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  • E-Business Suite Technology Sessions at OpenWorld 2012

    - by Max Arderius
    Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is almost here! We're looking forward to updating you on our products, strategy, and roadmaps. This year, the E-Business Suite Applications Technology Group (ATG) will participate in 25 speaker sessions, two Meet the Experts round-table discussions, five demoground booths and seven Special Interest Group meetings as guest speakers. We hope to see you at our sessions.  Please join us to hear the latest news and connect with senior ATG development staff. Here's a downloadable listing of all Applications Technology Group-related sessions with times and locations: FOCUS ON Oracle E-Business Suite - Applications Tools and Technology (PDF) General Sessions GEN8474 - Oracle E-Business Suite - Strategy, Update, and RoadmapCliff Godwin, SVP, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 12:15 PM - 1:15 PM - Moscone West 2002/2004 In this session, hear Oracle E-Business Suite General Manager Cliff Godwin deliver an update on the Oracle E-Business Suite product line. This session covers the value delivered by the current release of Oracle E-Business Suite, the momentum, and how Oracle E-Business Suite applications integrate into Oracle’s overall applications strategy. You’ll come away with an understanding of the value Oracle E-Business Suite applications deliver now and will deliver in the future. GEN9173 - Optimize and Extend Oracle Applications - The Path to Oracle Fusion ApplicationsNadia Bendjedou, Oracle; Corre Curtice, Bhavish Madurai (CSC) Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3002/3004 One of the main objectives of this session is to help organizations build their IT roadmap for the next five years and be aligned with the Oracle Applications strategy in general and the Oracle Fusion Applications strategy in particular. Come hear about some of the common sense, practical steps you can take to optimize the performance of your Oracle Applications today and prepare your path to Oracle Fusion Applications for when your organization is ready to embrace them. Each step you take in adopting Oracle Fusion technology gets you partway to Oracle Fusion Applications. Conference Sessions CON9024 - Oracle E-Business Suite Technology: Latest Features and Roadmap Lisa Parekh, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 10:45 AM - 11:45 AM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session provides a comprehensive overview of Oracle’s product strategy for Oracle E-Business Suite technology, the capabilities and associated business benefits of recent releases, and a review of capabilities on the product roadmap. This is the cornerstone session for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack. Come hear about the latest new usability enhancements of the user interface; systems administration and configuration management tools; security-related updates; and tools and options for extending, customizing, and integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. CON9021 - Oracle E-Business Suite Future Directions: Deployment and System AdministrationMax Arderius, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West 2016  What’s coming in the next major version of Oracle E-Business Suite 12? This Oracle Development session covers the latest technology stack, including the use of Oracle WebLogic Server (Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g) and Oracle Database 11g Release 2 (11.2). Topics include an architectural overview of the latest updates, installation and upgrade options, new configuration options, and new tools for hot cloning and automated “lights-out” cloning. Come learn how online patching (based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature) will reduce your database patching downtimes to however long it takes to bounce your database server. CON9017 - Desktop Integration in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Padmaprabodh Ambale, Gustavo Jimenez, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 This presentation covers the latest functional enhancements in Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and Oracle Report Manager, enhanced Microsoft Office support, and greater support for building custom desktop integration solutions. The session also presents tips and tricks for upgrading from Oracle Applications Desktop Integrator to Oracle Web Applications Desktop Integrator and Oracle Report Manager. CON9023 - Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Primer and Roadmap Steven Chan, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2016  Is your Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack up to date? Are you taking advantage of all the latest options and capabilities? This Oracle development session summarizes the latest certifications and roadmap for the Oracle E-Business Suite technology stack, including elements such as database releases and options, Java, Oracle Forms, Oracle Containers for J2EE, desktop operating systems, browsers, JRE releases, development and Web authoring tools, user authentication and management, business intelligence, Oracle Application Management Packs, security options, clouds, Oracle VM, and virtualization. The session also covers the most commonly asked questions about tech stack component support dates and upgrade implications. CON9028 - Minimizing Oracle E-Business Suite Maintenance DowntimesSantiago Bastidas, Elke Phelps, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session features a survey of the best techniques sysadmins can use to minimize patching downtimes. It starts with an architectural-level review of Oracle E-Business Suite fundamentals and then moves to a practical view of the various tools and approaches for downtimes. Topics include patching shortcuts, merging patches, distributing worker processes across multiple servers, running ADPatch in noninteractive mode, staged APPL_TOPs, shared file systems, deferring systemwide database tasks, avoiding resource bottlenecks, and more. An added bonus: hear about the upcoming Oracle E-Business Suite 12 online patching capabilities based on the groundbreaking Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature. CON9116 - Extending the Use of Oracle E-Business Suite with the Oracle Endeca PlatformOsama Elkady, Muhannad Obeidat, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2018 The Oracle Endeca platform includes a leading unstructured data correlation and analytics engine, together with a best-in class catalog search and guided navigation solution, to improve the productivity of all types of users in your enterprise. This development session focuses on the details behind the Oracle Endeca platform’s integration into Oracle E-Business Suite. It demonstrates how easily you can extend the use of the Oracle Endeca platform into other areas of Oracle E-Business Suite and how you can bring in your own data and build new Oracle Endeca applications for Oracle E-Business Suite. CON9005 - Oracle E-Business Suite Integration Best PracticesVeshaal Singh, Oracle, Jeffrey Hand, Zebra Technologies Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Oracle is investing across applications and technologies to make the application integration experience easier for customers. Today Oracle has certified Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and provides a comprehensive set of integration technologies. Learn about Oracle’s integration offering across data- and process-centric integrations. These technologies can be used to address various application integration challenges and styles. In this session, you will get an understanding of how, when, and where you can leverage Oracle’s integration technologies to connect end-to-end business processes across your enterprise, including your Oracle Applications portfolio.  CON9026 - Latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 User Interface and Usability EnhancementsPadmaprabodh Ambale, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session details the latest UI enhancements to Oracle Application Framework in Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. Developers will get a detailed look at new features to enhance usability, offer more capabilities for personalization and extensions, and support the development and use of dashboards and Web services. Topics include new rich UI capabilities such as new home page features, Navigator and Favorites pull-down menus, REST interface, embedded widgets for analytics content, Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) task flows, third-party widgets, a look-ahead list of values, inline attachments, pop-ups, personalization and extensibility enhancements, business layer extensions, Oracle ADF integration, and mobile devices. CON8805 - Planning Your Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade from 11i to Release 12.1 and BeyondAnne Carlson, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 3002/3004 Attend this session to hear the latest Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 upgrade planning tips from Oracle’s support, consulting, development, and IT organizations. You’ll get specific cross-product advice on how to understand the factors that affect your project’s duration, decide on your project’s scope, develop a robust testing strategy, leverage Oracle Support resources, and more. In a nutshell, this session tells you things you need to know before embarking upon your Release 12.1 upgrade project. CON9053 - Advanced Management of Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Enterprise ManagerAngelo Rosado, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 2016 The task of managing and monitoring Oracle E-Business Suite environments can be very challenging. Oracle Enterprise Manager is the only product on the market that is designed to monitor and manage all the different technologies that constitute Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including end user, midtier, configuration, host, and database management—to name just a few. Customers that have implemented Oracle Enterprise Manager have experienced dramatic improvements in system visibility and diagnostic capability as well as administrator productivity. The purpose of this session is to highlight the key features and benefits of Oracle Enterprise Manager and Oracle Application Management Suite for Oracle E-Business Suite. CON8809 - Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Upgrade Best Practices: Technical InsightIsam Alyousfi, Udayan Parvate, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3011 This session is ideal for organizations thinking about upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1. It covers the fundamentals of upgrading to Release 12.1, including the technology stack components and supported upgrade paths. Hear from Oracle Development about the set of best practices for patching in general and executing the Release 12.1 technical upgrade, with special considerations for minimizing your downtime. Also get to know about relatively recent upgrade resources. CON9032 - Upgrading Your Customizations of Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1Sara Woodhull, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2016 Have you personalized Oracle Forms or Oracle Application Framework screens in Oracle E-Business Suite? Have you used mod_plsql in Release 11i? Have you extended or customized your Release 11i environment with other tools? The technical options for upgrading these customizations as part of your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 upgrade can be bewildering. Come to this Oracle development session to learn about selecting the best upgrade approach for your existing customizations. The session will help you understand customization scenarios and use cases, tools, and technologies to ensure that your Oracle E-Business Suite Release 12.1 environment fits your users’ needs closely and that any future customizations will be easy to upgrade. CON9259 - Oracle E-Business Suite Internationalization and Multilingual FeaturesMaher Al-Nubani, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 2018 Oracle E-Business Suite supports more countries, languages, and regions than ever. Come to this Oracle development session to get an overview of internationalization features and capabilities and see new Release 12 features such as calendar support for Hijra and Thai, new group separators, lightweight multilingual support (MLS) setup, new character sets such as AL32UTF, newly supported languages, Mac certifications, Oracle iSetup support for moving MLS setups, new file export options for Unicode, new MLS number spelling options, and more. CON7188 - Mobile Apps for Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA SuiteSrikant Subramaniam, Joe Huang, Veshaal Singh, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 10:15 AM - 11:15 AM - Moscone West 3001 Follow your mobile customers, employees, and partners with Oracle Fusion Middleware. See how native iPhone and iPad applications can easily be built for Oracle E-Business Suite with the new Oracle ADF Mobile and Oracle SOA Suite. Using Oracle ADF Mobile, developers can quickly develop native applications for Apple iOS and other mobile platforms. The Oracle SOA Suite/Oracle ADF Mobile combination can execute business transactions on Oracle E-Business Suite. This session includes a demo in which a mobile user approves a business transaction in Oracle E-Business Suite and a demo of the tools used to build a native on-device solution. These concepts for mobile applications also apply to other Oracle applications.CON9029 - Oracle E-Business Suite Directions: Slashing Downtimes with Online PatchingKevin Hudson, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 11:45 AM - 12:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 Oracle E-Business Suite will soon include online patching (based on the Oracle Database 11g Release 2 Edition-Based Redefinition feature), which will reduce your database patching downtimes to however long it takes to bounce your database server. This Oracle development session details how online patching works, with special attention to what’s happening at a database object level when database patches are applied to an Oracle E-Business Suite environment that’s still running. Come learn about the operational and system management implications for minimizing maintenance downtimes when applying database patches with this new technology and the related impact on customizations you might have built on top of Oracle E-Business Suite. CON8806 - Upgrading to Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1: Technical and Functional PanelAndrew Katz, Komori America Corporation; Sandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. ;Srini Chavali, Cummins Inc.; Amrita Mehrok, Nadia Bendjedou, Anne Carlson Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 In this panel discussion, Oracle experts, customers, and partners share their experiences in upgrading to the latest release of Oracle E-Business Suite, Release 12.1. The panelists cover aspects of a typical Release 12 upgrade, technical (upgrading the technical infrastructure) as well as functional (upgrading to the new financial infrastructure). Hear directly from the experts who either develop the product or support, implement, or upgrade it, and find out how to apply their lessons learned to your organization. CON9027 - Personalize and Extend Oracle E-Business Suite Applications with Rich MashupsGustavo Jimenez, Padmaprabodh Ambale, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session covers the use of several Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies to personalize and extend your existing Oracle E-Business Suite applications. The Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies covered include Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF), Oracle WebCenter, Oracle Endeca applications, and Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition with Oracle E-Business Suite Oracle Application Framework applications. CON9036 - Advanced Oracle E-Business Suite Architectures: Maximum Availability, Security, and MoreElke Phelps, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session includes architecture diagrams and configuration instructions for building a maximum availability architecture (MAA) that will help you design a disaster recovery solution that fits the needs of your business. Database and application high-availability features it describes include Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Real Application Clusters (Oracle RAC), Oracle Active Data Guard, load-balancing Web and forms services, parallel concurrent processing, and the use of Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata to provide a highly available environment. The session also covers the latest updates to systems management tools, AutoConfig, cloud computing, virtualization, and Oracle WebLogic Server and provides sneak previews of upcoming functionality. CON9047 - Efficiently Scaling Oracle E-Business Suite on Oracle Exadata and Oracle ExalogicIsam Alyousfi, Nishit Rao, Oracle Wednesday, Oct 3, 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM - Moscone West 2016 Oracle Exadata and Oracle Exalogic are designed from the ground up with optimizations in software and hardware to deliver superfast performance for mission-critical applications such as Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle E-Business Suite applications run three to eight times as fast on the Oracle Exadata/Oracle Exalogic platform in standard benchmark tests. Besides performance, customers benefit from simplified support, enhanced manageability, and the ability to consolidate multiple Oracle E-Business Suite instances. Attend this session to understand best practices for Oracle E-Business Suite deployment on Oracle Exalogic and Oracle Exadata through customer case studies. Learn how adopting the Exa* platform increases efficiency, simplifies scaling, and boosts performance for peak loads. CON8716 - Web Services and SOA Integration Options for Oracle E-Business SuiteRekha Ayothi, Veshaal Singh, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This Oracle development session provides a deep dive into a subset of the Web services and SOA-related integration options available to Oracle E-Business Suite systems integrators. It offers a technical look at Oracle E-Business Suite Integrated SOA Gateway, Oracle SOA Suite, Oracle Application Adapters for Data Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite, and other Web services options for integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with other applications. Systems integrators and developers will get an overview of the latest integration capabilities and technologies available out of the box with Oracle E-Business Suite and possibly a sneak preview of upcoming functionality and features. CON9030 - Recommendations for Oracle E-Business Suite Performance TuningIsam Alyousfi, Samer Barakat, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Need to squeeze more performance out of your existing servers? This packed Oracle development session summarizes practical tips and lessons learned from performance-tuning and benchmarking the world’s largest Oracle E-Business Suite environments. Apps sysadmins will learn concrete tips and techniques for identifying and resolving performance bottlenecks on all layers, with special attention to application- and database-tier servers. Learn about tuning Oracle Forms, Oracle Concurrent Manager, Apache, and Oracle Discoverer. Track down memory leaks and other issues at the Java and JVM layers. The session also covers Oracle E-Business Suite product-level tuning, including Oracle Workflow, Oracle Order Management, Oracle Payroll, and other modules. CON3429 - Using Oracle ADF with Oracle E-Business Suite: The Full Integration ViewSiva Puthurkattil, Lake County; Juan Camilo Ruiz, Sara Woodhull, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 11:15 AM - 12:15 PM - Moscone West 3003 Oracle E-Business Suite delivers functionality for handling the core business of your organization. However, user requirements and new technologies are driving an emerging need to implement new types of user interfaces for these applications. This session provides an overview of how to use Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) to deliver cutting-edge Web 2.0 and mobile rich user interfaces that front existing Oracle E-Business Suite processes, and it also explores all the existing types of integration between the two worlds. CON9020 - Integrating Oracle E-Business Suite with Oracle Identity Management SolutionsSunil Ghosh, Elke Phelps, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 12:45 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 2016 Need to integrate Oracle E-Business Suite with Microsoft Windows Kerberos, Active Directory, CA Netegrity SiteMinder, or other third-party authentication systems? Want to understand your options when Oracle Premier Support for Oracle Single Sign-On ends in December 2011? This Oracle Development session covers the latest certified integrations with Oracle Access Manager 11g and Oracle Internet Directory 11g, which can be used individually or as bridges for integrating with third-party authentication solutions. The session presents an architectural overview of how Oracle Access Manager, its WebGate and AccessGate components, and Oracle Internet Directory work together, with implications for Oracle Discoverer, Oracle Portal, and other Oracle Fusion identity management products. CON9019 - Troubleshooting, Diagnosing, and Optimizing Oracle E-Business Suite TechnologyGustavo Jimenez, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 2016 This session covers how you can proactively diagnose Oracle E-Business Suite applications, including extensions built with Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies such as Oracle Application Development Framework (Oracle ADF) and Oracle WebCenter to catch potential issues in the middle tier before they become more serious. Topics include debugging, logging infrastructure, warning signs, performance tuning, information required when logging service requests, general JVM optimization, and an overall picture of all the moving parts that make it possible for Oracle E-Business Suite to isolate and fix problems. Also learn how Oracle Diagnostics Framework will help prevent downtime caused by failures. CON9031 - The Top 10 Things You Can Do to Secure Your Oracle E-Business Suite InstanceEric Bing, Erik Graversen, Oracle Thursday, Oct 4, 2:15 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 2018 Learn the top 10 things you can do to secure your applications and your sensitive data. This Oracle development session for system administrators and security professionals explores some of the most important and overlooked things you can do to secure your Oracle E-Business Suite instance. It also covers data masking and other mechanisms for protecting sensitive data. Special Interest Groups (SIG) Some of our most senior staff have been invited to participate on the following SIG meetings as guest speakers: SIG10525 - OAUG - Archive & Purge SIGBrian Bent - Pre-Sales Engineer, TierData, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3011 The Archive and Purge SIG is an organization in which users can share their experiences and solicit functional and technical advice on archiving and purging data in Oracle E-Business Suite. This session provides an opportunity for users to network and share best practices, tips, and tricks. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Database Performance, Archive & Purging - Q&A SessionIsam Alyousfi, Senior Director, Applications Performance, Oracle SIG10547 - OAUG - Oracle E-Business (EBS) Applications Technology SIGSrini Chavali - IT Director, Cummins Inc Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3018 The general purpose of the EBS Applications Technology SIG is to inform and educate its members about current and future components of the tech stack as they relate to Oracle E-Business Suite. Attend this meeting for networking and education and to share best practices. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Technology Certification Roadmap - Presentation and Q&ASteven Chan, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10559 - OAUG - User Management SIGSusan Behn - VP of Oracle Delivery, Infosemantics, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM - Moscone West 3024 The E-Business Suite User Management SIG focuses on the components of user management that enable Oracle E-Business Suite users to define administrative functions and manage users’ access to functions and data based on roles within an organization—rather than the user’s individual identity—which is referred to as role-based access control (RBAC). This meeting includes an introduction to Oracle User Management that covers the Oracle User Management building blocks and presents an example of creating a security policy.Guest: Security and User Management - Q&A SessionEric Bing, Sr. Director, EBS Security, OracleSara Woodhull, Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10515 - OAUG – Upgrade SIGBarbara Matthews - Consultant, On Call DBASandra Vucinic, VLAD Group, Inc. Sunday, Sep 30, 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM - Moscone West 3009 This Upgrade SIG session starts with a business meeting and then features a Q&A panel discussion on Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade topics. The session• Reviews Upgrade SIG goals and objectives• Provides answers, during the Q&A session, to questions related to Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades• Shares “real world” experiences, tips, and techniques for Oracle E-Business Suite upgrades to Release 12.1. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Upgrade - Q&A SessionAnne Carlson - Sr. Director, Oracle E-Business Suite Product Strategy, OracleUdayan Parvate - Director, EBS Release Engineering, OracleSuzana Ferrari, Sr. Principal Consultant, OracleIsam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle SIG10552 - OAUG - Oracle E-Business Suite SIGDonna Rosentrater - Manager, Global Sourcing & Procurement Systems, TJX Sunday, Sep 30, 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 3020 The E-Business Suite SIG, affiliated with OAUG, supports Oracle E-Business Suite users through networking, education, and sharing of best practices. This SIG meeting will feature a general discussion of Oracle E-Business Suite product strategies in Release 12 and migration to Oracle Fusion Applications. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite - Q&A SessionJeanne Lowell, Vice President, EBS Product Strategy, OracleNadia Bendjedou, Sr. Director, Product Strategy, Oracle SIG10556 - OAUG - SysAdmin SIGRandy Giefer - Sr Systems and Security Architect, Solution Beacon, LLC Sunday, Sep 30, 12:15 PM - 1:45 PM - Moscone West 3022 The SysAdmin SIG provides a forum in which OAUG members and participants can share updates, tips, and successful practices relating to system administration in an Oracle applications environment. The SysAdmin SIG strives to enable system administrators to become more effective and efficient in their jobs by providing them with access to people and information that can increase their system administration knowledge and experience. Attend this meeting to network, share best practices, and benefit from educational content. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite 12.2 Online Patching- Presentation and Q&AKevin Hudson, Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle SIG10553 - OAUG - Database SIGMichael Brown - Senior DBA, COLIBRI LTD LC Sunday, Sep 30, 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM - Moscone West 3020 The OAUG Database SIG provides an opportunity for applications database administrators to learn from and share their experiences with supporting the various Oracle applications environments. This session will include a brief business meeting followed by a short presentation. It will end with an open discussion among the attendees about items of interest to those present. Guest: Oracle E-Business Suite Database Performance - Presentation and Q&AIsam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Meet the Experts We're planning two round-table discussions where you can review your questions with senior E-Business Suite ATG staff: MTE9648 - Meet the Experts for Oracle E-Business Suite: Planning Your Upgrade Jeanne Lowell - VP, EBS Product Strategy, Oracle John Abraham - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Oracle Nadia Bendjedou - Sr. Director - Product Strategy, Oracle Anne Carlson - Sr. Director, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Udayan Parvate - Director, EBS Release Engineering, Oracle Isam Alyousfi, Sr. Director, Applications Performance, Oracle Monday, Oct 1, 3:15 PM - 4:15 PM - Moscone West 2001A Don’t miss this Oracle Applications Meet the Experts session with experts who specialize in Oracle E-Business Suite upgrade best practices. This is the place where attendees can have informal and semistructured but open one-on-one discussions with Strategy and Development regarding Oracle Applications strategy and your specific business and IT strategy. The experts will be available to discuss the value of the latest releases and share insights into the best path for your enterprise, so come ready with your questions. Space is limited, so make sure you register. MTE9649 - Meet the Oracle E-Business Suite Tools and Technology Experts Lisa Parekh - Vice President, Technology Integration, Oracle Steven Chan - Sr. Director, Oracle Elke Phelps - Sr. Principal Product Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Max Arderius - Manager, Applications Technology Group, Oracle Tuesday, Oct 2, 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM - Moscone West 2001A Don’t miss this Oracle Applications Meet the Experts session with experts who specialize in Oracle E-Business Suite technology. This is the place where attendees can have informal and semistructured but open one-on-one discussions with Strategy and Development regarding Oracle Applications strategy and your specific business and IT strategy. The experts will be available to discuss the value of the latest releases and share insights into the best path for your enterprise, so come ready with your questions. Space is limited, so make sure you register. Demos We have five booths in the exhibition demogrounds this year, where you can try ATG technologies firsthand and get your questions answered. Please stop by and meet our staff at the following locations: Advanced Architecture and Technology Stack for Oracle E-Business Suite (W-067) New User Productivity Capabilities in Oracle E-Business Suite (W-065) End-to-End Management of Oracle E-Business Suite (W-063) Oracle E-Business Suite 12.1 Technical Upgrade Best Practices (W-066) SOA-Based Integration for Oracle E-Business Suite (W-064)

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  • Solution: Testing Web Services with MSTest on Team Build

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    Guess what. About 20 minutes after I fixed the build, Allan broke it again! Update: 4th March 2010 – After having huge problems getting this working I read Billy Wang’s post which showed me the light. The problem here is that even though the test passes locally it will not during an Automated Build. When you send your tests to the build server it does not understand that you want to spin up the web site and run tests against that! When you run the test in Visual Studio it spins up the web site anyway, but would you expect your test to pass if you told the website not to spin up? Of course not. So, when you send the code to the build server you need to tell it what to spin up. First, the best way to get the parameters you need is to right click on the method you want to test and select “Create Unit Test”. This will detect wither you are running in IIS or ASP.NET Development Server or None, and create the relevant tags. Figure: Right clicking on “SaveDefaultProjectFile” will produce a context menu with “Create Unit tests…” on it. If you use this option it will AutoDetect most of the Attributes that are required. /// <summary> ///A test for SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.Services.IProfileService.SaveDefaultProjectFile ///</summary> // TODO: Ensure that the UrlToTest attribute specifies a URL to an ASP.NET page (for example, // http://.../Default.aspx). This is necessary for the unit test to be executed on the web server, // whether you are testing a page, web service, or a WCF service. [TestMethod()] [HostType("ASP.NET")] [AspNetDevelopmentServerHost("D:\\Workspaces\\SSW\\SSW\\SqlDeploy\\DEV\\Main\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web", "/")] [UrlToTest("http://localhost:3100/")] [DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")] public void SaveDefaultProjectFileTest() { IProfileService target = new ProfileService(); // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value string strComputerName = string.Empty; // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value bool expected = false; // TODO: Initialize to an appropriate value bool actual; actual = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile(strComputerName); Assert.AreEqual(expected, actual); Assert.Inconclusive("Verify the correctness of this test method."); } Figure: Auto created code that shows the attributes required to run correctly in IIS or in this case ASP.NET Development Server If you are a purist and don’t like creating unit tests like this then you just need to add the three attributes manually. HostType – This attribute specified what host to use. Its an extensibility point, so you could write your own. Or you could just use “ASP.NET”. UrlToTest – This specifies the start URL. For most tests it does not matter which page you call, as long as it is a valid page otherwise your test may not run on the server, but may pass anyway. AspNetDevelopmentServerHost – This is a nasty one, it is only used if you are using ASP.NET Development Host and is unnecessary if you are using IIS. This sets the host settings and the first value MUST be the physical path to the root of your web application. OK, so all that was rubbish and I could not get anything working using the MSDN documentation. Google provided very little help until I ran into Billy Wang’s post  and I heard that heavenly music that all developers hear when understanding dawns that what they have been doing up until now is just plain stupid. I am sure that the above will work when I am doing Web Unit Tests, but there is a much easier way when doing web services. You need to add the AspNetDevelopmentServer attribute to your code. This will tell MSTest to spin up an ASP.NET Development server to host the service. Specify the path to the web application you want to use. [AspNetDevelopmentServer("WebApp1", "D:\\Workspaces\\SSW\\SSW\\SqlDeploy\\DEV\\Main\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web")] [DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")] [TestMethod] public void ProfileService_Integration_SaveDefaultProjectFile_Returns_True() { ProfileServiceClient target = new ProfileServiceClient(); bool isTrue = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile("Mav"); Assert.AreEqual(true, isTrue); } Figure: This AspNetDevelopmentServer will make sure that the specified web application is launched. Now we can run the test and have it pass, but if the dynamically assigned ASP.NET Development server port changes what happens to the details in your app.config that was generated when creating a reference to the web service? Well, it would be wrong and the test would fail. This is where Billy’s helper method comes in. Once you have created an instance of your service call, and it has loaded the config, but before you make any calls to it you need to go in and dynamically set the Endpoint address to the same address as your dynamically hosted Web Application. using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.VisualStudio.TestTools.UnitTesting; using System.Reflection; using System.ServiceModel.Description; using System.ServiceModel; namespace SSW.SQLDeploy.Test { class WcfWebServiceHelper { public static bool TryUrlRedirection(object client, TestContext context, string identifier) { bool result = true; try { PropertyInfo property = client.GetType().GetProperty("Endpoint"); string webServer = context.Properties[string.Format("AspNetDevelopmentServer.{0}", identifier)].ToString(); Uri webServerUri = new Uri(webServer); ServiceEndpoint endpoint = (ServiceEndpoint)property.GetValue(client, null); EndpointAddressBuilder builder = new EndpointAddressBuilder(endpoint.Address); builder.Uri = new Uri(endpoint.Address.Uri.OriginalString.Replace(endpoint.Address.Uri.Authority, webServerUri.Authority)); endpoint.Address = builder.ToEndpointAddress(); } catch (Exception e) { context.WriteLine(e.Message); result = false; } return result; } } } Figure: This fixes a problem with the URL in your web.config not being the same as the dynamically hosted ASP.NET Development server port. We can now add a call to this method after we created the Proxy object and change the Endpoint for the Service to the correct one. This process is wrapped in an assert as if it fails there is no point in continuing. [AspNetDevelopmentServer("WebApp1", D:\\Workspaces\\SSW\\SSW\\SqlDeploy\\DEV\\Main\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web")] [DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")] [TestMethod] public void ProfileService_Integration_SaveDefaultProjectFile_Returns_True() { ProfileServiceClient target = new ProfileServiceClient(); Assert.IsTrue(WcfWebServiceHelper.TryUrlRedirection(target, TestContext, "WebApp1")); bool isTrue = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile("Mav"); Assert.AreEqual(true, isTrue); } Figure: Editing the Endpoint from the app.config on the fly to match the dynamically hosted ASP.NET Development Server URL and port is now easy. As you can imagine AspNetDevelopmentServer poses some problems of you have multiple developers. What are the chances of everyone using the same location to store the source? What about if you are using a build server, how do you tell MSTest where to look for the files? To the rescue is a property called" “%PathToWebRoot%” which is always right on the build server. It will always point to your build drop folder for your solutions web sites. Which will be “\\tfs.ssw.com.au\BuildDrop\[BuildName]\Debug\_PrecompiledWeb\” or whatever your build drop location is. So lets change the code above to add this. [AspNetDevelopmentServer("WebApp1", "%PathToWebRoot%\\SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web")] [DeploymentItem("SSW.SQLDeploy.SilverlightUI.Web.dll")] [TestMethod] public void ProfileService_Integration_SaveDefaultProjectFile_Returns_True() { ProfileServiceClient target = new ProfileServiceClient(); Assert.IsTrue(WcfWebServiceHelper.TryUrlRedirection(target, TestContext, "WebApp1")); bool isTrue = target.SaveDefaultProjectFile("Mav"); Assert.AreEqual(true, isTrue); } Figure: Adding %PathToWebRoot% to the AspNetDevelopmentServer path makes it work everywhere. Now we have another problem… this will ONLY run on the build server and will fail locally as %PathToWebRoot%’s default value is “C:\Users\[profile]\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects”. Well this sucks… How do we get the test to run on any build server and any developer laptop. Open “Tools | Options | Test Tools | Test Execution” in Visual Studio and you will see a field called “Web application root directory”. This is where you override that default above. Figure: You can override the default website location for tests. In my case I would put in “D:\Workspaces\SSW\SSW\SqlDeploy\DEV\Main” and all the developers working with this branch would put in the folder that they have mapped. Can you see a problem? What is I create a “$/SSW/SqlDeploy/DEV/34567” branch from Main and I want to run tests in there. Well… I would have to change the value above. This is not ideal, but as you can put your projects anywhere on a computer, it has to be done. Conclusion Although this looks convoluted and complicated there are real problems being solved here that mean that you have a test ANYWHERE solution. Any build server, any Developer workstation. Resources: http://billwg.blogspot.com/2009/06/testing-wcf-web-services.html http://tough-to-find.blogspot.com/2008/04/testing-asmx-web-services-in-visual.html http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms243399(VS.100).aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/dscruggs/archive/2008/09/29/web-tests-unit-tests-the-asp-net-development-server-and-code-coverage.aspx http://www.5z5.com/News/?543f8bc8b36b174f Technorati Tags: VS2010,MSTest,Team Build 2010,Team Build,Visual Studio,Visual Studio 2010,Visual Studio ALM,Team Test,Team Test 2010

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  • Using LINQ Distinct: With an Example on ASP.NET MVC SelectListItem

    - by Joe Mayo
    One of the things that might be surprising in the LINQ Distinct standard query operator is that it doesn’t automatically work properly on custom classes. There are reasons for this, which I’ll explain shortly. The example I’ll use in this post focuses on pulling a unique list of names to load into a drop-down list. I’ll explain the sample application, show you typical first shot at Distinct, explain why it won’t work as you expect, and then demonstrate a solution to make Distinct work with any custom class. The technologies I’m using are  LINQ to Twitter, LINQ to Objects, Telerik Extensions for ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET MVC 2, and Visual Studio 2010. The function of the example program is to show a list of people that I follow.  In Twitter API vernacular, these people are called “Friends”; though I’ve never met most of them in real life. This is part of the ubiquitous language of social networking, and Twitter in particular, so you’ll see my objects named accordingly. Where Distinct comes into play is because I want to have a drop-down list with the names of the friends appearing in the list. Some friends are quite verbose, which means I can’t just extract names from each tweet and populate the drop-down; otherwise, I would end up with many duplicate names. Therefore, Distinct is the appropriate operator to eliminate the extra entries from my friends who tend to be enthusiastic tweeters. The sample doesn’t do anything with the drop-down list and I leave that up to imagination for what it’s practical purpose could be; perhaps a filter for the list if I only want to see a certain person’s tweets or maybe a quick list that I plan to combine with a TextBox and Button to reply to a friend. When the program runs, you’ll need to authenticate with Twitter, because I’m using OAuth (DotNetOpenAuth), for authentication, and then you’ll see the drop-down list of names above the grid with the most recent tweets from friends. Here’s what the application looks like when it runs: As you can see, there is a drop-down list above the grid. The drop-down list is where most of the focus of this article will be. There is some description of the code before we talk about the Distinct operator, but we’ll get there soon. This is an ASP.NET MVC2 application, written with VS 2010. Here’s the View that produces this screen: <%@ Page Language="C#" MasterPageFile="~/Views/Shared/Site.Master" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<TwitterFriendsViewModel>" %> <%@ Import Namespace="DistinctSelectList.Models" %> <asp:Content ID="Content1" ContentPlaceHolderID="TitleContent" runat="server">     Home Page </asp:Content><asp:Content ID="Content2" ContentPlaceHolderID="MainContent" runat="server">     <fieldset>         <legend>Twitter Friends</legend>         <div>             <%= Html.DropDownListFor(                     twendVM => twendVM.FriendNames,                     Model.FriendNames,                     "<All Friends>") %>         </div>         <div>             <% Html.Telerik().Grid<TweetViewModel>(Model.Tweets)                    .Name("TwitterFriendsGrid")                    .Columns(cols =>                     {                         cols.Template(col =>                             { %>                                 <img src="<%= col.ImageUrl %>"                                      alt="<%= col.ScreenName %>" />                         <% });                         cols.Bound(col => col.ScreenName);                         cols.Bound(col => col.Tweet);                     })                    .Render(); %>         </div>     </fieldset> </asp:Content> As shown above, the Grid is from Telerik’s Extensions for ASP.NET MVC. The first column is a template that renders the user’s Avatar from a URL provided by the Twitter query. Both the Grid and DropDownListFor display properties that are collections from a TwitterFriendsViewModel class, shown below: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { /// /// For finding friend info on screen /// public class TwitterFriendsViewModel { /// /// Display names of friends in drop-down list /// public List FriendNames { get; set; } /// /// Display tweets in grid /// public List Tweets { get; set; } } } I created the TwitterFreindsViewModel. The two Lists are what the View consumes to populate the DropDownListFor and Grid. Notice that FriendNames is a List of SelectListItem, which is an MVC class. Another custom class I created is the TweetViewModel (the type of the Tweets List), shown below: namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { /// /// Info on friend tweets /// public class TweetViewModel { /// /// User's avatar /// public string ImageUrl { get; set; } /// /// User's Twitter name /// public string ScreenName { get; set; } /// /// Text containing user's tweet /// public string Tweet { get; set; } } } The initial Twitter query returns much more information than we need for our purposes and this a special class for displaying info in the View.  Now you know about the View and how it’s constructed. Let’s look at the controller next. The controller for this demo performs authentication, data retrieval, data manipulation, and view selection. I’ll skip the description of the authentication because it’s a normal part of using OAuth with LINQ to Twitter. Instead, we’ll drill down and focus on the Distinct operator. However, I’ll show you the entire controller, below,  so that you can see how it all fits together: using System.Linq; using System.Web.Mvc; using DistinctSelectList.Models; using LinqToTwitter; namespace DistinctSelectList.Controllers { [HandleError] public class HomeController : Controller { private MvcOAuthAuthorization auth; private TwitterContext twitterCtx; /// /// Display a list of friends current tweets /// /// public ActionResult Index() { auth = new MvcOAuthAuthorization(InMemoryTokenManager.Instance, InMemoryTokenManager.AccessToken); string accessToken = auth.CompleteAuthorize(); if (accessToken != null) { InMemoryTokenManager.AccessToken = accessToken; } if (auth.CachedCredentialsAvailable) { auth.SignOn(); } else { return auth.BeginAuthorize(); } twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth); var friendTweets = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Friends select new TweetViewModel { ImageUrl = tweet.User.ProfileImageUrl, ScreenName = tweet.User.Identifier.ScreenName, Tweet = tweet.Text }) .ToList(); var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct() .ToList(); var twendsVM = new TwitterFriendsViewModel { Tweets = friendTweets, FriendNames = friendNames }; return View(twendsVM); } public ActionResult About() { return View(); } } } The important part of the listing above are the LINQ to Twitter queries for friendTweets and friendNames. Both of these results are used in the subsequent population of the twendsVM instance that is passed to the view. Let’s dissect these two statements for clarification and focus on what is happening with Distinct. The query for friendTweets gets a list of the 20 most recent tweets (as specified by the Twitter API for friend queries) and performs a projection into the custom TweetViewModel class, repeated below for your convenience: var friendTweets = (from tweet in twitterCtx.Status where tweet.Type == StatusType.Friends select new TweetViewModel { ImageUrl = tweet.User.ProfileImageUrl, ScreenName = tweet.User.Identifier.ScreenName, Tweet = tweet.Text }) .ToList(); The LINQ to Twitter query above simplifies what we need to work with in the View and the reduces the amount of information we have to look at in subsequent queries. Given the friendTweets above, the next query performs another projection into an MVC SelectListItem, which is required for binding to the DropDownList.  This brings us to the focus of this blog post, writing a correct query that uses the Distinct operator. The query below uses LINQ to Objects, querying the friendTweets collection to get friendNames: var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct() .ToList(); The above implementation of Distinct seems normal, but it is deceptively incorrect. After running the query above, by executing the application, you’ll notice that the drop-down list contains many duplicates.  This will send you back to the code scratching your head, but there’s a reason why this happens. To understand the problem, we must examine how Distinct works in LINQ to Objects. Distinct has two overloads: one without parameters, as shown above, and another that takes a parameter of type IEqualityComparer<T>.  In the case above, no parameters, Distinct will call EqualityComparer<T>.Default behind the scenes to make comparisons as it iterates through the list. You don’t have problems with the built-in types, such as string, int, DateTime, etc, because they all implement IEquatable<T>. However, many .NET Framework classes, such as SelectListItem, don’t implement IEquatable<T>. So, what happens is that EqualityComparer<T>.Default results in a call to Object.Equals, which performs reference equality on reference type objects.  You don’t have this problem with value types because the default implementation of Object.Equals is bitwise equality. However, most of your projections that use Distinct are on classes, just like the SelectListItem used in this demo application. So, the reason why Distinct didn’t produce the results we wanted was because we used a type that doesn’t define its own equality and Distinct used the default reference equality. This resulted in all objects being included in the results because they are all separate instances in memory with unique references. As you might have guessed, the solution to the problem is to use the second overload of Distinct that accepts an IEqualityComparer<T> instance. If you were projecting into your own custom type, you could make that type implement IEqualityComparer<T>, but SelectListItem belongs to the .NET Framework Class Library.  Therefore, the solution is to create a custom type to implement IEqualityComparer<T>, as in the SelectListItemComparer class, shown below: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Web.Mvc; namespace DistinctSelectList.Models { public class SelectListItemComparer : EqualityComparer { public override bool Equals(SelectListItem x, SelectListItem y) { return x.Value.Equals(y.Value); } public override int GetHashCode(SelectListItem obj) { return obj.Value.GetHashCode(); } } } The SelectListItemComparer class above doesn’t implement IEqualityComparer<SelectListItem>, but rather derives from EqualityComparer<SelectListItem>. Microsoft recommends this approach for consistency with the behavior of generic collection classes. However, if your custom type already derives from a base class, go ahead and implement IEqualityComparer<T>, which will still work. EqualityComparer is an abstract class, that implements IEqualityComparer<T> with Equals and GetHashCode abstract methods. For the purposes of this application, the SelectListItem.Value property is sufficient to determine if two items are equal.   Since SelectListItem.Value is type string, the code delegates equality to the string class. The code also delegates the GetHashCode operation to the string class.You might have other criteria in your own object and would need to define what it means for your object to be equal. Now that we have an IEqualityComparer<SelectListItem>, let’s fix the problem. The code below modifies the query where we want distinct values: var friendNames = (from tweet in friendTweets select new SelectListItem { Text = tweet.ScreenName, Value = tweet.ScreenName }) .Distinct(new SelectListItemComparer()) .ToList(); Notice how the code above passes a new instance of SelectListItemComparer as the parameter to the Distinct operator. Now, when you run the application, the drop-down list will behave as you expect, showing only a unique set of names. In addition to Distinct, other LINQ Standard Query Operators have overloads that accept IEqualityComparer<T>’s, You can use the same techniques as shown here, with SelectListItemComparer, with those other operators as well. Now you know how to resolve problems with getting Distinct to work properly and also have a way to fix problems with other operators that require equality comparisons. @JoeMayo

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  • Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

    - by ScottGu
    Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure.  Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account.  This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it).  The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service.  You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it.  This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog.  You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects.  We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them).  You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data.  We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs.  You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud.  You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog.  For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery.  You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog.  For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level.  So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites.  This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier).  Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications.  Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy.  Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer.  Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure.  The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio.  For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template.  When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property.  When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser.  This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio.  You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance.  To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end.  Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting.  You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!).  Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center.  Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions.  They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services.  Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support.  It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services.  This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services.  I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it.  Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks).  Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings.  This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass).  Enabling this is now really easy.  To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal.  This will create a dialog like below.  I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository.  We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account.  Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to.  Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories.  This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services.  Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure.  You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services.  We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy.  Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI.  If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase.  For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever:  Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site.  We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app.  We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager.  You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent.  Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go.  We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it.  We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it.  The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this.  Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code.  The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages.  You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more).  The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these.  This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications.  Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic.  The  multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure.  This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total.  To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview.  Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit.  For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS.  Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • Unity not Working 14.04

    - by Back.Slash
    I am using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS x64. I did a sudo apt-get upgrade yesterday and restarted my PC. Now my taskbar and panel are missing. When I try to restart Unity using unity --replace Then I get error: unity-panel-service stop/waiting compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: core compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: core unity-panel-service start/running, process 3906 compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: ccp compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: ccp compizconfig - Info: Backend : gsettings compizconfig - Info: Integration : true compizconfig - Info: Profile : unity compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: composite compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: composite compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: opengl compiz (core) - Info: Unity is fully supported by your hardware. compiz (core) - Info: Unity is fully supported by your hardware. compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: opengl libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/i965_dri.so: undefined symbol: _glapi_tls_Dispatch) libGL error: dlopen ${ORIGIN}/dri/i965_dri.so failed (${ORIGIN}/dri/i965_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory) libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib/dri/i965_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/dri/i965_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory) libGL error: unable to load driver: i965_dri.so libGL error: driver pointer missing libGL error: failed to load driver: i965 libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/swrast_dri.so: undefined symbol: _glapi_tls_Dispatch) libGL error: dlopen ${ORIGIN}/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (${ORIGIN}/dri/swrast_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory) libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (/usr/lib/dri/swrast_dri.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory) libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: compiztoolbox compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: compiztoolbox compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: decor compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: decor compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: vpswitch compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: vpswitch compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: snap compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: snap compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: mousepoll compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: mousepoll compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: resize compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: resize compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: place compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: place compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: move compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: move compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: wall compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: wall compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: grid compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: grid compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: regex compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: regex compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: imgpng compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: imgpng compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: session compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: session I/O warning : failed to load external entity "/home/sumeet/.compiz/session/10de541a813cc1a8fc140170575114755000000020350005" compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: gnomecompat compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: gnomecompat compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: animation compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: animation compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: fade compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: fade compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: unitymtgrabhandles compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: unitymtgrabhandles compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: workarounds compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: workarounds compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: scale compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: scale compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: expo compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: expo compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: ezoom compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: ezoom compiz (core) - Info: Loading plugin: unityshell compiz (core) - Info: Starting plugin: unityshell WARN 2014-06-02 18:46:23 unity.glib.dbus.server GLibDBusServer.cpp:579 Can't register object 'org.gnome.Shell' yet as we don't have a connection, waiting for it... ERROR 2014-06-02 18:46:23 unity.debug.interface DebugDBusInterface.cpp:216 Unable to load entry point in libxpathselect: libxpathselect.so.1.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory compiz (unityshell) - Error: GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object not supported ERROR 2014-06-02 18:46:23 unity.shell.compiz unityshell.cpp:3850 Impossible to delete the unity locked stamp file compiz (core) - Error: Plugin initScreen failed: unityshell compiz (core) - Error: Failed to start plugin: unityshell compiz (core) - Info: Unloading plugin: unityshell X Error of failed request: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) Major opcode of failed request: 3 (X_GetWindowAttributes) Resource id in failed request: 0x3e000c9 Serial number of failed request: 10115 Current serial number in output stream: 10116 Any help would be highly appreciated. EDIT : My PC configuration description: Portable Computer product: Dell System XPS L502X (System SKUNumber) vendor: Dell Inc. version: 0.1 serial: 1006ZP1 width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-2.6 dmi-2.6 vsyscall32 configuration: administrator_password=unknown boot=normal chassis=portable family=HuronRiver System frontpanel_password=unknown keyboard_password=unknown power-on_password=unknown sku=System SKUNumber uuid=44454C4C-3000-1030-8036-B1C04F5A5031 *-core description: Motherboard product: 0YR8NN vendor: Dell Inc. physical id: 0 version: A00 serial: .1006ZP1.CN4864314C0560. slot: Part Component *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: Dell Inc. physical id: 0 version: A11 date: 05/29/2012 size: 128KiB capacity: 2496KiB capabilities: pci pnp upgrade shadowing escd cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy360 int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer int10video acpi usb ls120boot smartbattery biosbootspecification netboot *-cpu description: CPU product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz vendor: Intel Corp. physical id: 19 bus info: cpu@0 version: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2630QM CPU @ 2.00GHz serial: Not Supported by CPU slot: CPU size: 800MHz capacity: 800MHz width: 64 bits clock: 100MHz capabilities: x86-64 fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf eagerfpu pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid cpufreq configuration: cores=4 enabledcores=4 threads=8 *-cache:0 description: L1 cache physical id: 1a slot: L1-Cache size: 64KiB capacity: 64KiB capabilities: synchronous internal write-through data *-cache:1 description: L2 cache physical id: 1b slot: L2-Cache size: 256KiB capacity: 256KiB capabilities: synchronous internal write-through data *-cache:2 description: L3 cache physical id: 1c slot: L3-Cache size: 6MiB capacity: 6MiB capabilities: synchronous internal write-back unified *-memory description: System Memory physical id: 1d slot: System board or motherboard size: 6GiB *-bank:0 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: M471B5273DH0-CH9 vendor: Samsung physical id: 0 serial: 450F1160 slot: ChannelA-DIMM0 size: 4GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:1 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: HMT325S6BFR8C-H9 vendor: Hynix/Hyundai physical id: 1 serial: 0CA0E8E2 slot: ChannelB-DIMM0 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-pci description: Host bridge product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 100 bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:0 description: PCI bridge product: Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1 bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pm msi pciexpress normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:40 ioport:3000(size=4096) memory:f0000000-f10fffff ioport:c0000000(size=301989888) *-generic UNCLAIMED description: Unassigned class product: Illegal Vendor ID vendor: Illegal Vendor ID physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: ff width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: bus_master vga_palette cap_list configuration: latency=255 maxlatency=255 mingnt=255 resources: memory:f0000000-f0ffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff memory:d0000000-d1ffffff ioport:3000(size=128) memory:f1000000-f107ffff *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 2 bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0 version: 09 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=i915 latency=0 resources: irq:52 memory:f1400000-f17fffff memory:e0000000-efffffff ioport:4000(size=64) *-communication description: Communication controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 16 bus info: pci@0000:00:16.0 version: 04 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=mei_me latency=0 resources: irq:50 memory:f1c05000-f1c0500f *-usb:0 description: USB controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1a bus info: pci@0000:00:1a.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci-pci latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:f1c09000-f1c093ff *-multimedia description: Audio device product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1b bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:53 memory:f1c00000-f1c03fff *-pci:1 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.0 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:16 *-pci:2 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.1 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.1 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:17 memory:f1b00000-f1bfffff *-network description: Wireless interface product: Centrino Wireless-N 1030 [Rainbow Peak] vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: mon.wlan0 version: 34 serial: bc:77:37:14:47:e5 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list logical wireless ethernet physical configuration: broadcast=yes driver=iwlwifi driverversion=3.13.0-27-generic firmware=18.168.6.1 latency=0 link=no multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn resources: irq:51 memory:f1b00000-f1b01fff *-pci:3 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.3 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:19 memory:f1a00000-f1afffff *-usb description: USB controller product: uPD720200 USB 3.0 Host Controller vendor: NEC Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0 version: 04 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi msix pciexpress xhci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=xhci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:19 memory:f1a00000-f1a01fff *-pci:4 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 5 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.4 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.4 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:16 memory:f1900000-f19fffff *-pci:5 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 6 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.5 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.5 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:17 ioport:2000(size=4096) ioport:f1800000(size=1048576) *-network description: Ethernet interface product: RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller vendor: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:06:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 06 serial: 14:fe:b5:a3:ac:40 size: 1Gbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress msix vpd bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=r8169 driverversion=2.3LK-NAPI duplex=full firmware=rtl_nic/rtl8168e-2.fw ip=172.19.167.151 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=1Gbit/s resources: irq:49 ioport:2000(size=256) memory:f1804000-f1804fff memory:f1800000-f1803fff *-usb:1 description: USB controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci-pci latency=0 resources: irq:23 memory:f1c08000-f1c083ff *-isa description: ISA bridge product: HM67 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: isa bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=lpc_ich latency=0 resources: irq:0 *-ide:0 description: IDE interface product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 4 port SATA IDE Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: ide pm bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ata_piix latency=0 resources: irq:19 ioport:40b8(size=8) ioport:40cc(size=4) ioport:40b0(size=8) ioport:40c8(size=4) ioport:4090(size=16) ioport:4080(size=16) *-serial UNCLAIMED description: SMBus product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.3 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:f1c04000-f1c040ff ioport:efa0(size=32) *-ide:1 description: IDE interface product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family 2 port SATA IDE Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.5 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.5 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: ide pm bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ata_piix latency=0 resources: irq:19 ioport:40a8(size=8) ioport:40c4(size=4) ioport:40a0(size=8) ioport:40c0(size=4) ioport:4070(size=16) ioport:4060(size=16) *-scsi:0 physical id: 1 logical name: scsi0 capabilities: emulated *-disk description: ATA Disk product: SAMSUNG HN-M640M physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: 2AR1 serial: S2T3J1KBC00006 size: 596GiB (640GB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 sectorsize=512 signature=6b746d91 *-volume:0 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sda1 version: 3.1 serial: 0272-3e7f size: 348MiB capacity: 350MiB capabilities: primary bootable ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2013-09-18 12:20:45 filesystem=ntfs label=System Reserved modified_by_chkdsk=true mounted_on_nt4=true resize_log_file=true state=dirty upgrade_on_mount=true *-volume:1 description: Extended partition physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2 logical name: /dev/sda2 size: 116GiB capacity: 116GiB capabilities: primary extended partitioned partitioned:extended *-logicalvolume:0 description: Linux swap / Solaris partition physical id: 5 logical name: /dev/sda5 capacity: 6037MiB capabilities: nofs *-logicalvolume:1 description: Linux filesystem partition physical id: 6 logical name: /dev/sda6 logical name: / capacity: 110GiB configuration: mount.fstype=ext4 mount.options=rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered state=mounted *-volume:2 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 3 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,3 logical name: /dev/sda3 logical name: /media/os version: 3.1 serial: 4e7853ec-5555-a74d-82e0-9f49798d3772 size: 156GiB capacity: 156GiB capabilities: primary ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2013-09-19 09:19:00 filesystem=ntfs label=OS mount.fstype=fuseblk mount.options=ro,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096 state=mounted *-volume:3 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 4 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,4 logical name: /dev/sda4 logical name: /media/data version: 3.1 serial: 7666d55f-e1bf-e645-9791-2a1a31b24b9a size: 322GiB capacity: 322GiB capabilities: primary ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2013-09-17 23:27:01 filesystem=ntfs label=Data modified_by_chkdsk=true mount.fstype=fuseblk mount.options=rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096 mounted_on_nt4=true resize_log_file=true state=mounted upgrade_on_mount=true *-scsi:1 physical id: 2 logical name: scsi1 capabilities: emulated *-cdrom description: DVD-RAM writer product: DVD+-RW GT32N vendor: HL-DT-ST physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/cdrom logical name: /dev/sr0 version: A201 capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc *-battery product: DELL vendor: SANYO physical id: 1 version: 2008 serial: 1.0 slot: Rear capacity: 57720mWh configuration: voltage=11.1V `

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  • SQL SERVER – Guest Post – Jonathan Kehayias – Wait Type – Day 16 of 28

    - by pinaldave
    Jonathan Kehayias (Blog | Twitter) is a MCITP Database Administrator and Developer, who got started in SQL Server in 2004 as a database developer and report writer in the natural gas industry. After spending two and a half years working in TSQL, in late 2006, he transitioned to the role of SQL Database Administrator. His primary passion is performance tuning, where he frequently rewrites queries for better performance and performs in depth analysis of index implementation and usage. Jonathan blogs regularly on SQLBlog, and was a coauthor of Professional SQL Server 2008 Internals and Troubleshooting. On a personal note, I think Jonathan is extremely positive person. In every conversation with him I have found that he is always eager to help and encourage. Every time he finds something needs to be approved, he has contacted me without hesitation and guided me to improve, change and learn. During all the time, he has not lost his focus to help larger community. I am honored that he has accepted to provide his views on complex subject of Wait Types and Queues. Currently I am reading his series on Extended Events. Here is the guest blog post by Jonathan: SQL Server troubleshooting is all about correlating related pieces of information together to indentify where exactly the root cause of a problem lies. In my daily work as a DBA, I generally get phone calls like, “So and so application is slow, what’s wrong with the SQL Server.” One of the funny things about the letters DBA is that they go so well with Default Blame Acceptor, and I really wish that I knew exactly who the first person was that pointed that out to me, because it really fits at times. A lot of times when I get this call, the problem isn’t related to SQL Server at all, but every now and then in my initial quick checks, something pops up that makes me start looking at things further. The SQL Server is slow, we see a number of tasks waiting on ASYNC_IO_COMPLETION, IO_COMPLETION, or PAGEIOLATCH_* waits in sys.dm_exec_requests and sys.dm_exec_waiting_tasks. These are also some of the highest wait types in sys.dm_os_wait_stats for the server, so it would appear that we have a disk I/O bottleneck on the machine. A quick check of sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats() and tempdb shows a high write stall rate, while our user databases show high read stall rates on the data files. A quick check of some performance counters and Page Life Expectancy on the server is bouncing up and down in the 50-150 range, the Free Page counter consistently hits zero, and the Free List Stalls/sec counter keeps jumping over 10, but Buffer Cache Hit Ratio is 98-99%. Where exactly is the problem? In this case, which happens to be based on a real scenario I faced a few years back, the problem may not be a disk bottleneck at all; it may very well be a memory pressure issue on the server. A quick check of the system spec’s and it is a dual duo core server with 8GB RAM running SQL Server 2005 SP1 x64 on Windows Server 2003 R2 x64. Max Server memory is configured at 6GB and we think that this should be enough to handle the workload; or is it? This is a unique scenario because there are a couple of things happening inside of this system, and they all relate to what the root cause of the performance problem is on the system. If we were to query sys.dm_exec_query_stats for the TOP 10 queries, by max_physical_reads, max_logical_reads, and max_worker_time, we may be able to find some queries that were using excessive I/O and possibly CPU against the system in their worst single execution. We can also CROSS APPLY to sys.dm_exec_sql_text() and see the statement text, and also CROSS APPLY sys.dm_exec_query_plan() to get the execution plan stored in cache. Ok, quick check, the plans are pretty big, I see some large index seeks, that estimate 2.8GB of data movement between operators, but everything looks like it is optimized the best it can be. Nothing really stands out in the code, and the indexing looks correct, and I should have enough memory to handle this in cache, so it must be a disk I/O problem right? Not exactly! If we were to look at how much memory the plan cache is taking by querying sys.dm_os_memory_clerks for the CACHESTORE_SQLCP and CACHESTORE_OBJCP clerks we might be surprised at what we find. In SQL Server 2005 RTM and SP1, the plan cache was allowed to take up to 75% of the memory under 8GB. I’ll give you a second to go back and read that again. Yes, you read it correctly, it says 75% of the memory under 8GB, but you don’t have to take my word for it, you can validate this by reading Changes in Caching Behavior between SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 RTM and SQL Server 2005 SP2. In this scenario the application uses an entirely adhoc workload against SQL Server and this leads to plan cache bloat, and up to 4.5GB of our 6GB of memory for SQL can be consumed by the plan cache in SQL Server 2005 SP1. This in turn reduces the size of the buffer cache to just 1.5GB, causing our 2.8GB of data movement in this expensive plan to cause complete flushing of the buffer cache, not just once initially, but then another time during the queries execution, resulting in excessive physical I/O from disk. Keep in mind that this is not the only query executing at the time this occurs. Remember the output of sys.dm_io_virtual_file_stats() showed high read stalls on the data files for our user databases versus higher write stalls for tempdb? The memory pressure is also forcing heavier use of tempdb to handle sorting and hashing in the environment as well. The real clue here is the Memory counters for the instance; Page Life Expectancy, Free List Pages, and Free List Stalls/sec. The fact that Page Life Expectancy is fluctuating between 50 and 150 constantly is a sign that the buffer cache is experiencing constant churn of data, once every minute to two and a half minutes. If you add to the Page Life Expectancy counter, the consistent bottoming out of Free List Pages along with Free List Stalls/sec consistently spiking over 10, and you have the perfect memory pressure scenario. All of sudden it may not be that our disk subsystem is the problem, but is instead an innocent bystander and victim. Side Note: The Page Life Expectancy counter dropping briefly and then returning to normal operating values intermittently is not necessarily a sign that the server is under memory pressure. The Books Online and a number of other references will tell you that this counter should remain on average above 300 which is the time in seconds a page will remain in cache before being flushed or aged out. This number, which equates to just five minutes, is incredibly low for modern systems and most published documents pre-date the predominance of 64 bit computing and easy availability to larger amounts of memory in SQL Servers. As food for thought, consider that my personal laptop has more memory in it than most SQL Servers did at the time those numbers were posted. I would argue that today, a system churning the buffer cache every five minutes is in need of some serious tuning or a hardware upgrade. Back to our problem and its investigation: There are two things really wrong with this server; first the plan cache is excessively consuming memory and bloated in size and we need to look at that and second we need to evaluate upgrading the memory to accommodate the workload being performed. In the case of the server I was working on there were a lot of single use plans found in sys.dm_exec_cached_plans (where usecounts=1). Single use plans waste space in the plan cache, especially when they are adhoc plans for statements that had concatenated filter criteria that is not likely to reoccur with any frequency.  SQL Server 2005 doesn’t natively have a way to evict a single plan from cache like SQL Server 2008 does, but MVP Kalen Delaney, showed a hack to evict a single plan by creating a plan guide for the statement and then dropping that plan guide in her blog post Geek City: Clearing a Single Plan from Cache. We could put that hack in place in a job to automate cleaning out all the single use plans periodically, minimizing the size of the plan cache, but a better solution would be to fix the application so that it uses proper parameterized calls to the database. You didn’t write the app, and you can’t change its design? Ok, well you could try to force parameterization to occur by creating and keeping plan guides in place, or we can try forcing parameterization at the database level by using ALTER DATABASE <dbname> SET PARAMETERIZATION FORCED and that might help. If neither of these help, we could periodically dump the plan cache for that database, as discussed as being a problem in Kalen’s blog post referenced above; not an ideal scenario. The other option is to increase the memory on the server to 16GB or 32GB, if the hardware allows it, which will increase the size of the plan cache as well as the buffer cache. In SQL Server 2005 SP1, on a system with 16GB of memory, if we set max server memory to 14GB the plan cache could use at most 9GB  [(8GB*.75)+(6GB*.5)=(6+3)=9GB], leaving 5GB for the buffer cache.  If we went to 32GB of memory and set max server memory to 28GB, the plan cache could use at most 16GB [(8*.75)+(20*.5)=(6+10)=16GB], leaving 12GB for the buffer cache. Thankfully we have SQL Server 2005 Service Pack 2, 3, and 4 these days which include the changes in plan cache sizing discussed in the Changes to Caching Behavior between SQL Server 2000, SQL Server 2005 RTM and SQL Server 2005 SP2 blog post. In real life, when I was troubleshooting this problem, I spent a week trying to chase down the cause of the disk I/O bottleneck with our Server Admin and SAN Admin, and there wasn’t much that could be done immediately there, so I finally asked if we could increase the memory on the server to 16GB, which did fix the problem. It wasn’t until I had this same problem occur on another system that I actually figured out how to really troubleshoot this down to the root cause.  I couldn’t believe the size of the plan cache on the server with 16GB of memory when I actually learned about this and went back to look at it. SQL Server is constantly telling a story to anyone that will listen. As the DBA, you have to sit back and listen to all that it’s telling you and then evaluate the big picture and how all the data you can gather from SQL about performance relate to each other. One of the greatest tools out there is actually a free in the form of Diagnostic Scripts for SQL Server 2005 and 2008, created by MVP Glenn Alan Berry. Glenn’s scripts collect a majority of the information that SQL has to offer for rapid troubleshooting of problems, and he includes a lot of notes about what the outputs of each individual query might be telling you. When I read Pinal’s blog post SQL SERVER – ASYNC_IO_COMPLETION – Wait Type – Day 11 of 28, I noticed that he referenced Checking Memory Related Performance Counters in his post, but there was no real explanation about why checking memory counters is so important when looking at an I/O related wait type. I thought I’d chat with him briefly on Google Talk/Twitter DM and point this out, and offer a couple of other points I noted, so that he could add the information to his blog post if he found it useful.  Instead he asked that I write a guest blog for this. I am honored to be a guest blogger, and to be able to share this kind of information with the community. The information contained in this blog post is a glimpse at how I do troubleshooting almost every day of the week in my own environment. SQL Server provides us with a lot of information about how it is running, and where it may be having problems, it is up to us to play detective and find out how all that information comes together to tell us what’s really the problem. This blog post is written by Jonathan Kehayias (Blog | Twitter). Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: MVP, Pinal Dave, PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, SQL Wait Stats, SQL Wait Types, T SQL, Technology

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, April 14, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, April 14, 2010New Projectsbitly.net: A bitly (useing Version 3 of their API's) client for .NET (Version 3.5)Chord Sheet Editor Add-In for Word: Transpose music chord sheets (guitar chord sheets, etc.) in Microsoft Word using this VSTO Add-In.CloudSponge.Net: Simple .Net wrapper for www.cloudsponge.com's REST API.Database Searcher: This is a small tool for searching a typed value inside all type matching columns and rows of a database. For connecting the database a .NET data p...Edu Math: PL: Program Edu Math, ma na celu ułatwienie wykonywania skomplikowanych obliczeń oraz analiz matematycznych. EN: Program Edu Math, aims to facilita...fluent AOP: This project is not yet publishedFNA Fractal Numerical Algorithm for a new encryption technology: FNA Fractal Numerical Algorithm for a new encryption technology is a symmetrical encryption method based on two algorithms that I developed for: 1....Image viewer cum editor: This is a project on image viewing and editing. The project have following features VIEWER: Album Password security for albums Inbuilt Browser...JEngine - Tile Map Editor v1: JEngine - Tile Map Editor v1Jeremy Knight: Code samples, snippets, etc from my personal blog.lcskey: lcs test codemoldme: testesds ssdfsdfsNanoPrompt: NanoPrompt makes it more pleasant to work on a command-line. Features: - syntax-highlighting - graphical output possible - up to 12 "displays" (cha...nirvana: for testOffInvoice Add-in for MS Office 2010: Project Description: The project it's based in the ability to extend funtionality in the Microsoft Office 2010 suite.PowerSlim - Acceptance Testing for Enterprise Applications: PowerSlim makes it possible to use PowerShell in the acceptance testing. It is a small but powerful plugin for the Fitnesse acceptance testing fram...Proxi [Proxy Interface]: Proxi is a light-weight library that allows to generate dynamic proxies using different providers. By utilizing Proxi frameworks and libraries can ...Reality show about ASP.NET development: This application is created with using ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server for the demo purposes with the following target goals: example of usage fo...RecordLogon.vbs login script: RecordLogon.vbs is a script applied at logon via Group or Local policy. It records specific user and computer information and writes the data to a ...SpaceGameApplet: A java game ;)SpaceShipsGame: A game with space ships ";..;"SysHard: Info for Linux system.System Etheral™ - Developer: SE Dev (System Etheral™ - Developer) is an OS (Operating System) that is a bit like UNIX but it is for you to edit! We have not gave you much but w...TimeSheet Reporting Silverlight: TimeSheet Reporting application in Silver light. Contains a data grid containing combo boxes bound to different data sources like Members and Proje...TrayBird: A minimalistic twitter client for windows.Twitter4You: This appliction for windows is a communication for twitter!WCF RIA Services (+ PRISM + MVVM) LoB Application: WCF RIA Services sample LoB application (case study) built on PRISM with Entity Framework Model. It's a simple application for a fictive company Te...New ReleasesBluetooth Radar: Version 1.9: Change Search and Close Icons Add Device Detail ViewCloudSponge.Net: Alpha: Initial alpha release very limited tested includes *CloudSponge.dll *Sponge.exe (simple cmd line utility to import contacts, and test API)Global Assembly Cache comparison tool: GAC Compare version 3.1: Version 3.1Added export assemblies to directory functionalityHTML Ruby: 6.21.2: Some style adjustments Ruby text spacing is spaced out to keep Firefox responsive Status bar is backJEngine - Tile Map Editor v1: JEngine - Tile Map Editor V1: JEngine - Tile Map Editor V1 Discription SoonJeremy Knight: SQL Padding Functions v1.0: The entire scripts, including if exists logic, for SQL Padding Functions are included in this download.jqGrid ASP.Net MVC Control: Version 1.1.0.0: UPDATE 14-04 Fixed a small problem with the custom column renderers controller, And added a new example for a cascading-dropdownlist grid column A...JulMar MVVM Helpers + Behaviors: Version 1.06: This version is an update to MVVM Helpers that is built on Visual Studio 2010 RTM. It includes some minor updates to classes and a few new convert...lcskey: v 1.0: v1.0 基本能跑,未详细测试LINQ To Blippr: LINQ to Blippr: Download to test out and play around LINQ to Blippr based from blog posts: http://consultingblogs.emc.com/jonsharrattLINQ to XSD: 1.1.0: The LINQ to XSD technology provides .NET developers with support for typed XML programming. LINQ to XSD contributes to the LINQ project (.NET Langu...LINQ to XSD: 2.0.0: It is the same code as version 1.1 but compiled for .NET framework 4.0. Requirements: .NET Framework 4.0.LocoSync: LocoSync v0.1r2010.04.12: Second Alpha version of LocoSync. Download unzip and run setup. It will download the .NET framework if needed. It will create an icon in the start ...mojoPortal: 2.3.4.2: see release note on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2342-released.aspxNanoPrompt: Setup (.NET 4.0) - 20100414-A Nightly: The setup for NanoPrompt 0.Xa for Intel-80386- (32 or 64 bits) or Intel-Itanium-compatible targets with installed .NET-Framework 4.0 Client Profile...Neural Cryptography in F#: Neural Cryptography 0.0.5: This release provides the basic functionality that this project was supposed to have from the very beginning: it can hash strings using neural netw...NodeXL: Network Overview, Discovery and Exploration for Excel: NodeXL Class Libraries, version 1.0.1.121: The NodeXL class libraries can be used to display network graphs in .NET applications. To include a NodeXL network graph in a WPF desktop or Windo...nRoute Framework: nRoute.Toolkit Release Version 0.4: Note, both "nRoute.Framework (x3)" and "nRoute.Toolkit (x3)" zip files contains binaries for Web, Desktop and Mobile targets. Also this release wa...Numina Application/Security Framework: Numina.Framework Core 50381: Rebuilt using .NET 4 RTM One minor change made to the web.config file - added System.Data.Linq to the assemblies list.PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn Lib and Sample: Great sample with usefull comet ajax library! .Net 2.0 Note : It was very easy to build this project with Visual Studio 10 ;)Powershell Zip File Export/Import Cmdlet Module: PowershellZip 0.1.0.3: Powershell-Zip 0.1.0.3 contains the cmdlets Export-Zip and Import-ZipPowerSlim - Acceptance Testing for Enterprise Applications: PowerSlim 0.1: Just PowerSlim. http://vlasenko.org/2010/04/09/howto-setup-powerslim-step-by-step/RDA Collaboration Team Projects: SharePoint BPOS Logging Framework: RDA's SharePoint BPOS logging framework is a very lightweight WSP Builder project that provides the following items: A Site feature that creates a...RecordLogon.vbs login script: LogonSearchGadget: This is the Windows Gadget companion for RecordLogon.RecordLogon.vbs login script: LogonSearchTool.hta: This is the HTA standalone script that runs inside of an IE window. The HTA is what presents the data the recordlogon.vbs creates. Please remember...RecordLogon.vbs login script: recordlogon.vbs: This is the main script that grabs the logon and computer information and dumps the info as text files to a defined folder share. Make sure to chec...Rensea Image Viewer: RIV 0.4.3: New Release of RIV. Added many many features! You would love it. You would need .NET Framework 4.0 to make it run With separated RIV up-loader, to...SharePoint Site Configurator Feature: SharePoint Site Configurator V2.0: Updated for SharePoint 2010 and added quite a lot of new functions. Compatible with SP2010, MOSS and WSS 3.0Sharp Tests Ex: Sharp Tests Ex 1.0.0RC2: Project Description #TestsEx (Sharp Tests Extensions) is a set of extensible extensions. The main target is write short assertions where the Visual...SQL Server Extended Properties Quick Editor: Release 1.6.2: Whats new in 1.6.2: Fixed several errors in LinqToSQL generated classes, solved generation EntitySet members. Its highly recomended to download and...SSRS SDK for PHP: SugarCRM Sample for SSRSReport: The zip file contains a sample SugarCRM module that shows how the SSRS SDK for PHP can be used to add simple reporting capabilities to the SugarCRM...System Etheral™ - Developer: System Etheral Dev v1.00: Comes with a VERY basic text editor and the ability to shutdown. Hopefully we will have a lot more stuff in version 1.01! But this is fine for now....Text to HTML: 0.4.2.0: ¡Gracias a Martin Lemburg por avisar de los errores y por sus sugerencias! Cambios de la versiónSustitución de los caracteres especiales alemanes:...TimeSheet Reporting Silverlight: v1.0 Source Code: Source CodeTwitter4You: Twitter 4 You - Version 1.0 (TESTER): Serialcode: http://joeynl.blogspot.com/2010/04/test-version-of-t4yv1.html Thanks JoeyNLVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30413.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisioAutomation: VisioAutomation 2.5.1: VisioAutomation 2.5.1- Moved to Visual Studio 2010 (Still using .NET Framework 3.5) Changes Since 2.5.0- Solution and Projects are all based on Vi...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelFacebook Developer ToolkitMost Active ProjectsRawrAutoPocopatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationFarseer Physics EngineNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBeanProxyjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETFacebook Developer Toolkit

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  • What's up with LDoms: Part 1 - Introduction & Basic Concepts

    - by Stefan Hinker
    LDoms - the correct name is Oracle VM Server for SPARC - have been around for quite a while now.  But to my surprise, I get more and more requests to explain how they work or to give advise on how to make good use of them.  This made me think that writing up a few articles discussing the different features would be a good idea.  Now - I don't intend to rewrite the LDoms Admin Guide or to copy and reformat the (hopefully) well known "Beginners Guide to LDoms" by Tony Shoumack from 2007.  Those documents are very recommendable - especially the Beginners Guide, although based on LDoms 1.0, is still a good place to begin with.  However, LDoms have come a long way since then, and I hope to contribute to their adoption by discussing how they work and what features there are today.  In this and the following posts, I will use the term "LDoms" as a common abbreviation for Oracle VM Server for SPARC, just because it's a lot shorter and easier to type (and presumably, read). So, just to get everyone on the same baseline, lets briefly discuss the basic concepts of virtualization with LDoms.  LDoms make use of a hypervisor as a layer of abstraction between real, physical hardware and virtual hardware.  This virtual hardware is then used to create a number of guest systems which each behave very similar to a system running on bare metal:  Each has its own OBP, each will install its own copy of the Solaris OS and each will see a certain amount of CPU, memory, disk and network resources available to it.  Unlike some other type 1 hypervisors running on x86 hardware, the SPARC hypervisor is embedded in the system firmware and makes use both of supporting functions in the sun4v SPARC instruction set as well as the overall CPU architecture to fulfill its function. The CMT architecture of the supporting CPUs (T1 through T4) provide a large number of cores and threads to the OS.  For example, the current T4 CPU has eight cores, each running 8 threads, for a total of 64 threads per socket.  To the OS, this looks like 64 CPUs.  The SPARC hypervisor, when creating guest systems, simply assigns a certain number of these threads exclusively to one guest, thus avoiding the overhead of having to schedule OS threads to CPUs, as do typical x86 hypervisors.  The hypervisor only assigns CPUs and then steps aside.  It is not involved in the actual work being dispatched from the OS to the CPU, all it does is maintain isolation between different guests. Likewise, memory is assigned exclusively to individual guests.  Here,  the hypervisor provides generic mappings between the physical hardware addresses and the guest's views on memory.  Again, the hypervisor is not involved in the actual memory access, it only maintains isolation between guests. During the inital setup of a system with LDoms, you start with one special domain, called the Control Domain.  Initially, this domain owns all the hardware available in the system, including all CPUs, all RAM and all IO resources.  If you'd be running the system un-virtualized, this would be what you'd be working with.  To allow for guests, you first resize this initial domain (also called a primary domain in LDoms speak), assigning it a small amount of CPU and memory.  This frees up most of the available CPU and memory resources for guest domains.  IO is a little more complex, but very straightforward.  When LDoms 1.0 first came out, the only way to provide IO to guest systems was to create virtual disk and network services and attach guests to these services.  In the meantime, several different ways to connect guest domains to IO have been developed, the most recent one being SR-IOV support for network devices released in version 2.2 of Oracle VM Server for SPARC. I will cover these more advanced features in detail later.  For now, lets have a short look at the initial way IO was virtualized in LDoms: For virtualized IO, you create two services, one "Virtual Disk Service" or vds, and one "Virtual Switch" or vswitch.  You can, of course, also create more of these, but that's more advanced than I want to cover in this introduction.  These IO services now connect real, physical IO resources like a disk LUN or a networt port to the virtual devices that are assigned to guest domains.  For disk IO, the normal case would be to connect a physical LUN (or some other storage option that I'll discuss later) to one specific guest.  That guest would be assigned a virtual disk, which would appear to be just like a real LUN to the guest, while the IO is actually routed through the virtual disk service down to the physical device.  For network, the vswitch acts very much like a real, physical ethernet switch - you connect one physical port to it for outside connectivity and define one or more connections per guest, just like you would plug cables between a real switch and a real system. For completeness, there is another service that provides console access to guest domains which mimics the behavior of serial terminal servers. The connections between the virtual devices on the guest's side and the virtual IO services in the primary domain are created by the hypervisor.  It uses so called "Logical Domain Channels" or LDCs to create point-to-point connections between all of these devices and services.  These LDCs work very similar to high speed serial connections and are configured automatically whenever the Control Domain adds or removes virtual IO. To see all this in action, now lets look at a first example.  I will start with a newly installed machine and configure the control domain so that it's ready to create guest systems. In a first step, after we've installed the software, let's start the virtual console service and downsize the primary domain.  root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-c-- UART 512 261632M 0.3% 2d 13h 58m root@sun # ldm add-vconscon port-range=5000-5100 \ primary-console primary root@sun # svcadm enable vntsd root@sun # svcs vntsd STATE STIME FMRI online 9:53:21 svc:/ldoms/vntsd:default root@sun # ldm set-vcpu 16 primary root@sun # ldm set-mau 1 primary root@sun # ldm start-reconf primary root@sun # ldm set-memory 7680m primary root@sun # ldm add-config initial root@sun # shutdown -y -g0 -i6 So what have I done: I've defined a range of ports (5000-5100) for the virtual network terminal service and then started that service.  The vnts will later provide console connections to guest systems, very much like serial NTS's do in the physical world. Next, I assigned 16 vCPUs (on this platform, a T3-4, that's two cores) to the primary domain, freeing the rest up for future guest systems.  I also assigned one MAU to this domain.  A MAU is a crypto unit in the T3 CPU.  These need to be explicitly assigned to domains, just like CPU or memory.  (This is no longer the case with T4 systems, where crypto is always available everywhere.) Before I reassigned the memory, I started what's called a "delayed reconfiguration" session.  That avoids actually doing the change right away, which would take a considerable amount of time in this case.  Instead, I'll need to reboot once I'm all done.  I've assigned 7680MB of RAM to the primary.  That's 8GB less the 512MB which the hypervisor uses for it's own private purposes.  You can, depending on your needs, work with less.  I'll spend a dedicated article on sizing, discussing the pros and cons in detail. Finally, just before the reboot, I saved my work on the ILOM, to make this configuration available after a powercycle of the box.  (It'll always be available after a simple reboot, but the ILOM needs to know the configuration of the hypervisor after a power-cycle, before the primary domain is booted.) Now, lets create a first disk service and a first virtual switch which is connected to the physical network device igb2. We will later use these to connect virtual disks and virtual network ports of our guest systems to real world storage and network. root@sun # ldm add-vds primary-vds root@sun # ldm add-vswitch net-dev=igb2 switch-primary primary You are free to choose whatever names you like for the virtual disk service and the virtual switch.  I strongly recommend that you choose names that make sense to you and describe the function of each service in the context of your implementation.  For the vswitch, for example, you could choose names like "admin-vswitch" or "production-network" etc. This already concludes the configuration of the control domain.  We've freed up considerable amounts of CPU and RAM for guest systems and created the necessary infrastructure - console, vts and vswitch - so that guests systems can actually interact with the outside world.  The system is now ready to create guests, which I'll describe in the next section. For further reading, here are some recommendable links: The LDoms 2.2 Admin Guide The "Beginners Guide to LDoms" The LDoms Information Center on MOS LDoms on OTN

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  • MSCC: Purpose and benefits of Version Control Systems (VCS)

    Unfortunately, there was no monthly meetup during May. Which means that it was even more important and interesting to go forward with a great topic for this month. Earlier this year I already spoke to Nayar Joolfoo about doing a presentation on version control systems (VCS), and he gladly agreed since then. It was just about finding the right date for the action. Furthermore, it was also a great coincidence that Avinash Meetoo announced on social media networks that Knowledge 7 is about to have a new training on "Effective git" - which correlates to a book title Avinash is currently working on - all the best with your approach on this and reach out to our MSCC craftsmen for recessions. Once again a big Thank you to Orange Ebene Accelerator on providing the venue for us, and the MSCC members involved on securing the time slot for our event. Unfortunately, it's kind of tough to get an early confirmation for our meetups these days. I'll keep you posted on that one as there are some interesting and exciting options coming up soon. Okay, let's talk about the meeting and version control systems again. As usual, I'm going to put my first impression of the meetup: "Absolutely great topic, questions and discussions on version control systems, like git or VSO. I was also highly pleased by the number of first timers and female IT geeks. Hopefully, we will be able to keep this trend for future get-togethers." And I really have to emphasise the amount of fresh blood coming to our gathering. Also, during the initial phase it was surprising to see that exactly those first-timers, most of them students at various campuses here on the island, had absolutely no idea about version control systems. More about further down... Reactions of other attendees If I counted correctly, we had a total of 17 attendees this month, and I'd like to give you feedback from some of them: "Inspiring. Helped me understand more about GIT." -- Sean on event comments "Joined the meetup today with literally no idea what is a version control system. I have several reasons why I should be starting to use VCS as from NOW in my projects. Thanks Nayar, Jochen and other participants :)" -- Yudish on event comments "Was present today and I'm very satisfied.I was not aware if there was a such tool like git available. Thanks to those who contributed for this meetup.It was great. Learned a lot from this meetup!!" -- Leonardo on event comments "Seriously, I can see how it’s going to ease my task and help me save time. Gone are the issues with files backups.  And since I’ll be doing my dissertation this year, using Git would help me a lot for my backups and I’m grateful to Nayar for the great explanation." -- Swan-Iyah on MSCC meetup : Version Controls Hopefully, I'll be able to get some other sources - personal blogs preferred - on our meeting. Geeks, thank you so much for those encouraging comments. It's really great to experience that we, all members of the MSCC, are doing the right thing to get more IT information out, and to help each other to improve and evolve in our professional careers. Our agenda of the day Honestly, we had a bumpy start... First, I was battling a little bit with the movable room divider in order to maximize the space. I mean, we had 24 RSVPs and usually there might additional people coming along. Then, for what ever reason, we were facing power outages - actually twice in short periods. Not too good for the projector after all, but hey it went smooth for the rest of the time being. And last but not least... our first speaker Nayar got stuck somewhere on the road. ;-) Anyway, not a real show-stopper and we used the time until Nayar's arrival to introduce ourselves a little bit. It is always important for me to get to know the "newbies" a little bit, and as a result we had lots of students of university - first year, second year and recent graduates - among them. Surprisingly, none of them was ever in contact with version control systems at all. I mean, this is a shocking discovery! Similar to the ability of touch-typing I'd say that being able to use (and master) any kind of version control system is compulsory in any job in the IT industry. Seriously, I'm wondering what is being taught during the classes on the campus. All of them have to work on semester assessments or final projects, even in small teams of 2-4 people. That's the perfect occasion to get started with VCS. Already in this phase, we had great input from more experienced VCS users, like Sean, Avinash and myself. git - a modern approach to VCS - Nayar What a tour! Nayar gave us the full round of git from start to finish, even touching some more advanced techniques. First, he started to explain about the importance of version control systems as an essential tool for software developers, even working alone on a project, and the ability to have a kind of "time machine" that allows you to inspect and revert to a previous version of source code at any time. Then he showed how easy it is to install git on an Ubuntu based system but also mentioned that git is literally available for any operating system, like Windows, Mac OS X and of course other Linux distributions. Next, he showed us how to set the initial configuration values of user name and email address which simplifies the daily usage of the git client while working with your repositories. Then he initialised and added a new repository for some local development of a blogging software. All commands were done using the command line interface (CLI) so that they can be repeated on any system as reference. The syntax and the procedure is always the same, and Nayar clearly mentioned this to the attendees. Now, having a git repository in place it was about time to work on some "important" changes on the blogging software - just for the sake of demonstrating the ease of use and power of git. One interesting question came very early: "How many commands do we have to learn? It looks quite difficult at the moment" - Well, rest assured that during daily development circles you will need less than 10 git commands on a regular base: git add, commit, push, pull, checkout, and merge And Nayar demo'd all of them. Much to the delight of everyone he also showed gitk which is the git repository browser. It's an UI tool to display changes in a repository or a selected set of commits. This includes visualizing the commit graph, showing information related to each commit, and the files in the trees of each revision. Using gitk to display and browse information of a local git repository And last but not least, we took advantage of the internet connectivity and reached out to various online portals offering git hosting for free. Nayar showed us how to push the local repository into a remote system on github. Showing the web-based git browser and history handling, and then also explained and demo'd on how to connect to existing online repositories in order to get access to either your own source code or other people's open source projects. Next to github, we also spoke about bitbucket and gitlab as potential online platforms for your projects. Have a look at the conditions and details about their free service packages and what you can get additionally as a paying customer. Usually, you already get a lot of services for up to five users for free but there might be other important aspects that might have an impact on your decision. Anyways, moving git-based repositories between systems is a piece of cake, and changing online platforms is possible at any stage of your development. Visual Studio Online (VSO) - Jochen Well, Nayar literally covered all elements of working with git during his session, including the use of external online platforms. So, what would be the advantage of talking about Visual Studio Online (VSO)? First of all, VSO is "just another" online platform for hosting and managing git repositories on remote systems, equivalent to github, bitbucket, or any other web site. At the moment (of writing), Microsoft also provides a free package of up to five users / developers on a git repository but there is more in that package. Of course, it is related to software development on the Windows systems and the bonds are tightened towards the use of Visual Studio but out of experience you are absolutely not restricted to that. Connecting a Linux or Mac OS X machine with a git client or an integrated development environment (IDE) like Eclipse or Xcode works as smooth as expected. So, why should one opt in for VSO? Well, one of the main aspects that I would like to mention here is that VSO integrates the Application Life Cycle Methodology (ALM) of Microsoft in their platform. Meaning that you get agile project management with Backlogs, Sprints, Burn-down charts as well as the ability to track tasks, bug reports and work items next to collaborative team chats. It's the whole package of agile development you'll get. And, something I mentioned briefly during the begin of our meeting, VSO gives you the possibility of an automated continuous integrated (CI) process which builds and can run tests of your source code after each commit of changes. Having a proper CI strategy is also part of the Clean Code Developer practices - on Level Green actually -, and not only simplifies your life as a software developer but also reduces the sources of potential errors. Seamless integration and automated deployment between Microsoft Azure Web Sites and git repository But my favourite feature is the seamless continuous deployment to Microsoft Azure. Especially, while working on web projects it's absolutely astounishing that as soon as you commit your chances it just takes a couple of seconds until your modifications are deployed and available on your Azure-hosted web sites. Upcoming Events and networking Due to the adjusted times, everybody was kind of hungry and we didn't follow up on networking or upcoming events - very unfortunate to my opinion and this will have an impact on future planning of our meetups. Because I rather would like to see more conversations during and at the end of our meetings than everyone just packing their laptops, bags and accessories and rush off to grab some food. I was hoping to get some information regarding this year's Code Challenge - supposedly to be organised during July? Maybe someone could leave a comment on that - but I couldn't get any updates. Well, I'll keep digging... In case that you would like to get more into git and how to use it effectively, please check out Knowledge 7's upcoming course on "Effective git". Thanks Avinash for your vital input into today's conversation and I'm looking forward to get a grip on your book title very soon. My resume of the day Do not work in IT without any kind of version control system! Seriously, without a VCS in place you're doing it wrong. It's like driving a car without seat belts attached or riding your bike without safety helmet. You don't do that! End of discussion. ;-) Nowadays, having access to free (as in cost) tools to install on your machine and numerous online platforms to host your source code for free for up to five users it's a no-brainer to get yourself familiar with VCS. Today's sessions gave a good overview on how to start using git and how to connect to various remote services like github or VSO.

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 31, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 31, 2010New ProjectsBase Class Libraries: The Base Class Libraries site hosts samples, previews, and prototypes from the BCL team. BB Scheduler - BroadBand Scheduler: Broadband Scheduler is highly useful as it helps the user to set the time when the computer will automatically enable the Broadband (Internet) conn...BFBC2 PRoCon: BFBC2 PRoCon makes it easier for Bad Company 2 GSP's and private server owners to administer their BFBC2 servers. It's developed in C# and targete...Business Process Management Virtual Environment (BPMVE): This BPMVE project has been separated into 3 different projects. BPMVE_DataStructure project contains all data structures (classes and attribute...Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test Steps: Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test StepsCint: CintContent Edit Extender for Ajax.Net: The Content Edit Extender is an Ajax.Net control extender that allows in-place editing of a div tag (panel). Double-click to edit, hit enter or tab...COV Game: Cov game is a worms like game made on Silverlight with Python server.Cybera: A continuing development project of the existing but now generally inactive former Cybera project.DotNetCRM Community Edition: DotNetCRM Community Edition is an open source, enterprise class CRM built on the .NET platform. It is designed to be extensible, configurable, data...EAV: A sample EAV pattern for SQL Server with: Tables and indexes Partial referential integrity Partial data typing Updatable views (like normal SQL table)EditRegion.MVC: EditRegion.MVC may be all you want, when you do not want a full CMS. It allows html areas to be edited by nominated users or roles. The API follo...Firestarter Modeller: Firestarter ModellerHabanero.Testability: Habanero.TestabilityProSoft CMS: CMS System - scalable over an undeclared amount of servers - publishing services - version control of sitesPS-Blog.net: This is my first project here on codeplex. I would like to write my own blog software. Any comments or critcs are welcome.ReleaseMe: ReleaseMe is a simple little tool I use to copy websites, and custom Window Services, from my development machine to a specified production machin...SAAS-RD: SAAS-RD: uma ferrameta utilizada para prover integração de SaaS com aplicações externasSample Web Application using Telerik's OpenAccess ORM: Sample Web Site Application Project that uses Telerik's OpenAccess ORM for data access.Sistema Facturacion: En el proyecto de Sistema de Facturacion se desarrollara una aplicacion para el total control de un establecimiento comercial Smooth Habanero: Smooth HabaneroSouthEast Conference 2011: For the Florida Institute of Technology IEEE Chapter regarding the Southeast Hardware Conference held in Nashville, TN 2011.SQL Server Bible Standards: A SQL Server Design and Development standards document. SSAS Profiler Trace Scheduler: AS Profiler Scheduler is a tool that will enable Scheduling of SQL AS Tracing using predefined Profiler Templates. For tracking different issues th...Symbolic Algebra: Another attempt to make an algebric system but to be natively in C# under the .net framework. Theocratic Ministry School System: This is an Open Source Theocratic Ministry School System designed for Jehovah's Witnesses. It will include much of the same features as the TMS ver...Weather Report WebControls: The First Release Version:1.0.10330.2334WPF 3D Labyrinth: A project for "Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms" subject at Kaunas University of Technology. Building a 3D labyrinth with a figure which ...WPF Zen Garden: This is intended to be a gallery for WPF Style sheets in the form of Css Zen Garden. New ReleasesAPSales CRM - Software as a Service: APSales 0.1.3: This version add some interesting features to the project: Implement "Filter By Additional Fields" in view edit Implement quick create function Im...Base Class Libraries: BigRational: BigRational builds on the BigInteger introduced in .NET Framework 4 to create an arbitrary-precision rational number type. A rational number is a ...Base Class Libraries: Long Path: The long path wrapper provides functionality to make it easier to work with paths that are longer than the current 259 character limit of the Syste...Base Class Libraries: PerfMonitor: PerfMonitor is a command-line tool for profiling the system using Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). PerfMonitor is built on top of the TraceEvent li...Base Class Libraries: TraceEvent: TraceEvent is an experimental library that greatly simplifies reading Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events. It is used by the PerfMonitor tool. ...BB Scheduler - BroadBand Scheduler: Broadband Scheduler v2.0: - Broadband service has some of the cheap and best monthly plans for the users all over the nation. And some of the plans include unlimited night d...BuildTools - Toolset for automated builds: BuildTools 2.0 Mar 2010 Milestone: The Mar 2010 Milestone release is a contains a bug fixes for projects not explicitly setting the StartingDate property, and no longer breaks when t...Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test Steps: BRE BizUnit Test Steps Ver. 1.0: Version 1.0Claymore MVP: Claymore 1.1.0.0: Changelog Added Compact Framework support Added fluent interface to configure the library.Content Edit Extender for Ajax.Net: ContentEditExtender 1.0 for Ajax.Net: Complete with source control and test/example Website and Web Service. Built with Visual Studio 2008 with the 3.5 BCL. Control requires the AjaxCon...dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.6: This stable version of the compiler for both .NET 3.5 and 4.0 adds the loading of numbers in a bult-in fashion. See code below: #refasm mscorlib...EAV: March 2010: The initial release as demoed at the SSWUG Virtual Conference Spring 2010Fax .NET: Fax .NET 1.0.1: FIX : bugs for x64 and WOW64 architecture. The zip file include : Binary file Demo executable file Help fileFluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.0 for NET 4.0 RC: Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) compiled with .NET 4.0 RC Test application compiled with .NET 4.0 RC SourcesIceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 12.1 Full Install: Build Alpha 12.1 - March 30 2010 Fix Nick Name Change for Tabs/Server List for Queries Fix for running Channel List Multiple Times, clears list n...Import Excel data to SharePoint List: Import Data from Spreadsheet to SP List V1.5 x64: Import from Spreadsheet to a SharePoint List is the missing facet to the WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 List features. SharePoint lets a user create a custom...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.9: New items added since v1.1 include: Support for OAuth (via DotNetOpenAuth), secure communication via https, VB language support, serialization of ...mojoPortal: 2.3.4.1: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2341-released.aspxocculo: test: Release build for testers.PowerShell ToodleDo Module: 0.1: Initial Development Release - Very rough build.Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.2: Fixed issue where app crash when performance counter disappear or becomes unavailable while the application is running. For now the exception is si...Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.3: Add 'view last error'Rule 18 - Love your clipboard: Rule 18 (Visual Studio 2010 + .NET 4 RC Version): This is the second public beta for the first version of Rule 18. It has had a extensive private beta and been used in big presentations since the ...Selection Maker: Selection Maker 1.5: New Features:If the source folder does not exist,a dialog box will appear and ask the user if he/she wants to create that folder or if select anoth...sPATCH: sPatch v0.9a: + Fixed: wrong path to elementclient.exeSQL Server Bible Standards: March 2010: Initial release as presented at SSWUG Virtual Conference Spring 2010Survey - web survey & form engine: Source Code Documentation: Documentation.chm file as published with Nsurvey v. 1.9.1 - april 2005 Basic technical documentation and description of source code for developers...Theocratic Ministry School System: Theocratic Ministry School System - TMSS: This is the first release of TMSS. It is far from complete but demonstrates the possiablities of what can be done with Access 2007 using developer ...Weather Report WebControls: WeatherReport Controls: 本下载包含一个已经经过编译的二进制运行库和一个测试的WebApplication项目,是2010年3月30日发布的Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)LiveUpload to FacebookASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBase Class LibrariesBlogEngine.NETManaged Extensibility FrameworkFarseer Physics EngineGraffiti CMSMicrosoft Biology FoundationLINQ to Twitterpatterns & practices – Enterprise Library

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  • How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project

    - by constant
    While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack. After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades? On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea. Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company. Engineering Systems is Hard Work! The backbone of Exalogic is its InfiniBand network: 4 times better bandwidth than even 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and only about a tenth of its latency. What a potential for increased scalability and throughput across the middleware and database layers! But InfiniBand is a beast that needs to be tamed: It is true that Exalogic uses a standard, open-source Open Fabrics Enterprise Distribution (OFED) InfiniBand driver stack. Unfortunately, this software has been developed by the HPC community with fastest speed in mind (which is good) but, despite the name, not many other enterprise-class requirements are included (which is less good). Here are some of the improvements that Oracle's InfiniBand development team had to add to the OFED stack to make it enterprise-ready, simply because typical HPC users didn't have the need to implement them: More than 100 bug fixes in the pieces that were not related to the Message Passing Interface Protocol (MPI), which is the protocol that HPC users use most of the time, but which is less useful in the enterprise. Performance optimizations and tuning across the whole IB stack: From Switches, Host Channel Adapters (HCAs) and drivers to low-level protocols, middleware and applications. Yes, even the standard HPC IB stack could be improved in terms of performance. Ethernet over IB (EoIB): Exalogic uses InfiniBand internally to reach high performance, but it needs to play nicely with datacenters around it. That's why Oracle added Ethernet over InfiniBand technology to it that allows for creating many virtual 10GBE adapters inside Exalogic's nodes that are aggregated and connected to Exalogic's IB gateway switches. While this is an open standard, it's up to the vendor to implement it. In this case, Oracle integrated the EoIB stack with Oracle's own IB to 10GBE gateway switches, and made it fully virtualized from the beginning. This means that Exalogic customers can completely rewire their server infrastructure inside the rack without having to physically pull or plug a single cable - a must-have for every cloud deployment. Anybody who wants to match this level of integration would need to add an InfiniBand switch development team to their project. Or just buy Oracle's gateway switches, which are conveniently shipped with a whole server infrastructure attached! IPv6 support for InfiniBand's Sockets Direct Protocol (SDP), Reliable Datagram Sockets (RDS), TCP/IP over IB (IPoIB) and EoIB protocols. Because no IPv6 = not very enterprise-class. HA capability for SDP. High Availability is not a big requirement for HPC, but for enterprise-class application servers it is. Every node in Exalogic's InfiniBand network is connected twice for redundancy. If any cable or port or HCA fails, there's always a replacement link ready to take over. This requires extra magic at the protocol level to work. So in addition to Weblogic's failover capabilities, Oracle implemented IB automatic path migration at the SDP level to avoid unnecessary failover operations at the middleware level. Security, for example spoof-protection. Another feature that is less important for traditional users of InfiniBand, but very important for enterprise customers. InfiniBand Partitioning and Quality-of-Service (QoS): One of the first questions we get from customers about Exalogic is: “How can we implement multi-tenancy?” The answer is to partition your IB network, which effectively creates many networks that work independently and that are protected at the lowest networking layer possible. In addition to that, QoS allows administrators to prioritize traffic flow in multi-tenancy environments so they can keep their service levels where it matters most. Resilient IB Fabric Management: InfiniBand is a self-managing network, so a lot of the magic lies in coming up with the right topology and in teaching the subnet manager how to properly discover and manage the network. Oracle's Infiniband switches come with pre-integrated, highly available fabric management with seamless integration into Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center. In short: Oracle elevated the OFED InfiniBand stack into an enterprise-class networking infrastructure. Many years and multiple teams of manpower went into the above improvements - this is something you can only get from Oracle, because no other InfiniBand vendor can give you these features across the whole stack! Exabus: Because it's not About the Size of Your Network, it's How You Use it! So let's assume that you somehow were able to get your hands on an enterprise-class IB driver stack. Or maybe you don't care and are just happy with the standard OFED one? Anyway, the next step is to actually leverage that InfiniBand performance. Here are the choices: Use traditional TCP/IP on top of the InfiniBand stack, Develop your own integration between your middleware and the lower-level (but faster) InfiniBand protocols. While more bandwidth is always a good thing, it's actually the low latency that enables superior performance for your applications when running on any networking infrastructure: The lower the latency, the faster the response travels through the network and the more transactions you can close per second. The reason why InfiniBand is such a low latency technology is that it gets rid of most if not all of your traditional networking protocol stack: Data is literally beamed from one region of RAM in one server into another region of RAM in another server with no kernel/drivers/UDP/TCP or other networking stack overhead involved! Which makes option 1 a no-go: Adding TCP/IP on top of InfiniBand is like adding training wheels to your racing bike. It may be ok in the beginning and for development, but it's not quite the performance IB was meant to deliver. Which only leaves option 2: Integrating your middleware with fast, low-level InfiniBand protocols. And this is what Exalogic's "Exabus" technology is all about. Here are a few Exabus features that help applications leverage the performance of InfiniBand in Exalogic: RDMA and SDP integration at the JDBC driver level (SDP), for Oracle Weblogic (SDP), Oracle Coherence (RDMA), Oracle Tuxedo (RDMA) and the new Oracle Traffic Director (RDMA) on Exalogic. Using these protocols, middleware can communicate a lot faster with each other and the Oracle database than by using standard networking protocols, Seamless Integration of Ethernet over InfiniBand from Exalogic's Gateway switches into the OS, Oracle Weblogic optimizations for handling massive amounts of parallel transactions. Because if you have an 8-lane Autobahn, you also need to improve your ramps so you can feed it with many cars in parallel. Integration of Weblogic with Oracle Exadata for faster performance, optimized session management and failover. As you see, “Exabus” is Oracle's word for describing all the InfiniBand enhancements Oracle put into Exalogic: OFED stack enhancements, protocols for faster IB access, and InfiniBand support and optimizations at the virtualization and middleware level. All working together to deliver the full potential of InfiniBand performance. Who else has 100% control over their middleware so they can develop their own low-level protocol integration with InfiniBand? Even if you take an open source approach, you're looking at years of development work to create, test and support a whole new networking technology in your middleware! The Extras: Less Hassle, More Productivity, Faster Time to Market And then there are the other advantages of Engineered Systems that are true for Exalogic the same as they are for every other Engineered System: One simple purchasing process: No headaches due to endless RFPs and no “Will X work with Y?” uncertainties. Everything has been engineered together: All kinds of bugs and problems have been already fixed at the design level that would have only manifested themselves after you have built the system from scratch. Everything is built, tested and integrated at the factory level . Less integration pain for you, faster time to market. Every Exalogic machine world-wide is identical to Oracle's own machines in the lab: Instant replication of any problems you may encounter, faster time to resolution. Simplified patching, management and operations. One throat to choke: Imagine finger-pointing hell for systems that have been put together using several different vendors. Oracle's Engineered Systems have a single phone number that customers can call to get their problems solved. For more business-centric values, read The Business Value of Engineered Systems. Conclusion: Buy Exalogic, or get ready for a 6-12 Month Science Project And here's the reason why it's not easy to "build your own Exalogic": There's a lot of work required to make such a system fly. In fact, anybody who is starting to "just put together a bunch of servers and an InfiniBand network" is really looking at a 6-12 month science project. And the outcome is likely to not be very enterprise-class. And it won't have Exalogic's performance either. Because building an Engineered System is literally rocket science: It takes a lot of time, effort, resources and many iterations of design/test/analyze/fix to build such a system. That's why InfiniBand has been reserved for HPC scientists for such a long time. And only Oracle can bring the power of InfiniBand in an enterprise-class, ready-to use, pre-integrated version to customers, without the develop/integrate/support pain. For more details, check the new Exalogic overview white paper which was updated only recently. P.S.: Thanks to my colleagues Ola, Paul, Don and Andy for helping me put together this article! var flattr_uid = '26528'; var flattr_tle = 'How to Avoid Your Next 12-Month Science Project'; var flattr_dsc = 'While most customers immediately understand how the magic of Oracle's Hybrid Columnar Compression, intelligent storage servers and flash memory make Exadata uniquely powerful against home-grown database systems, some people think that Exalogic is nothing more than a bunch of x86 servers, a storage appliance and an InfiniBand (IB) network, built into a single rack.After all, isn't this exactly what the High Performance Computing (HPC) world has been doing for decades?On the surface, this may be true. And some people tried exactly that: They tried to put together their own version of Exalogic, but then they discover there's a lot more to building a system than buying hardware and assembling it together. IT is not Ikea.Why is that so? Could it be there's more going on behind the scenes than merely putting together a bunch of servers, a storage array and an InfiniBand network into a rack? Let's explore some of the special sauce that makes Exalogic unique and un-copyable, so you can save yourself from your next 6- to 12-month science project that distracts you from doing real work that adds value to your company.'; var flattr_tag = 'Engineered Systems,Engineered Systems,Infiniband,Integration,latency,Oracle,performance'; var flattr_cat = 'text'; var flattr_url = 'http://constantin.glez.de/blog/2012/04/how-avoid-your-next-12-month-science-project'; var flattr_lng = 'en_GB'

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  • 8 Reasons Why Even Microsoft Agrees the Windows Desktop is a Nightmare

    - by Chris Hoffman
    Let’s be honest: The Windows desktop is a mess. Sure, it’s extremely powerful and has a huge software library, but it’s not a good experience for average people. It’s not even a good experience for geeks, although we tolerate it. Even Microsoft agrees about this. Microsoft’s Surface tablets with Windows RT don’t support any third-party desktop apps. They consider this a feature — users can’t install malware and other desktop junk, so the system will always be speedy and secure. Malware is Still Common Malware may not affect geeks, but it certainly continues to affect average people. Securing Windows, keeping it secure, and avoiding unsafe programs is a complex process. There are over 50 different file extensions that can contain harmful code to keep track of. It’s easy to have theoretical discussions about how malware could infect Mac computers, Android devices, and other systems. But Mac malware is extremely rare, and has  generally been caused by problem with the terrible Java plug-in. Macs are configured to only run executables from identified developers by default, whereas Windows will run everything. Android malware is talked about a lot, but Android malware is rare in the real world and is generally confined to users who disable security protections and install pirated apps. Google has also taken action, rolling out built-in antivirus-like app checking to all Android devices, even old ones running Android 2.3, via Play Services. Whatever the reason, Windows malware is still common while malware for other systems isn’t. We all know it — anyone who does tech support for average users has dealt with infected Windows computers. Even users who can avoid malware are stuck dealing with complex and nagging antivirus programs, especially since it’s now so difficult to trust Microsoft’s antivirus products. Manufacturer-Installed Bloatware is Terrible Sit down with a new Mac, Chromebook, iPad, Android tablet, Linux laptop, or even a Surface running Windows RT and you can enjoy using your new device. The system is a clean slate for you to start exploring and installing your new software. Sit down with a new Windows PC and the system is a mess. Rather than be delighted, you’re stuck reinstalling Windows and then installing the necessary drivers or you’re forced to start uninstalling useless bloatware programs one-by-one, trying to figure out which ones are actually useful. After uninstalling the useless programs, you may end up with a system tray full of icons for ten different hardware utilities anyway. The first experience of using a new Windows PC is frustration, not delight. Yes, bloatware is still a problem on Windows 8 PCs. Manufacturers can customize the Refresh image, preventing bloatware rom easily being removed. Finding a Desktop Program is Dangerous Want to install a Windows desktop program? Well, you’ll have to head to your web browser and start searching. It’s up to you, the user, to know which programs are safe and which are dangerous. Even if you find a website for a reputable program, the advertisements on that page will often try to trick you into downloading fake installers full of adware. While it’s great to have the ability to leave the app store and get software that the platform’s owner hasn’t approved — as on Android — this is no excuse for not providing a good, secure software installation experience for typical users installing typical programs. Even Reputable Desktop Programs Try to Install Junk Even if you do find an entirely reputable program, you’ll have to keep your eyes open while installing it. It will likely try to install adware, add browse toolbars, change your default search engine, or change your web browser’s home page. Even Microsoft’s own programs do this — when you install Skype for Windows desktop, it will attempt to modify your browser settings t ouse Bing, even if you’re specially chosen another search engine and home page. With Microsoft setting such an example, it’s no surprise so many other software developers have followed suit. Geeks know how to avoid this stuff, but there’s a reason program installers continue to do this. It works and tricks many users, who end up with junk installed and settings changed. The Update Process is Confusing On iOS, Android, and Windows RT, software updates come from a single place — the app store. On Linux, software updates come from the package manager. On Mac OS X, typical users’ software updates likely come from the Mac App Store. On the Windows desktop, software updates come from… well, every program has to create its own update mechanism. Users have to keep track of all these updaters and make sure their software is up-to-date. Most programs now have their act together and automatically update by default, but users who have old versions of Flash and Adobe Reader installed are vulnerable until they realize their software isn’t automatically updating. Even if every program updates properly, the sheer mess of updaters is clunky, slow, and confusing in comparison to a centralized update process. Browser Plugins Open Security Holes It’s no surprise that other modern platforms like iOS, Android, Chrome OS, Windows RT, and Windows Phone don’t allow traditional browser plugins, or only allow Flash and build it into the system. Browser plugins provide a wealth of different ways for malicious web pages to exploit the browser and open the system to attack. Browser plugins are one of the most popular attack vectors because of how many users have out-of-date plugins and how many plugins, especially Java, seem to be designed without taking security seriously. Oracle’s Java plugin even tries to install the terrible Ask toolbar when installing security updates. That’s right — the security update process is also used to cram additional adware into users’ machines so unscrupulous companies like Oracle can make a quick buck. It’s no wonder that most Windows PCs have an out-of-date, vulnerable version of Java installed. Battery Life is Terrible Windows PCs have bad battery life compared to Macs, IOS devices, and Android tablets, all of which Windows now competes with. Even Microsoft’s own Surface Pro 2 has bad battery life. Apple’s 11-inch MacBook Air, which has very similar hardware to the Surface Pro 2, offers double its battery life when web browsing. Microsoft has been fond of blaming third-party hardware manufacturers for their poorly optimized drivers in the past, but there’s no longer any room to hide. The problem is clearly Windows. Why is this? No one really knows for sure. Perhaps Microsoft has kept on piling Windows component on top of Windows component and many older Windows components were never properly optimized. Windows Users Become Stuck on Old Windows Versions Apple’s new OS X 10.9 Mavericks upgrade is completely free to all Mac users and supports Macs going back to 2007. Apple has also announced their intention that all new releases of Mac OS X will be free. In 2007, Microsoft had just shipped Windows Vista. Macs from the Windows Vista era are being upgraded to the latest version of the Mac operating system for free, while Windows PCs from the same era are probably still using Windows Vista. There’s no easy upgrade path for these people. They’re stuck using Windows Vista and maybe even the outdated Internet Explorer 9 if they haven’t installed a third-party web browser. Microsoft’s upgrade path is for these people to pay $120 for a full copy of Windows 8.1 and go through a complicated process that’s actaully a clean install. Even users of Windows 8 devices will probably have to pay money to upgrade to Windows 9, while updates for other operating systems are completely free. If you’re a PC geek, a PC gamer, or someone who just requires specialized software that only runs on Windows, you probably use the Windows desktop and don’t want to switch. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean the Windows desktop is actually a good experience. Much of the burden falls on average users, who have to struggle with malware, bloatware, adware bundled in installers, complex software installation processes, and out-of-date software. In return, all they get is the ability to use a web browser and some basic Office apps that they could use on almost any other platform without all the hassle. Microsoft would agree with this, touting Windows RT and their new “Windows 8-style” app platform as the solution. Why else would Microsoft, a “devices and services” company, position the Surface — a device without traditional Windows desktop programs — as their mass-market device recommended for average people? This isn’t necessarily an endorsement of Windows RT. If you’re tech support for your family members and it comes time for them to upgrade, you may want to get them off the Windows desktop and tell them to get a Mac or something else that’s simple. Better yet, if they get a Mac, you can tell them to visit the Apple Store for help instead of calling you. That’s another thing Windows PCs don’t offer — good manufacturer support. Image Credit: Blanca Stella Mejia on Flickr, Collin Andserson on Flickr, Luca Conti on Flickr     

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 03, 2010

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 03, 2010New ProjectsAlbatross: Albatross framework. We are still working on the documentation, more details will be available soon.ApiChange: ApiChange is the Swiss army knife for inspecting your assemblies from the command line. Now you can do basic operations like diff, who uses (method...BaseCalendar: BaseCalendar is a server-side ASP.NET web control (WebForms or MVC) that renders a calendar while giving you full control over the generated HTML. ...CESAVE: Proyectos para el Comité Estatal de Sanidad Vegetal.Closure Compiler w/ Annotations Visual Studio 2010 Snippets: This is an attempt to create reusable Visual Studio snippets to make working with closure compiler annotated JavaScript more productive. VS2010 ...Common Service Host: Common Service Host is a generic Windows Communication Service Host and factory that uses the Common Service Locator to create Service objects. ...DarkLight: DarkLight is a 2D Lighting Engine written in XNA, and allows developers to create 2D shadowing effects in their 2D games easily. It supports poi...Earn Burn Tracker: A tool to track earned value against a given release, initiative, feature set, and objects.eOfficeAACS: eOffice is an open source access control and attendance management system developed by e-bird Innovation (www.ebirdinfo.com).Its flexible design al...FLV Video conversion library for .Net 3.5: This is a component created to call the ffmpeg tool to convert various video formats to the Adobe Flash FLV output format. The component also takes...Google Moderator: .NET client library for the Google Moderator API.linq to jquery: provides support for linq to jquery objectsMobile Vikings Data: App to view your data usage RefBrowser: RefBrowserRESX Translator with Bing (from Microsoft Consulting Services, UK): A Windows Form application that automatically translates RESX files using Bing web servicesRhyduino - Remote Arduino Control via Managed Code: Rhyduino makes it easy for Visual Studio / Windows devs to control the Arduino using a computer. It's like supercharging your Arduino with all the ...SharePoint 2010 CSV Bulk Term Set Importer: Allows for multiple import of *.csv files to a given term group in SharePoint 2010 Term Store. It will create new term group based on the name pr...SharePoint Feature - Export history version to Excel: Add a function to list the action button, the ability to export history version of the item sheet to Excel from the specified date. Features suppo...SwEntry: A system that allows people to open doors by using a Bluetooth enabled phone. Things to Do with the DLR: This project is about ideas and sample code around the Dynamic Language Runtime.Work Recorder - Hold on own time!: Work Recorder is a office aid software which can recorde the time used on PC for researchers, office workers and students. And it is also a good he...xuezhixu: xuezhixu foundYaget: Yet Another Game Engine TechnologyNew ReleasesBackUpAnyWhere: backupanywhere RC1: this is the RC of our programBaseCalendar: BaseControls 1.0: BaseControls 1.0 contains the BaseCalendar ASP.NET control.BizTalk Server Pipeline Component Wizard: 2.20: Version suitable for 2010 release.CheckHeader: CheckHeader v0.8.6: The Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0 is needed to run this program.Chirpy - VS Add In For Handling Js, Css, and DotLess Files: Chirpy Installer for VS 2010 (Ver-1.0.0.2): VS 2010 Installer for the Chirpy AddIn. Version 1.0.0.2Christoc's DotNetNuke C# Module Development Template: 00.00.01: This is the initial release of Christoc's DotNetNuke C# Module Development Template. You can use the Template as-is, or you can customize the VSTem...Closure Compiler w/ Annotations Visual Studio 2010 Snippets: v1 release: The initial release of the projectCommunity Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V22: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V23: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...Community Forums NNTP bridge: Community Forums NNTP Bridge V24: Release of the Community Forums NNTP Bridge to access the social and anwsers MS forums with a single, open source NNTP bridge. This release has ad...DarkLight: DarkLight Engine v1.0: This is the first version of the DarkLight engine and currently supports point, spot and area lights with no upper limit on the number of lights. ...DotNetNuke® Skin Collaborate: Collaborate Package 1.1.0: Newer version of Collaborate included fixes: - removed conditional code to display control panel - changed background color to match with backgroun...dotSpatial: System.Spatial.Projection Zip June 2, 2010: This version tries to fix a problem with reprojecting to UTM zones. It is still being tested though.Entity Framework Repository & Unit of Work Template: 1.0.1: This version has more than just the T4 template. I have added a new template that has a RepositoryHelper class for use with StructureMap. Also th...FLV Video conversion library for .Net 3.5: Beta 1: This is the first release of this project. Improvements may be added if necessary.HERB.IQ: Alpha 0.1 Preview: Only clone tab works, just setting up the GUI and getting the XML data handling working correctlyJetfire - Workflow DSL: V1.2.0: The complete source code required for a Jetfire system (server and client nexus) is included in the release. Highlights of Changes Full programmat...linq to jquery: linq to jquery alpha: beta development projectMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 June 2, 2010: This version fixes a problem with projecting to UTM zones. I'm not sure that this works perfectly yet. It seemed to require a zone adjustment by ...patterns & practices Web Client Developer Guidance: Developing Web Apps May 2010 Beta: This RelesaeThis drop includes updated documentation, links, and graphics. We are still looking for feedback on this release. Plans going forward...patterns & practices: Composite WPF and Silverlight: Prism 4.0 Drop 1: Prism 4.0 Drop 1 Welcome to the first drop of Prism 4.0 (formally known as the Composite Application Guidance for WPF and Silverlight). This drop i...Powershell4SQL: Version 1.3: Changes from version 1.2 Added support for -Confirm and -WhatIf parameters Added support for -Verbose mode. Includes SQL Batch text, parameters ...RESX Translator with Bing (from Microsoft Consulting Services, UK): v1.0: This is the initial release of the toolRhyduino - Remote Arduino Control via Managed Code: Beta Release (v0.80): LibraryAuto-detects connected Arduino devices. Uses system resources intelligently to take advantage of multiple CPU cores when present. Firmata ...SharePoint Feature - Export history version to Excel: Export Item List Version: - multilanguage support Czech, English Install: "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\BIN\stsadm.exe" -o addsol...Simulo: Simulo v2.5: That's the third release of Simulo (v2.5). For detailed info on what's new, read the changes log block at the project's home page. System requirem...Site Directory for SharePoint 2010 (from Microsoft Consulting Services, UK): v1.5: Please carefully follow the Installation Guideas there are additional actions that need to be undertaken in this release. As 1.4 with the followin...Spackle.NET: 4.1.0.0 Release: Added IEquatable<T> to Range<T>StreamInsight Samples: Microsoft StreamInsight Product Team Samples: This is the current snapshot of the samples created by the Streaminsight Product Team.Touch Mice: 0.1: Initial release of Touch MiceVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30602.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.2.0: Version 7.2.0 of VivoSocial has been released. If you experienced any issues with the previous version, please update your modules to the 7.2.0 rel...Work Recorder - Hold on own time!: WorkRecorder 1.0: +Finished Version 1.0Most Popular ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeOutSyncASP.NET MVC Time PlannerNeatUploadMoonyDesk (windows desktop widgets)Mute4eXpress Persistent Objects (XPO) ToolkitAgUnit - Silverlight unit testing with ReSharperASP.NET MVC ExtensionsAviva Solutions C# Coding GuidelinesMost Active ProjectsCommunity Forums NNTP bridgeGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationRawrIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterN2 CMSpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETGameSetFarseer Physics EngineMirror Testing System

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  • Making a Case For The Command Line

    - by Jesse Taber
    Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/GruffCode/archive/2013/06/30/making-a-case-for-the-command-line.aspxI have had an idea percolating in the back of my mind for over a year now that I’ve just recently started to implement. This idea relates to building out “internal tools” to ease the maintenance and on-going support of a software system. The system that I currently work on is (mostly) web-based, so we traditionally we have built these internal tools in the form of pages within the app that are only accessible by our developers and support personnel. These pages allow us to perform tasks within the system that, for one reason or another, we don’t want to let our end users perform (e.g. mass create/update/delete operations on data, flipping switches that turn paid modules of the system on or off, etc). When we try to build new tools like this we often struggle with the level of effort required to build them. Effort Required Creating a whole new page in an existing web application can be a fairly large undertaking. You need to create the page and ensure it will have a layout that is consistent with the other pages in the app. You need to decide what types of input controls need to go onto the page. You need to ensure that everything uses the same style as the rest of the site. You need to figure out what the text on the page should say. Then, when you figure out that you forgot about an input that should really be present you might have to go back and re-work the entire thing. Oh, and in addition to all of that, you still have to, you know, write the code that actually performs the task. Everything other than the code that performs the task at hand is just overhead. We don’t need a fancy date picker control in a nicely styled page for the vast majority of our internal tools. We don’t even really need a page, for that matter. We just need a way to issue a command to the application and have it, in turn, execute the code that we’ve written to accomplish a given task. All we really need is a simple console application! Plumbing Problems A former co-worker of mine, John Sonmez, always advocated the Unix philosophy for building internal tools: start with something that runs at the command line, and then build a UI on top of that if you need to. John’s idea has a lot of merit, and we tried building out some internal tools as simple Console applications. Unfortunately, this was often easier said that done. Doing a “File –> New Project” to build out a tool for a mature system can be pretty daunting because that new project is totally empty.  In our case, the web application code had a lot of of “plumbing” built in: it managed authentication and authorization, it handled database connection management for our multi-tenanted architecture, it managed all of the context that needs to follow a user around the application such as their timezone and regional/language settings. In addition, the configuration file for the web application  (a web.config in our case because this is an ASP .NET application) is large and would need to be reproduced into a similar configuration file for a Console application. While most of these problems are could be solved pretty easily with some refactoring of the codebase, building Console applications for internal tools still potentially suffers from one pretty big drawback: you’d have to execute them on a machine with network access to all of the needed resources. Obviously, our web servers can easily communicate the the database servers and can publish messages to our service bus, but the same is not true for all of our developer and support personnel workstations. We could have everyone run these tools remotely via RDP or SSH, but that’s a bit cumbersome and certainly a lot less convenient than having the tools built into the web application that is so easily accessible. Mix and Match So we need a way to build tools that are easily accessible via the web application but also don’t require the overhead of creating a user interface. This is where my idea comes into play: why not just build a command line interface into the web application? If it’s part of the web application we get all of the plumbing that comes along with that code, and we’re executing everything on the web servers which means we’ll have access to any external resources that we might need. Rather than having to incur the overhead of creating a brand new page for each tool that we want to build, we can create one new page that simply accepts a command in text form and executes it as a request on the web server. In this way, we can focus on writing the code to accomplish the task. If the tool ends up being heavily used, then (and only then) should we consider spending the time to build a better user experience around it. To be clear, I’m not trying to downplay the importance of building great user experiences into your system; we should all strive to provide the best UX possible to our end users. I’m only advocating this sort of bare-bones interface for internal consumption by the technical staff that builds and supports the software. This command line interface should be the “back end” to a highly polished and eye-pleasing public face. Implementation As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, this is an idea that I’ve had for awhile but have only recently started building out. I’ve outlined some general guidelines and design goals for this effort as follows: Text in, text out: In the interest of keeping things as simple as possible, I want this interface to be purely text-based. Users will submit commands as plain text, and the application will provide responses in plain text. Obviously this text will be “wrapped” within the context of HTTP requests and responses, but I don’t want to have to think about HTML or CSS when taking input from the user or displaying responses back to the user. Task-oriented code only: After building the initial “harness” for this interface, the only code that should need to be written to create a new internal tool should be code that is expressly needed to accomplish the task that the tool is intended to support. If we want to encourage and enable ourselves to build good tooling, we need to lower the barriers to entry as much as possible. Built-in documentation: One of the great things about most command line utilities is the ‘help’ switch that provides usage guidelines and details about the arguments that the utility accepts. Our web-based command line utility should allow us to build the documentation for these tools directly into the code of the tools themselves. I finally started trying to implement this idea when I heard about a fantastic open-source library called CLAP (Command Line Auto Parser) that lets me meet the guidelines outlined above. CLAP lets you define classes with public methods that can be easily invoked from the command line. Here’s a quick example of the code that would be needed to create a new tool to do something within your system: 1: public class CustomerTools 2: { 3: [Verb] 4: public void UpdateName(int customerId, string firstName, string lastName) 5: { 6: //invoke internal services/domain objects/hwatever to perform update 7: } 8: } This is just a regular class with a single public method (though you could have as many methods as you want). The method is decorated with the ‘Verb’ attribute that tells the CLAP library that it is a method that can be invoked from the command line. Here is how you would invoke that code: Parser.Run(args, new CustomerTools()); Note that ‘args’ is just a string[] that would normally be passed passed in from the static Main method of a Console application. Also, CLAP allows you to pass in multiple classes that define [Verb] methods so you can opt to organize the code that CLAP will invoke in any way that you like. You can invoke this code from a command line application like this: SomeExe UpdateName -customerId:123 -firstName:Jesse -lastName:Taber ‘SomeExe’ in this example just represents the name of .exe that is would be created from our Console application. CLAP then interprets the arguments passed in order to find the method that should be invoked and automatically parses out the parameters that need to be passed in. After a quick spike, I’ve found that invoking the ‘Parser’ class can be done from within the context of a web application just as easily as it can from within the ‘Main’ method entry point of a Console application. There are, however, a few sticking points that I’m working around: Splitting arguments into the ‘args’ array like the command line: When you invoke a standard .NET console application you get the arguments that were passed in by the user split into a handy array (this is the ‘args’ parameter referenced above). Generally speaking they get split by whitespace, but it’s also clever enough to handle things like ignoring whitespace in a phrase that is surrounded by quotes. We’ll need to re-create this logic within our web application so that we can give the ‘args’ value to CLAP just like a console application would. Providing a response to the user: If you were writing a console application, you might just use Console.WriteLine to provide responses to the user as to the progress and eventual outcome of the command. We can’t use Console.WriteLine within a web application, so I’ll need to find another way to provide feedback to the user. Preferably this approach would allow me to use the same handler classes from both a Console application and a web application, so some kind of strategy pattern will likely emerge from this effort. Submitting files: Often an internal tool needs to support doing some kind of operation in bulk, and the easiest way to submit the data needed to support the bulk operation is in a file. Getting the file uploaded and available to the CLAP handler classes will take a little bit of effort. Mimicking the console experience: This isn’t really a requirement so much as a “nice to have”. To start out, the command-line interface in the web application will probably be a single ‘textarea’ control with a button to submit the contents to a handler that will pass it along to CLAP to be parsed and run. I think it would be interesting to use some javascript and CSS trickery to change that page into something with more of a “shell” interface look and feel. I’ll be blogging more about this effort in the future and will include some code snippets (or maybe even a full blown example app) as I progress. I also think that I’ll probably end up either submitting some pull requests to the CLAP project or possibly forking/wrapping it into a more web-friendly package and open sourcing that.

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  • How I Work: A Cloud Developer's Workstation

    - by BuckWoody
    I've written here a little about how I work during the day, including things like using a stand-up desk (still doing that, by the way). Inspired by a Twitter conversation yesterday, I thought I might explain how I set up my computing environment. First, a couple of important points. I work in Cloud Computing, specifically (but not limited to) Windows Azure. Windows Azure has features to run a Virtual Machine (IaaS), run code without having to control a Virtual Machine (PaaS) and use databases, video streaming, Hadoop and more (a kind of SaaS for tech pros). As such, my designs run the gamut of on-premises, VM's in the Cloud, and software that I write for a platform. I focus on data primarily, meaning that I design a lot of systems that use an RDBMS (like SQL Server or Windows Azure Databases) or a NoSQL approach (MongoDB on Azure or large-scale Key-Value Pairs in Table storage) and even Hadoop and R, and also Cloud Numerics in F#. All that being said, those things inform my choices below. Hardware I have a Lenovo X220 tablet/laptop which I really like a great deal - it's a light, tough, extremely fast system. When I travel, that's the system I take. It has 8GB of RAM, and an SSD drive. I sometimes use that to develop or work at a client's site, on the road, or in the living room when I'm not in my home office. My main system is a GateWay DX430017 - I've maxed it out on RAM, and I have two 1TB drives in it. It's not only my workstation for work; I leave it on all the time and it streams our videos, music and books. I have about 3400 e-books, and I've just started using Calibre to stream the library. I run Windows 8 on it so I can set up Hyper-V images, since Windows Azure allows me to move regular Hyper-V disks back and forth to the Cloud. That's where all my "servers" are, when I have to use an IaaS approach. The reason I use a desktop-style system rather than a laptop only approach is that a good part of my job is setting up architectures to solve really big, complex problems. That means I have to simulate entire networks on-premises, along with the Hybrid Cloud approach I use a lot. I need a lot of disk space and memory for that, and I use two huge monitors on my stand-up desk. I could probably use 10 monitors if I had the room for them. Also, since it's our home system as well, I leave it on all the time and it doesn't travel.   Software For the software for my systems, it's important to keep in mind that I not only write code, but I design databases, teach, present, and create Linux and other environments. Windows 8 - While the jury is out for me on the new interface, the context-sensitive search, integrated everything, and speed is just hands-down the right choice. I've evaluated a server OS, Linux, even an Apple, but I just am not as efficient on those as I am with Windows 8. Visual Studio Ultimate - I develop primarily in .NET (C# and F# mostly) and I use the Team Foundation Server in the cloud, and I'm asked to do everything from UI to Services, so I need everything. Windows Azure SDK, Windows Azure Training Kit - I need the first to set up my Azure PaaS coding, and the second has all the info I need for PaaS, IaaS and SaaS. This is primarily how I get paid. :) SQL Server Developer Edition - While I might install Oracle, MySQL and Postgres on my VM's, the "outside" environment is SQL Server for an RDBMS. I install the Developer Edition because it has the same features as Enterprise Edition, and comes with all the client tools and documentation. Microsoft Office -  Even if I didn't work here, this is what I would use. I've just grown too accustomed to doing business this way to change, so my advice is always "use what works", and this does. The parts I use are: OneNote (and a Math Add-in) - I do almost everything - and I mean everything in OneNote. I can code, do high-end math, present, design, collaborate and more. All my notebooks are on my Skydrive. I can use them from any system, anywhere. If you take the time to learn this program, you'll be hooked. Excel with PowerPivot - Don't make that face. Excel is the world's database, and every Data Scientist I know - even the ones where I teach at the University of Washington - know it, use it, and love it.  Outlook - Primary communications, CRM and contact tool. I have all of my social media hooked up to it, so when I get an e-mail from you, I see everything, see all the history we've had on e-mail, find you on a map and more. Lync - I was fine with LiveMeeting, although it has it's moments. For me, the Lync client is tres-awesome. I use this throughout my day, present on it, stay in contact with colleagues and the folks on the dev team (who wish I didn't have it) and more.  PowerPoint - Once again, don't make that face. Whenever I see someone complaining about PowerPoint, I have 100% of the time found they don't know how to use it. If you suck at presenting or creating content, don't blame PowerPoint. Works great on my machine. :) Zoomit - Magnifier - On Windows 7 (and 8 as well) there's a built-in magnifier, but I install Zoomit out of habit. It enlarges the screen. If you don't use one of these tools (or their equivalent on some other OS) then you're presenting/teaching wrong, and you should stop presenting/teaching until you get them and learn how to show people what you can see on your tiny, tiny monitor. :) Cygwin - Unix for Windows. OK, that's not true, but it's mostly that. I grew up on mainframes and Unix (IBM and HP, thank you) and I can't imagine life without  sed, awk, grep, vim, and bash. I also tend to take a lot of the "Science" and "Development" and "Database" packages in it as well. PuTTY - Speaking of Unix, when I need to connect to my Linux VM's in Windows Azure, I want to do it securely. This is the tool for that. Notepad++ - Somewhere between torturing myself in vim and luxuriating in OneNote is Notepad++. Everyone has a favorite text editor; this one is mine. Too many features to name, and it's free. Browsers - I install Chrome, Firefox and of course IE. I know it's in vogue to rant on IE, but I tend to think for myself a great deal, and I've had few (none) problems with it. The others I have for the haterz that make sites that won't run in IE. Visio - I've used a lot of design packages, but none have the extreme meta-data edit capabilities of Visio. I don't use this all the time - it can be rather heavy, but what it does it does really well. I also present this way when I'm not using PowerPoint. Yup, I just bring up Visio and diagram away as I'm chatting with clients. Depending on what we're covering, this can be the right tool for that. Tweetdeck - The AIR one, not that new disaster they came out with. I live on social media, since you, dear readers, are my cube-mates. When I get tired of you all, I close Tweetdeck. When I need help or someone needs help from me, or if I want to see a picture of a cat while I'm coding, I bring it up. It's up most all day and night. Windows Media Player - I listen to Trance or Classical when I code, and I find music managers overbearing and extra. I just use what comes in the box, and it works great for me. R - F# and Cloud Numerics now allows me to load in R libraries (yay!) and I use this for statistical work on big data loads. Microsoft Math - One of the most amazing, free, rich, amazing, awesome, amazing calculators out there. I get the 64-bit version for quick math conversions, plots and formula-checks. Python - I know, right? Who knew that the scientific community loved Python so much. But they do. I use 2.7; not as much runs with 3+. I also use IronPython in Visual Studio, or I edit in Notepad++ Camstudio recorder - Windows PSR - In much of my training, and all of my teaching at the UW, I need to show a process on a screen. Camstudio records screen and voice, and it's free. If I need to make static training, I use the Windows PSR tool that's built right in. It's ostensibly for problem duplication, but I use it to record for training.   OK - your turn. Post a link to your blog entry below, and tell me how you set your system up.  

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, December 15, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, December 15, 2012Popular ReleasesAmarok Framework Library: 1.12: refactored agent-specific implementation introduced new interface representing important concepts like IDispatcher, IPublisher Refer to the Release Notes for details.sb0t v.5: sb0t 5.02b beta 2: Bug fix for Windows XP users (tab resize) Bug fix where ib0t stopped working A lot of command tweaksCRM 2011 Visual Ribbon Editor: Visual Ribbon Editor (1.3.1116.8): [FIX] Fixed issue not displaying CRM system button images correctly (incorrect path in file VisualRibbonEditor.exe.config)MySqlBackup.NET - MySQL Backup Solution for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET: MySqlBackup.NET 1.5.6 beta: Fix Bug: If encryption is applied in Export Process, the generated encrypted SQL file is not able to import Stored Procedures, Functions, Triggers, Events and View. Fix Bug: In some unknown cases, the SHOW CREATE TABLE `tablename` query will return byte array. Improve 1: During Export, StreamWriter is opened and closed several times when writting to the dump file, which this is considered as not a good practice. Improve 2: SQL line in class Database method GetEvents: "SHOW EVENTS WHERE ...My Expenses Windows Store LOB App Demo: My Expenses Version 1: This is version 1 of the MyExpenses Windows 8 line of business demo app. The app is written in XAML and C#. It calls a WCF service that works with a SQL Server database. The app uses the Callisto toolkit. You can get it at https://github.com/timheuer/callisto. The Expenses.sql file contains the SQL to create the Expenses database. The ExpensesWCFService.zip file contains the WCF service, also written in C#. You should create a WCF service. Create an Entity Framework model and point it to...EasyTwitter: EasyTwitter basic operations: See the commit log to see the features!, check history files to see examples of how to use this libraryCommand Line Parser Library: 1.9.3.31 rc0: Main assembly CommandLine.dll signed. Removed old commented code. Added missing XML documentation comments. Two (very) minor code refactoring changes.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.4: 2012.12.13 Ver5.7.4 (1)Web???????、???????????????????????????????????????????VFPX: ssClasses A1.0: My initial release. See https://vfpx.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=ssClasses&referringTitle=Home for a brief description of what is inside this releaseHome Access Plus+: v8.6: v8.6.1213.1220 Added: Group look up to the visible property of the Booking System Fixed: Switched to using the outlook/exchange thumbnailPhoto instead of jpegPhoto Added: Add a blank paragraph below the tiles. This means that the browser displays a vertical scroller when resizing the window. Previously it was possible for the bottom edge of a tile not to be visible if the browser window was resized. Added: Booking System: Only Display Day+Month on the booking Home Page. This allows for the cs...Layered Architecture Solution Guidance (LASG): LASG 1.0.0.8 for Visual Studio 2012: PRE-REQUISITES Open GAX (Please install Oct 4, 2012 version) Microsoft® System CLR Types for Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Shared Management Objects Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 (for the generated code) Windows Azure SDK (for layered cloud applications) Silverlight 5 SDK (for Silverlight applications) THE RELEASE This release only works on Visual Studio 2012. Known Issue If you choose the Database project, the solution unfolding time will be slow....Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 2.0: Prva prava produkcijska verzija - Zakon je tu, ova je verzija uskladena sa trenutno važecom Tehnickom specifikacijom (v1.2. od 04.12.2012.) i spremna je za produkcijsko korištenje. Verzije iza ove ce ovisiti o naknadnim izmjenama Zakona i/ili Tehnicke specifikacije, odnosno, o eventualnim greškama u radu/zahtjevima community-a za novim feature-ima. Novosti u v2.0 su: - That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/699) - scheme IznosType...Simple Injector: Simple Injector v1.6.1: This patch release fixes a bug in the integration libraries that disallowed the application to start when .NET 4.5 was not installed on the machine (but only .NET 4.0). The following packages are affected: SimpleInjector.Integration.Web.dll SimpleInjector.Integration.Web.Mvc.dll SimpleInjector.Integration.Wcf.dll SimpleInjector.Extensions.LifetimeScoping.dllBootstrap Helpers: Version 1: First releasesheetengine - Isometric HTML5 JavaScript Display Engine: sheetengine v1.2.0: Main featuresOptimizations for intersectionsThe main purpose of this release was to further optimize rendering performance by skipping object intersections with other sheets. From now by default an object's sheets will only intersect its own sheets and never other static or dynamic sheets. This is the usual scenario since objects will never bump into other sheets when using collision detection. DocumentationMany of you have been asking for proper documentation, so here it goes. Check out the...DirectX Tool Kit: December 11, 2012: December 11, 2012 Ex versions of DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader Removed use of ATL's CComPtr in favor of WRL's ComPtr for all platforms to support VS Express editions Updated VS 2010 project for official 'property sheet' integration for Windows 8.0 SDK Minor fix to CommonStates for Feature Level 9.1 Tweaked AlphaTestEffect.cpp to work around ARM NEON compiler codegen bug Added dxguid.lib as a default library for Debug builds to resolve GUID link issuesArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.1 Final for 10.1: We are proud to announce the release of ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap version 2.1. This download is compatible with ArcGIS 10.1, and includes setups for the Desktop Component, Desktop Component when 64 bit Background Geoprocessing is installed, and the Server Component. Important: if you already have ArcGIS Editor for OSM installed but want to install this new version, you will need to uninstall your previous version and then install this one. This release includes support for the ArcGIS 1...SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.8.2: This release just contains some fixes that have been done since the last release. Plus, this is strong named as well. I apologize for the lack of updates but my free time is less these days.Media Companion: MediaCompanion3.511b release: Two more bug fixes: - General Preferences were not getting restored - Fanart and poster image files were being locked, preventing changes to themVodigi Open Source Interactive Digital Signage: Vodigi Release 5.5: The following enhancements and fixes are included in Vodigi 5.5. Vodigi Administrator - Manage Music Files - Add Music Files to Image Slide Shows - Manage System Messages - Display System Messages to Users During Login - Ported to Visual Studio 2012 and MVC 4 - Added New Vodigi Administrator User Guide Vodigi Player - Improved Login/Schedule Startup Procedure - Startup Using Last Known Schedule when Disconnected on Startup - Improved Check for Schedule Changes - Now Every 15 Minutes - Pla...New Projects1Q86: testAdd Ratings to SharePoint Blog Site: This web part is an ‘administrative’ level tool used to update a Blog site to a) enable ratings on the post and b) add the User Ratings web part to the site. BadmintonBuddy: Source codeBetter Place Admin: Admin client for the BetterPlaceBooking ProjectBorkoSi: BorkoSi WebPage Source code.ChimpHD - 2D Evolved: High quality OpenCL accelerated 2D engine, capable of full complex yet easy to code 2D games. This is SpaceChimp2.0, wrote from the ground up, not just patchedCoderJoe: Repository for code samples used in my blog.CodeTemplate: ??????Data Persistent Object: ORM tool to access SQL Server, log record changes, Json and Linq supportedDevian: a simple web portal based on asp.net 2.0HD: hdHospital Tracking: hospital patient tracking ????? ???? ??????? ???? ?????Instant Get: An auction based c# applicationipangolin: DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and COmmunication in Medicine. The DICOM standard addresses the basic connectivity between different imaging devices.ISEFun: PowerShell module(s) to simplify work in it. It contains PowerShell scripts, compiled libs and some formating files. Several modules will come in one batch as optional features.Kerjasama: Aplikasi Database Kerjasama Bagian Kerjasama Kota SemarangMCEBuddy Viewer: Windows Media Center Plugin for MCEBuddy 2.x MusicForMyBlog: Link your recently played music in Itunes to your blog.My Expenses Windows Store LOB App Demo: This is a sample Windows 8 LOB app. Employees can use this app to create and submit expense reports. And managers can approve or reject those reports.Node Paint: An app based on the nodegarden application created by alphalabs.ccNPhysics: NPhysics - Physical Data Types for .NETomr.domready.js: Dom is ready? This project provides easy to detect ready event of dom.RegSecEdit: set registry security from command line, or batch file.Sitecore - Logger Module: This module provides an abstraction of the built-in Sitecore Logging features.SMART LMS: Welcome to SMART LMS, a learning management system with a difference, this software will allow teachers to create custom education activities such as quizzes.TaskManagerDD: DotNetNuke task manager tutorialThe Reactive Extensions for JavaScript: RxJS or Reactive Extensions for JavaScript is a library for transforming, composing, and querying streams of data.Timestamp: Tool for generating timestamps into clipboard for fast use.TweetGarden: Visualising connected users using their tweetsUpdateContentType: UpdateContentType atualiza os modelos de documentos utilizados por tipos de conteúdo do SharePoint a partir de documentos armazenados em uma biblioteca.User Rating Web Part for SharePoint 2010: User Rating Web Part - the fix for Ratings in SharePoint!webget: webgetwhatsnew.exe a command line utility to find new files: whatsnew.exe is a command line utility that lists the files created (new files) in a given number of days. whatsnew.exe 's syntax is very simple: whatsnew path numberofdays Also whatsnew supports other options like HTML or XML output, hyperlinked outputs and more.whoami: ip address resolverWPFReview: WPF code sample

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  • New release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available for download - March 2011

    - by Jialiang
    A new release of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework is available on March 8th. Download address: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62267#DownloadId=215627 You can download individual code samples or browse code samples grouped by technology in the updated code sample index. If it’s the first time that you hear about Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, please read this Microsoft News Center article http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/features/2011/jan11/01-13codeframework.mspx, or watch the introduction video on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cO5Li3APU58, or read the introduction on our homepage http://1code.codeplex.com/. -------------- New Silverlight code samples CSSLTreeViewCRUDDragDrop Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215808 The code sample was created by Amit Dey. It demonstrates a custom TreeView with added functionalities of CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) and drag-and-drop operations. Silverlight TreeView control with CRUD and drag & drop is a frequently asked programming question in Silverlight  forums. Many customers also requested this code sample in our code sample request service. We hope that this sample can reduce developers' efforts in handling this typical programming scenario. The following blog article introduces the sample in detail: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/codefx/archive/2011/02/15/silverlight-treeview-control-with-crud-and-drag-amp-drop.aspx. CSSL4FileDragDrop and VBSL4FileDragDrop Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215809 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215810 The code sample demonstrates the new drag&drop feature of Silverlight 4 to implement dragging picures from the local file system to a Silverlight application.   Sometimes we want to change SiteMapPath control's titles and paths according to Query String values. And sometimes we want to create the SiteMapPath dynamically. This code sample shows how to achieve these goals by handling SiteMap.SiteMapResolve event. CSASPNETEncryptAndDecryptConfiguration, VBASPNETEncryptAndDecryptConfiguration Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215027 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215106 In this sample, we encrypt and decrypt some sensitive information in the config file of a web application by using the RSA asymmetric encryption. This project contains two snippets. The first one demonstrates how to use RSACryptoServiceProvider to generate public key and the corresponding private key and then encrypt/decrypt string value on page. The second part shows how to use RSA configuration provider to encrypt and decrypt configuration section in web.config of web application. connectionStrings section in plain text: Encrypted connectionString:  Note that if you store sensitive data in any of the following configuration sections, we cannot encrypt it by using a protected configuration provider <processModel> <runtime> <mscorlib> <startup> <system.runtime.remoting> <configProtectedData> <satelliteassemblies> <cryptographySettings> <cryptoNameMapping> CSASPNETFileUploadStatus Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215028 I believe ASP.NET programmers will like this sample, because in many cases we need customers know the current status of the uploading files, including the upload speed and completion percentage and so on. Under normal circumstances, we need to use COM components to accomplish this function, such as Flash, Silverlight, etc. The uploading data can be retrieved in two places, the client-side and the server-side. For the client, for the safety factors, the file upload status information cannot be got from JavaScript or server-side code, so we need COM component, like Flash and Silverlight to accomplish this, I do not like this approach because the customer need to install these components, but also we need to learn another programming framework. For the server side, we can get the information through coding, but the key question is how to tell the client results. In this case, We will combine custom HTTPModule and AJAX technology to illustrate how to analyze the HTTP protocol, how to break the file request packets, how to customize the location of the server-side file caching, how to return the file uploading status back to the client and so on . CSASPNETHighlightCodeInPage, VBASPNETHighlightCodeInPage Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215029 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215108 This sample imitates a system that needs display the highlighted code in an ASP.NET page . As a matter of fact, sometimes we input code like C# or HTML in a web page and we need these codes to be highlighted for a better reading experience. It is convenient for us to keep the code in mind if it is highlighted. So in this case, the sample shows how to highlight the code in an ASP.NET page. It is not difficult to highlight the code in a web page by using String.Replace method directly. This  method can return a new string in which all occurrences of a specified string in the current instance are replaced with another specified string. However, it may not be a good idea, because it's not extremely fast, in fact, it's pretty slow. In addition, it is hard to highlight multiple keywords by using String.Replace method directly. Sometimes we need to copy source code from visual studio to a web page, for readability purpose, highlight the code is important while set the different types of keywords to different colors in a web page by using String.Replace method directly is not available. To handle this issue, we need to use a hashtable variable to store the different languages of code and their related regular expressions with matching options. Furthermore, define the css styles which used to highlight the code in a web page. The sample project can auto add the style object to the matching string of code. A step-by-step guide illustrating how to highlight the code in an ASP.NET page: 1. the HighlightCodePage.aspx page Choose a type of language in the dropdownlist control and paste the code in the textbox control, then click the HighLight button. 2.  Display the highlighted code in an ASP.NET page After user clicks the HighLight button, the highlighted code will be displayed at right side of the page.        CSASPNETPreventMultipleWindows Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215032 This sample demonstrates a step-by-step guide illustrating how to detect and prevent multiple windows or tab usage in Web Applications. The sample imitates a system that need to prevent multiple windows or tabs to solve some problems like sharing sessions, protect duplicated login, data concurrency, etc. In fact, there are many methods achieving this goal. Here we give a solution of use JavaScript, Sample shows how to use window.name property check the correct links and throw other requests to invalid pages. This code-sample use two user controls to make a distinction between base page and target page, user only need drag different controls to appropriate web form pages. so user need not write repetitive code in every page, it will make coding work lightly and convenient for modify your code.  JSVirtualKeyboard Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215093 This article describes an All-In-One framework sample that demonstrates a step-by-step guide illustrating how to build a virtual keyboard in your HTML page. Sometimes we may need to offer a virtual keyboard to let users input something without their real keyboards. This scenario often occurs when users will enter their password to get access to our sites and we want to protect the password from some kinds of back-door software, a Key-logger for example, and we will find a virtual keyboard on the page will be a good choice here. To create a virtual keyboard, we firstly need to add some buttons to the page. And when users click on a certain button, the JavaScript function handling the onclick event will input an appropriated character to the textbox. That is the simple logic of this feature. However, if we indeed want a virtual keyboard to substitute for the real keyboard completely, we will need more advanced logic to handle keys like Caps-Lock and Shift etc. That will be a complex work to achieve. CSASPNETDataListImageGallery Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62261#DownloadId=215267 This code sample demonstrates how to create an Image Gallery application by using the DataList control in ASP.NET. You may find the Image Gallery is widely used in many social networking sites, personal websites and E-Business websites. For example, you may use the Image Gallery to show a library of personal uploaded images on a personal website. Slideshow is also a popular tool to display images on websites. This code sample demonstrates how to use the DataList and ImageButton controls in ASP.NET to create an Image Gallery with image navigation. You can click on a thumbnail image in the Datalist control to display a larger version of the image on the page. This sample code reads the image paths from a certain directory into a FileInfo array. Then, the FileInfo array is used to populate a custom DataTable object which is bound to the Datalist control. This code sample also implements a custom paging system that allows five images to be displayed horizontally on one page. The following link buttons are used to implement a custom paging system:   •     First •     Previous •     Next •     Last Note We recommend that you use this method to load no more than five images at a time. You can also set the SelectedIndex property for the DataList control to limit the number of the thumbnail images that can be selected. To indicate which image is selected, you can set the SelectedStyle property for the DataList control. VBASPNETSearchEngine Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215112 This sample shows how to implement a simple search engine in an ASP.NET web site. It uses LIKE condition in SQL statement to search database. Then it highlights keywords in search result by using Regular Expression and JavaScript. New Windows General code samples CSCheckEXEType, VBCheckEXEType Downloads: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215045 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215120 The sample demonstrates how to check an executable file type.  For a given executable file, we can get 1 whether it is a console application 2 whether it is a .Net application 3 whether it is a 32bit native application. 4 The full display name of a .NET application, e.g. System, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089, processorArchitecture=MSIL New Internet Explorer code samples CSIEExplorerBar, VBIEExplorerBar Downloads: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215060 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215133 The sample demonstrates how to create and deploy an IE Explorer Bar which could list all the images in a web page. CSBrowserHelperObject, VBBrowserHelperObject Downloads: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215044 http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215119 The sample demonstrates how to create and deploy a Browser Helper Object,  and the BHO in this sample is used to disable the context menu in IE. New Windows Workflow Foundation code samples CSWF4ActivitiesCorrelation Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215085 Consider that there are two such workflow instances:       start                                   start          |                                           | Receive activity      Receive activity         |                                           | Receive2 activity      Receive2 activity         |                                           | A WCF request comes to call the second Receive2 activity. Which one should take care of the request? The answer is Correlation. This sample will show you how to correlate two workflow service to work together. -------------- New ASP.NET code samples CSASPNETBreadcrumbWithQueryString Download: http://1code.codeplex.com/releases/view/62253#DownloadId=215022

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 11, 2013

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 11, 2013Popular ReleasesStackBuilder: StackBuilder 1.0.17.0: Corrected minor bug in box/case analysisPowerShell App Deployment Toolkit: PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit v3.0.6: Added PersistPrompt parameter to Show-InstallationWelcome and Show-InstallationPrompt. Prompt window is persistently returned to center screen after interval specified in config file (default 10 seconds). For Show-InstallationWelcome, this only takes effect if deferral is not available to user. The user will have no option but to respond to the prompt - resistance is futile! Added example advanced Office 2010 deployment script Asynchronous actions now write to the same log file as synchro...XrmServiceToolkit - A Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011 & CRM 2013 JavaScript Library: XrmServiceToolkit 2.0.0 for CRM 2011 and CRM 2013: Version: 2.0.0 (beta) Date: October, 2013 Dependency: JSON2, jQuery (latest or 1.7.2 above) ---NOTE---Due to the changes for CRM 2013, please use the attached version of JSON2 and jQuery Tested Platform: IE10, latest Chrome, latest FireFox Tested CRM Server: CRM 2013 on-premise RTM, CRM 2013 online, CRM 2011 with RU15 Changes: New Behavior - XrmServiceTookit.Soap.Fetch parameters change to work with asynchronous callback compared to 1.4.2 beta: XrmS...MoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): MoreTerra 1.11.3: =========== =New Features= =========== New Markers added for Plantera's Bulb, Heart Fruits and Gold Cache. Markers now correctly display for the gems found in rock debris on the floor. =========== =Compatibility= =========== Fixed header changes found in Terraria 1.0.3.1Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Kitting: First Beta release of Kitting: First Beta release of Kitting Install by using XPO or Models.C# Intellisense for Notepad++: Release v1.0.8.0: - fixed document formatting artifacts To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.CS-Script for Notepad++ (C# intellisense and code execution): Release v1.0.8.0: - fixed document formatting artifacts To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.Generic Unit of Work and Repositories Framework: v2.0: Async methods for Repostiories - Ivan (@ifarkas) OData Async - Ivan (@ifarkas) Glimpse MVC4 workig with MVC5 Glimpse EF6 Northwind.Repostiory Project (layer) best practices for extending the Repositories Northwind.Services Project (layer), best practices for implementing business facade Live Demo: http://longle.azurewebsites.net/Spa/Product#/list Documentation: http://blog.longle.net/2013/10/09/upgrading-to-async-with-entity-framework-mvc-odata-asyncentitysetcontroller-kendo-ui-gli...Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.581b: Fix in place for TVDB xml issue. New* Movie - General Preferences, allow saving of ignored 'The' or 'A' to end of movie title, stored in sorttitle field. * Movie - New Way for Cropping Posters. Fixed* Movie - Rename of folders/filename. caught error message. * Movie - Fixed Bug in Save Cropped image, only saving in Pre-Frodo format if Both model selected. * Movie - Fixed Cropped image didn't take zoomed ratio into effect. * Movie - Separated Folder Renaming and File Renaming fuctions durin...Ghostscript.NET: Ghostscript.NET v.1.1.1.: v.1.1.1. fixed problem in GhostscriptRasterizer and GhostscriptViewer when MediaBox contains negative llx or lly values. (problem reported by "Prasenjit Das"). added GhostscriptPngDevice, a friendly output device class with all png devices related switches. (GhostscriptPngDevice supports: png16m, pngalpha, pnggray, png256, png16, pngmono, pngmonod). added GhostscriptJpegDevice, a friendly output device class with all jpeg devices related switches. (GhostscriptJpegDevice supports: jpeg, jp...xFunc: xFunc 2.7.3: Fixed memory leak. Small fixes.SmartStore.NET - Free ASP.NET MVC Ecommerce Shopping Cart Solution: SmartStore.NET 1.2.0: HighlightsMulti-store support "Trusted Shops" plugins Highly improved SmartStore.biz Importer plugin Add custom HTML content to pages Performance optimization New FeaturesMulti-store-support: now multiple stores can be managed within a single application instance (e.g. for building different catalogs, brands, landing pages etc.) Added 3 new Trusted Shops plugins: Seal, Buyer Protection, Store Reviews Added Display as HTML Widget to CMS Topics (store owner now can add arbitrary HT...Fast YouTube Downloader: Youtube Downloader 2.1: Youtube Downloader 2.1NuGet: NuGet 2.7.1: Released October 07, 2013. Release notes: http://docs.nuget.org/docs/release-notes/nuget-2.7.1 Important note: After downloading the signed build of NuGet.exe, if you perform an update using the "nuget.exe update -self" command, it will revert back to the unsigned build.Mugen MVVM Toolkit: Mugen MVVM Toolkit 2.0: IntroductionMugen MVVM Toolkit makes it easier to develop Silverlight, WPF, WinRT and WP applications using the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern. The purpose of the toolkit is to provide a simple framework and set of tools for getting up to speed quickly with applications based on the MVVM design pattern. The core of Toolkit contains a navigation system, windows management system, models, validation, etc. Mugen MVVM Toolkit contains all the MVVM classes such as ViewModelBase, RelayCommand,...Office Ribbon Project (under active development): Ribbon (07. Oct. 2013): Fixed Scrollbar Bug if DropDown Button is bigger than screen Added Office 2013 Theme Fixed closing the Ribbon caused a null reference exception in the RibbonButton.Dispose if the DropDown was not created yet Fixed Memory leak fix (unhooked events after Dispose) Fixed ToolStrip Selected Text 2013 and 2007 for Blue and Standard themescmdradio: v0.1.1: Default download in win32. For other OS see here. This is alpha version. Please report all bugs.Squiggle - A free open source LAN Messenger: Squiggle 3.3 Alpha: Allow using environment variables in configuration file (history db connection string, download folder location, display name, group and message) Fix for history viewer to show the correct history entries History saved with UTC timestamp This is alpha release and not recommended for use in productionVidCoder: 1.5.7 Beta: Updated HandBrake core to SVN 4819. About dialog now pulls down HandBrake version from the DLL. Added a confirmation dialog to Stop if the encode has been going on for more than 5 minutes. Fixed handling of unicode characters for input and output filenames. We now encode to UTF-8 before passing to HandBrake. Fixed a crash in the queue multiple titles dialog. Added code to rescue tool windows which get placed outside of the visible screen area.Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1310.05: Enhance the "Reboot Remote Computers", by adding a timer before the reboot occure. So that remote users can save their documents and close applications. You can also add a message to be display. In 'Tools'->'Settings'-> Misc Tab, you can set a default message. Enhance the "Compare Computers against AD", by choosing OUs to include in the comparison.New ProjectsA fork of the RPG Stendhal: Stendhal is a multiplayer online adventures game developed using the Arianne game development system. Stendhal is written using Java 6 and Java2D environment.Board Game Up: Welcome to the codeplex of the Board Game Up website. This contains the entire source code for www.boardgameup.com, the free board game meet up website.Business Information Organizer System: Goal every aspect of small business: services, inventory, education, finance, and heath. Must support every language and country.CRM 2011 to 2013 Icon Upgrader: This application allows you to automatically upgrade CRM 2011 icons to CRM 2013 icons. This application converts entity icons into grey scale.Data Access: CQRS Highway: Command Query Responsibility Segregation pattern for data access.djtest001: this is a summary Test1DNN Evoq Social Invitation Registration: Invitation and Registration module for DNN Evoq Social.Dynamics AX 2012 R2 Kitting: Dynamics AX 2012 R2 - Kitting. A solution for creating and using Kit's on salesorders.IlluminatiEngine: This is a 3D deferred lighting engine, it has skinned mesh animation as well as instanced mesh (including skinned) and a few post processing effects, DoF, etc..jean1011jabbrchang: wJessWork: for now let us make it emptyKiller Core: Starquake re makeKinect Stream Saver Application: The application allows users to display and save the Kinect data streams. The Kinect Stream Saver application is based on the KinectExplorer-D2D ( C++) sample.LUA for Windows CE: LUA porting to Windows CE devices.OpenDespatch for Peoplevox: OpenDespatch is an add-on for Peoplevox to complete despatch using external carriers such as DPD and RM-DMO. Prontuário Eletrônico: Projeto para cadeira de Projeto de Desenvolvimento de software do curso de sistemas de informação que visa a unificação do prontuário médicoRiver Niles Operating System: The project is a research of C# language program , that will be cover to a full Operating SystemSocketIO4WinRT.Client: This is a port of the SocketIO4Net.Client project, to run on WinRT (Windows 8) for C# users.SQL Data: SQL Data is an ORM for C# without any of the bloat.Task Factory Bug Sample: This project is used to demonstrate a bug in .NET 4.0 Runtime for Task Factory.Team Manticore Student System: Student system applicationVccDryad: VccDryad aims at extending VCC with proof strategies that enable automated verification of C programs that manipulate complex data structures. X0oo0Z: X0oo0ZYT: mouse move

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  • How Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server enable Compliance

    - by Martin Hinshelwood
    One of the things that makes Team Foundation Server (TFS) the most powerful Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform is the traceability it provides to those that use it. This traceability is crucial to enable many companies to adhere to many of the Compliance regulations to which they are bound (e.g. CFR 21 Part 11 or Sarbanes–Oxley.)   From something as simple as relating Tasks to Check-in’s or being able to see the top 10 files in your codebase that are causing the most Bugs, to identifying which Bugs and Requirements are in which Release. All that information is available and more in TFS. Although all of this tradability is available within TFS you do need to understand that it is not for free. Well… I say that, but if you are using TFS properly you will have this information with no additional work except for firing up the reporting. Using Visual Studio ALM and Team Foundation Server you can relate every line of code changes all the way up to requirements and back down through Test Cases to the Test Results. Figure: The only thing missing is Build In order to build the relationship model below we need to examine how each of the relationships get there. Each member of your team from programmer to tester and Business Analyst to Business have their roll to play to knit this together. Figure: The relationships required to make this work can get a little confusing If Build is added to this to relate Work Items to Builds and with knowledge of which builds are in which environments you can easily identify what is contained within a Release. Figure: How are things progressing Along with the ability to produce the progress and trend reports the tractability that is built into TFS can be used to fulfil most audit requirements out of the box, and augmented to fulfil the rest. In order to understand the relationships, lets look at each of the important Artifacts and how they are associated with each other… Requirements – The root of all knowledge Requirements are the thing that the business cares about delivering. These could be derived as User Stories or Business Requirements Documents (BRD’s) but they should be what the Business asks for. Requirements can be related to many of the Artifacts in TFS, so lets look at the model: Figure: If the centre of the world was a requirement We can track which releases Requirements were scheduled in, but this can change over time as more details come to light. Figure: Who edited the Requirement and when There is also the ability to query Work Items based on the History of changed that were made to it. This is particularly important with Requirements. It might not be enough to say what Requirements were completed in a given but also to know which Requirements were ever assigned to a particular release. Figure: Some magic required, but result still achieved As an augmentation to this it is also possible to run a query that shows results from the past, just as if we had a time machine. You can take any Query in the system and add a “Asof” clause at the end to query historical data in the operational store for TFS. select <fields> from WorkItems [where <condition>] [order by <fields>] [asof <date>] Figure: Work Item Query Language (WIQL) format In order to achieve this you do need to save the query as a *.wiql file to your local computer and edit it in notepad, but one imported into TFS you run it any time you want. Figure: Saving Queries locally can be useful All of these Audit features are available throughout the Work Item Tracking (WIT) system within TFS. Tasks – Where the real work gets done Tasks are the work horse of the development team, but they only as useful as Excel if you do not relate them properly to other Artifacts. Figure: The Task Work Item Type has its own relationships Requirements should be broken down into Tasks that the development team work from to build what is required by the business. This may be done by a small dedicated group or by everyone that will be working on the software team but however it happens all of the Tasks create should be a Child of a Requirement Work Item Type. Figure: Tasks are related to the Requirement Tasks should be used to track the day-to-day activities of the team working to complete the software and as such they should be kept simple and short lest developers think they are more trouble than they are worth. Figure: Task Work Item Type has a narrower purpose Although the Task Work Item Type describes the work that will be done the actual development work involves making changes to files that are under Source Control. These changes are bundled together in a single atomic unit called a Changeset which is committed to TFS in a single operation. During this operation developers can associate Work Item with the Changeset. Figure: Tasks are associated with Changesets   Changesets – Who wrote this crap Changesets themselves are just an inventory of the changes that were made to a number of files to complete a Task. Figure: Changesets are linked by Tasks and Builds   Figure: Changesets tell us what happened to the files in Version Control Although comments can be changed after the fact, the inventory and Work Item associations are permanent which allows us to Audit all the way down to the individual change level. Figure: On Check-in you can resolve a Task which automatically associates it Because of this we can view the history on any file within the system and see how many changes have been made and what Changesets they belong to. Figure: Changes are tracked at the File level What would be even more powerful would be if we could view these changes super imposed over the top of the lines of code. Some people call this a blame tool because it is commonly used to find out which of the developers introduced a bug, but it can also be used as another method of Auditing changes to the system. Figure: Annotate shows the lines the Annotate functionality allows us to visualise the relationship between the individual lines of code and the Changesets. In addition to this you can create a Label and apply it to a version of your version control. The problem with Label’s is that they can be changed after they have been created with no tractability. This makes them practically useless for any sort of compliance audit. So what do you use? Branches – And why we need them Branches are a really powerful tool for development and release management, but they are most important for audits. Figure: One way to Audit releases The R1.0 branch can be created from the Label that the Build creates on the R1 line when a Release build was created. It can be created as soon as the Build has been signed of for release. However it is still possible that someone changed the Label between this time and its creation. Another better method can be to explicitly link the Build output to the Build. Builds – Lets tie some more of this together Builds are the glue that helps us enable the next level of tractability by tying everything together. Figure: The dashed pieces are not out of the box but can be enabled When the Build is called and starts it looks at what it has been asked to build and determines what code it is going to get and build. Figure: The folder identifies what changes are included in the build The Build sets a Label on the Source with the same name as the Build, but the Build itself also includes the latest Changeset ID that it will be building. At the end of the Build the Build Agent identifies the new Changesets it is building by looking at the Check-ins that have occurred since the last Build. Figure: What changes have been made since the last successful Build It will then use that information to identify the Work Items that are associated with all of the Changesets Changesets are associated with Build and change the “Integrated In” field of those Work Items . Figure: Find all of the Work Items to associate with The “Integrated In” field of all of the Work Items identified by the Build Agent as being integrated into the completed Build are updated to reflect the Build number that successfully integrated that change. Figure: Now we know which Work Items were completed in a build Now that we can link a single line of code changed all the way back through the Task that initiated the action to the Requirement that started the whole thing and back down to the Build that contains the finished Requirement. But how do we know wither that Requirement has been fully tested or even meets the original Requirements? Test Cases – How we know we are done The only way we can know wither a Requirement has been completed to the required specification is to Test that Requirement. In TFS there is a Work Item type called a Test Case Test Cases enable two scenarios. The first scenario is the ability to track and validate Acceptance Criteria in the form of a Test Case. If you agree with the Business a set of goals that must be met for a Requirement to be accepted by them it makes it both difficult for them to reject a Requirement when it passes all of the tests, but also provides a level of tractability and validation for audit that a feature has been built and tested to order. Figure: You can have many Acceptance Criteria for a single Requirement It is crucial for this to work that someone from the Business has to sign-off on the Test Case moving from the  “Design” to “Ready” states. The Second is the ability to associate an MS Test test with the Test Case thereby tracking the automated test. This is useful in the circumstance when you want to Track a test and the test results of a Unit Test designed to test the existence of and then re-existence of a a Bug. Figure: Associating a Test Case with an automated Test Although it is possible it may not make sense to track the execution of every Unit Test in your system, there are many Integration and Regression tests that may be automated that it would make sense to track in this way. Bug – Lets not have regressions In order to know wither a Bug in the application has been fixed and to make sure that it does not reoccur it needs to be tracked. Figure: Bugs are the centre of their own world If the fix to a Bug is big enough to require that it is broken down into Tasks then it is probably a Requirement. You can associate a check-in with a Bug and have it tracked against a Build. You would also have one or more Test Cases to prove the fix for the Bug. Figure: Bugs have many associations This allows you to track Bugs / Defects in your system effectively and report on them. Change Request – I am not a feature In the CMMI Process template Change Requests can also be easily tracked through the system. In some cases it can be very important to track Change Requests separately as an Auditor may want to know what was changed and who authorised it. Again and similar to Bugs, if the Change Request is big enough that it would require to be broken down into Tasks it is in reality a new feature and should be tracked as a Requirement. Figure: Make sure your Change Requests only Affect Requirements and not rewrite them Conclusion Visual Studio 2010 and Team Foundation Server together provide an exceptional Application Lifecycle Management platform that can help your team comply with even the harshest of Compliance requirements while still enabling them to be Agile. Most Audits are heavy on required documentation but most of that information is captured for you as long a you do it right. You don’t even need every team member to understand it all as each of the Artifacts are relevant to a different type of team member. Business Analysts manage Requirements and Change Requests Programmers manage Tasks and check-in against Change Requests and Bugs Testers manage Bugs and Test Cases Build Masters manage Builds Although there is some crossover there are still rolls or “hats” that are worn. Do you thing this is all achievable? Have I missed anything that you think should be there?

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 11, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 11, 2012Popular ReleasesDirectX Tool Kit: December 11, 2012: December 11, 2012 Ex versions of DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader Removed use of ATL's CComPtr in favor of WRL's ComPtr for all platforms to support VS Express editions Updated VS 2010 project for official 'property sheet' integration for Windows 8.0 SDK Minor fix to CommonStates for Feature Level 9.1 Tweaked AlphaTestEffect.cpp to work around ARM NEON compiler codegen bug Added dxguid.lib as a default library for Debug builds to resolve GUID link issuesCleverBobCat: CleverBobCat 1.1.3: Fixed: - Cart code now works in vab, wheels retract correctly and no more anchors visible - No more exceptions on VAB Added: - ResourceTransfer beam now has a wide array of configurable options for beam material, size and colors - Added an optional offset to resource transfer, if specificed the "beam" will start from part center + the specified offsetSharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.8.2: This release just contains some fixes that have been done since the last release. Plus, this is strong named as well. I apologize for the lack of updates but my free time is less these days.re-linq: 1.13.178.0: This is build 1.13.178.0 of re-linq. Find the complete release notes for the build here: Release NotesMedia Companion: MediaCompanion3.511b release: Two more bug fixes: - General Preferences were not getting restored - Fanart and poster image files were being locked, preventing changes to themVodigi Open Source Interactive Digital Signage: Vodigi Release 5.5: The following enhancements and fixes are included in Vodigi 5.5. Vodigi Administrator - Manage Music Files - Add Music Files to Image Slide Shows - Manage System Messages - Display System Messages to Users During Login - Ported to Visual Studio 2012 and MVC 4 - Added New Vodigi Administrator User Guide Vodigi Player - Improved Login/Schedule Startup Procedure - Startup Using Last Known Schedule when Disconnected on Startup - Improved Check for Schedule Changes - Now Every 15 Minutes - Pla...Secretary Tool: Secretary Tool v1.1.0: I'm still considering this version a beta version because, while it seems to work well for me, I haven't received any feedback and I certainly don't want anyone relying solely on this tool for calculations and such until its correct functioning is verified by someone. This version includes several bug fixes, including a rather major one with Emergency Contact Information not saving. Also, reporting is completed. There may be some tweaking to the reporting engine, but it is good enough to rel...VidCoder: 1.4.10 Beta: Added progress percent to the title bar/task bar icon. Added MPLS information to Blu-ray titles. Fixed the following display issues in Windows 8: Uncentered text in textbox controls Disabled controls not having gray text making them hard to identify as disabled Drop-down menus having hard-to distinguish white on light-blue text Added more logging to proxy disconnect issues and increased timeout on initial call to help prevent timeouts. Fixed encoding window showing the built-in pre...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.400: Version 2.5.0.400 (Release): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete Update the documentation. InfoMan: Write the documentation. Other Downloads Downloads OverviewHome Access Plus+: v8.5: v8.5.1211.1240 Fixed: changed to using the thumbnailPhoto attribute instead of jpegPhoto v8.5.1208.1500 This is a point release, for the other parts of HAP+ see the v8.3 release. Fixed: #me#me issue with the Edit Profile Link Updated: 8.5.1208 release Updated: Documentation with hidden booking system feature Added: Room Drop Down to the Booking System (no control panel interface), can be Resource Specific Fixed: Recursive AD Group Membership Lookup Fixed: User.IsInRole with recursive lookup...Http Explorer: httpExplorer-1.1: httpExplorer now has the ability to connect to http server via web proxies. The proxy may be explicitly specified by hostname or IP address. Or it may be specified via the Internet Options settings of Windows. You may also specify credentials to pass to the proxy if the proxy requires them. These credentials may be NTLM or basic authentication (clear text username and password).Bee OPOA Platform: Bee OPOA Demo V1.0.001: Initial version.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.78: Fix for issue #18924 - using -pretty option left in ///#DEBUG blocks. Fix for issue #18980 - bad += optimization caused bug in resulting code. Optimization has been removed pending further review.Dynamics Crm 2011 Solution Manager: Crm Solution Manager 1.0: First Version.Lava JS: Lava JS 1.0: Sourcemp3player-xslt-plugin: mp3player module 1.0: This is a mp3 player module that you can install on your umbraco project. It can display the list of the media and you can click the button to play or stop.STeaL : stealed functionarities from STL: STeaL 0.4.1(prelerease): + fill / fill-nMi-DevEnv: Development 0.5: Ran a new test scenario where I created a DC, then created a web server, blew it away, then re-created the web server. The purpose of the test was to see how the installers would handle information existing in AD, like the OU for CRM. This revealed yet another silly issue in retrieving details of existing OU's, where I had the syntax wrong. I should read exception details more closely :) Apologies also, I've just now started labelling the solution according to these "snapshots". Sorry for...Yahoo! UI Library: YUI Compressor for .Net: Version 2.2.0.0 - Epee: New : Web Optimization package! Cleaned up the nuget packages BugFix: minifying lots of files will now be faster because of a recent regression in some code. (We were instantiating something far too many times).DtPad - .NET Framework text editor: DtPad 2.9.0.40: http://dtpad.diariotraduttore.com/files/images/flag-eng.png English + A new built-in editor for the management of CSV files, including the edit of cells, deleting and adding new rows, replacement of delimiter character and much more (issue #1137) + The limit of rows allowed before the decommissioning of their side panel has been raised (new default: 1.000) (issue #1155, only partially solved) + Pressing CTRL+TAB now DtPad opens a screen that shows the list of opened tabs (issue #1143) + Note...New ProjectsAmazon S3 Upload with Uploadify: ASP.MVC upload file from client browser direct to Amazon S3Ameoto DEV: Bin for all of our software sources :DAutonomic Computing Library: This framework will simplify the development of Autonomic Computing Systems. BIUUITest: BIUUITestBotvaBot: This project should help tothe Botva.Ru gamers to automize their game proces. It is a set of libraries for simple sending of the HTTP requests with list of the main requests to the botva.ru web-site. Also project contains the clients forsimple using this request umulators.Cartellino: Scopo del progetto è la realizzazione di un software in grado di rilevare i dati dai rilevatori 3Tec (www.3tec.it) e stampare i cartellini presenza dei dipendenticmsforbeginner: in this project explain how to edit, create multiple webpages to a single website with less knowledge on html ,.net languagesContact Us Module: This is an Umbraco based module for feedback. You can upload the contact us module in the dashboard and then display those module anywhere in your site.CrmXpress Security Roles Helper For Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011: CrmXpress Security Roles Helper is a tool/utility. It lets you compare the Security Roles for their differences at the privilege level with their scopes.DarkSky Helpdesk: DarkSky Helpdesk is an Orchard module that turns your Orchard application into a Helpdesk system.DataEntity: A Framework that help us to make persistences and materializations from any SQLServer DataBase Tables to Entity classes. Better performance with native ADO.NET.Edisfera DNN Training Task Module: This is a training project to familiarize with codeplex and dnn module creation.eyoung events description language: Eyoung is a event driven language. It can be used in many fields, such as intrusion action definition.FastBuild: Fast build VS2010 C++ project with the options OpenCV, QT, Boost and OpenGL.Find Changeset By Comment: This extension is used to find changesets that contain a specific phrase in a comment.Gatepass System: This application under development is my first application on codeplex. It is meant primarily as a learning tool while developing a Gatepass System. This GateHandle Template Library (HTL): Handle Template Library (HTL) is a C++ library for developing Windows applications and services. It provides a set of classes for files, threads, events, and more.iDoklad API: iDoklad API Demo je Open Source projekt spolecnosti Cígler Software. Ukázková aplikace demonstruje napojení na fakturacní službu iDokladIronBefunge: IronBefunge is an interpretor (written in .NET) for Befunge programs.Iterator Tasks: Iterator Tasks is a iterator-based coroutine class library.Javacc-Compile-N14: Javacc - compile - N14 is a students' compiler project and we use javacc to compiler XYZ-2 languageMessenger Game - Starter Kit: Kom godt i gang med at lave spil til Messenger med dette komplette Starter Kit. Indeholder et komplet netværksspil lavet med Messenger Activity API og Silverlight.MOBZcript: MOBZcript is a simple batch file editor for cmd scripts. It saves and runs your scripts as if you started them from a command line.NET.Library: The NET.Library will be available in different versions to run on the .Net 2, 3 and 4 frameworks and consists of various .Net programming utilities. proxificator: Proxificator is component for getting the appropriate proxyRetailManagement: abcStudentManage: testWebQQ Interface: A library that enable programmers to access QQ much easier via codeZytonic Screenshot: Upload Images From your Computer Harddrive or Screen With Ease!

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  • CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 14, 2012

    CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 14, 2012Popular ReleasesCommand Line Parser Library: 1.9.3.31 rc0: Main assembly CommandLine.dll signed. Removed old commented code. Added missing XML documentation comments. Two (very) minor code refactoring changes.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.7.4: 2012.12.13 Ver5.7.4 (1)Web???????、???????????????????????????????????????????VFPX: ssClasses A1.0: My initial release. See https://vfpx.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=ssClasses&referringTitle=Home for a brief description of what is inside this releasesb0t v.5: sb0t 5.01 alpha 1: GUI support for Spanish language (Thank you Di3go and Oysterhead) Captcha database updates Bug fix where some hosts could not joinHome Access Plus+: v8.6: v8.6.1213.1220 Added: Group look up to the visible property of the Booking System Fixed: Switched to using the outlook/exchange thumbnailPhoto instead of jpegPhoto Added: Add a blank paragraph below the tiles. This means that the browser displays a vertical scroller when resizing the window. Previously it was possible for the bottom edge of a tile not to be visible if the browser window was resized. Added: Booking System: Only Display Day+Month on the booking Home Page. This allows for the cs...Layered Architecture Solution Guidance (LASG): LASG 1.0.0.8 for Visual Studio 2012: PRE-REQUISITES Open GAX (Please install Oct 4, 2012 version) Microsoft® System CLR Types for Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Microsoft® SQL Server® 2012 Shared Management Objects Microsoft Enterprise Library 5.0 (for the generated code) Windows Azure SDK (for layered cloud applications) Silverlight 5 SDK (for Silverlight applications) THE RELEASE This release only works on Visual Studio 2012. Known Issue If you choose the Database project, the solution unfolding time will be slow....Fiskalizacija za developere: FiskalizacijaDev 2.0: Prva prava produkcijska verzija - Zakon je tu, ova je verzija uskladena sa trenutno važecom Tehnickom specifikacijom (v1.2. od 04.12.2012.) i spremna je za produkcijsko korištenje. Verzije iza ove ce ovisiti o naknadnim izmjenama Zakona i/ili Tehnicke specifikacije, odnosno, o eventualnim greškama u radu/zahtjevima community-a za novim feature-ima. Novosti u v2.0 su: - That assembly does not allow partially trusted callers (http://fiskalizacija.codeplex.com/workitem/699) - scheme IznosType...Simple Injector: Simple Injector v1.6.1: This patch release fixes a bug in the integration libraries that disallowed the application to start when .NET 4.5 was not installed on the machine (but only .NET 4.0). The following packages are affected: SimpleInjector.Integration.Web.dll SimpleInjector.Integration.Web.Mvc.dll SimpleInjector.Integration.Wcf.dll SimpleInjector.Extensions.LifetimeScoping.dllBootstrap Helpers: Version 1: First releasesheetengine - Isometric HTML5 JavaScript Display Engine: sheetengine v1.2.0: Main featuresOptimizations for intersectionsThe main purpose of this release was to further optimize rendering performance by skipping object intersections with other sheets. From now by default an object's sheets will only intersect its own sheets and never other static or dynamic sheets. This is the usual scenario since objects will never bump into other sheets when using collision detection. DocumentationMany of you have been asking for proper documentation, so here it goes. Check out the...DirectX Tool Kit: December 11, 2012: December 11, 2012 Ex versions of DDSTextureLoader and WICTextureLoader Removed use of ATL's CComPtr in favor of WRL's ComPtr for all platforms to support VS Express editions Updated VS 2010 project for official 'property sheet' integration for Windows 8.0 SDK Minor fix to CommonStates for Feature Level 9.1 Tweaked AlphaTestEffect.cpp to work around ARM NEON compiler codegen bug Added dxguid.lib as a default library for Debug builds to resolve GUID link issuesDNN Flash Viewer: Source (same as default release): SourceArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.1 Final for 10.1: We are proud to announce the release of ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap version 2.1. This download is compatible with ArcGIS 10.1, and includes setups for the Desktop Component, Desktop Component when 64 bit Background Geoprocessing is installed, and the Server Component. Important: if you already have ArcGIS Editor for OSM installed but want to install this new version, you will need to uninstall your previous version and then install this one. This release includes support for the ArcGIS 1...SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.8.2: This release just contains some fixes that have been done since the last release. Plus, this is strong named as well. I apologize for the lack of updates but my free time is less these days.Media Companion: MediaCompanion3.511b release: Two more bug fixes: - General Preferences were not getting restored - Fanart and poster image files were being locked, preventing changes to themVodigi Open Source Interactive Digital Signage: Vodigi Release 5.5: The following enhancements and fixes are included in Vodigi 5.5. Vodigi Administrator - Manage Music Files - Add Music Files to Image Slide Shows - Manage System Messages - Display System Messages to Users During Login - Ported to Visual Studio 2012 and MVC 4 - Added New Vodigi Administrator User Guide Vodigi Player - Improved Login/Schedule Startup Procedure - Startup Using Last Known Schedule when Disconnected on Startup - Improved Check for Schedule Changes - Now Every 15 Minutes - Pla...VidCoder: 1.4.10 Beta: Added progress percent to the title bar/task bar icon. Added MPLS information to Blu-ray titles. Fixed the following display issues in Windows 8: Uncentered text in textbox controls Disabled controls not having gray text making them hard to identify as disabled Drop-down menus having hard-to distinguish white on light-blue text Added more logging to proxy disconnect issues and increased timeout on initial call to help prevent timeouts. Fixed encoding window showing the built-in pre...WPF Application Framework (WAF): WPF Application Framework (WAF) 2.5.0.400: Version 2.5.0.400 (Release): This release contains the source code of the WPF Application Framework (WAF) and the sample applications. Requirements .NET Framework 4.0 (The package contains a solution file for Visual Studio 2010) The unit test projects require Visual Studio 2010 Professional Changelog Legend: [B] Breaking change; [O] Marked member as obsolete Update the documentation. InfoMan: Write the documentation. Other Downloads Downloads OverviewBee OPOA Platform: Bee OPOA Demo V1.0.001: Initial version.Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.78: Fix for issue #18924 - using -pretty option left in ///#DEBUG blocks. Fix for issue #18980 - bad += optimization caused bug in resulting code. Optimization has been removed pending further review.New Projects.net demo: This is a demo project. 12141325: tesing12141327: testingAW User Applications: This project is used to enable AccessWeb User Applications for Database Application Users. Outline: The degree of professionalism permissions access options OkBattery Life Live Tile: Windows 8 app that displays the battery percentage in a live tile on the homescreen with the help of a system tray application. only available on intel devices.CMS .NET: CMS .net HTML5 multilingual+FORUM+GALLERY+Responsive Web Design+WIKI+COMMUNITY: Easy user-friendly, fast 10X,;multi site in different domain; multi servercookieTerm: A simple BBS terminal that can run in unicode environmentDevCow: This is a location for all of the community projects that help support DevCow.comDevville.NET: The project contains some of a very useful helpers and extension methods for .NET and SharePoint.Echo Garden: Echo Garden is a modification of Alphalabs' Windows Phone app, Node Garden, that represents the nodes through sound.FluentNavigationCoercion: Simple library that makes navigation coercion on WP simple and readableGet Music: Internet radio's parser. Parse radio logs, store received data to store. Make statistic analyze of radio. jKinect - Kinectify any web site.: Provide a unique Kinect User Experience for your website. With jKinect, turn any web site into a Kinect enabled web application.Lagos Single Mothers: This is a web2.0 site that will help single mothers in the city of Lagos (in Nigeria) share ideas on how to raise children, as single mothers. LIF11: Projet logique classiqueMalkiSum: Malki SumMyLittleAdressBook: Just a little project to test MVVM pattern on a multiview solution with authentificationNopCommerce 2.7x Multi Store version: NopCommerce 7.x Multi Store / Vendor versionPodcastToMp3: Automated tool to make MP3s from M4A chapters.Primer Demo ClickOnce: Demo ClickOncePulsus: A simple .NET logging library for modern applications.Sharp6800 - ET-3400 Microprocessor Trainer Emulator: A Heathkit ET-3400 Microprocessor Trainer Emulator. It features a 6800 emulator core and simulated 7-segment display and keypad. Written in 100% C#TEdit: TEdit is a source code editor that mainly used for InfoBasic Programming language. Running in Windows platform. Developed using Scintilla & ScintillaNet.VsPackageUtils: VsPackageUtils is a basic utility helper class for common operations in a VsPackage.WiFiShare: WiFiShare shares your LAN connection to WiFi using Internet Connection Sharing(ICS) from your Windows operating system.Windows 8 RSS App Kit: A Windows 8 App "kit" that allows you to build a fixed-list RSS reader with auto-image-detection in feeds.

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  • How to make a player stay within bounds of world with 2D Camera

    - by Craig
    Im creating a simple top down survival game. At the moment, i have the sprite which is a ship and moves by rotating left or right then going forward in that direction. I have implemented a 2D camera, its always centered on the player. However, when i move towards the bounds of the world that the sprite is in it just keeps on going :( How to i sort it that it stops at the edge of the world and cant go beyond it? Cheers :) Below is the main game class using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Audio; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Content; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.GamerServices; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Input; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Media; namespace GamesCoursework_1 { /// <summary> /// This is the main type for your game /// </summary> public class Game1 : Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Game { GraphicsDeviceManager graphics; SpriteBatch spriteBatch; // player variables Texture2D Ship; Vector2 Ship_Position; float Ship_Rotation = 0.0f; Vector2 Ship_Origin; Vector2 Ship_Velocity; const float tangentialVelocity = 4f; float friction = 0.05f; static Point CameraViewport = new Point(800, 800); Camera2d cam = new Camera2d((int)CameraViewport.X, (int)CameraViewport.Y); //Size of world static Point worldSize = new Point(1600, 1600); // Screen variables static Point worldCenter = new Point(worldSize.X / 2, worldSize.Y / 2); Rectangle playerBounds = new Rectangle(CameraViewport.X / 2, CameraViewport.Y / 2, worldSize.X - CameraViewport.X, worldSize.Y - CameraViewport.Y); Rectangle worldBounds = new Rectangle(0, 0, worldSize.X, worldSize.Y); Texture2D background; public Game1() { graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this); graphics.PreferredBackBufferWidth = CameraViewport.X; graphics.PreferredBackBufferHeight = CameraViewport.Y; Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to perform any initialization it needs to before starting to run. /// This is where it can query for any required services and load any non-graphic /// related content. Calling base.Initialize will enumerate through any components /// and initialize them as well. /// </summary> protected override void Initialize() { // TODO: Add your initialization logic here base.Initialize(); } /// <summary> /// LoadContent will be called once per game and is the place to load /// all of your content. /// </summary> protected override void LoadContent() { // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(GraphicsDevice); // TODO: use this.Content to load your game content here Ship = Content.Load<Texture2D>("Ship"); Ship_Origin.X = Ship.Width / 2; Ship_Origin.Y = Ship.Height / 2; background = Content.Load<Texture2D>("aus"); Ship_Position = new Vector2(worldCenter.X, worldCenter.Y); cam.Pos = Ship_Position; cam.Zoom = 1f; } /// <summary> /// UnloadContent will be called once per game and is the place to unload /// all content. /// </summary> protected override void UnloadContent() { // TODO: Unload any non ContentManager content here } /// <summary> /// Allows the game to run logic such as updating the world, /// checking for collisions, gathering input, and playing audio. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) { // Allows the game to exit if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) this.Exit(); // TODO: Add your update logic here Ship_Position = Ship_Velocity + Ship_Position; keyPressed(); base.Update(gameTime); } /// <summary> /// This is called when the game should draw itself. /// </summary> /// <param name="gameTime">Provides a snapshot of timing values.</param> protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); // TODO: Add your drawing code here spriteBatch.Begin(SpriteSortMode.Deferred, BlendState.AlphaBlend, null, null, null,null, cam.get_transformation(GraphicsDevice)); spriteBatch.Draw(background, Vector2.Zero, Color.White); spriteBatch.Draw(Ship, Ship_Position, Ship.Bounds, Color.White, Ship_Rotation, Ship_Origin, 1.0f, SpriteEffects.None, 0f); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); } private void Ship_Move(Vector2 move) { Ship_Position += move; } private void keyPressed() { KeyboardState keyState; // Move right keyState = Keyboard.GetState(); if (keyState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Right)) { Ship_Rotation = Ship_Rotation + 0.1f; } if (keyState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left)) { Ship_Rotation = Ship_Rotation - 0.1f; } if (keyState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Up)) { Ship_Velocity.X = (float)Math.Cos(Ship_Rotation) * tangentialVelocity; Ship_Velocity.Y = (float)Math.Sin(Ship_Rotation) * tangentialVelocity; if ((int)Ship_Position.Y < playerBounds.Bottom && (int)Ship_Position.Y > playerBounds.Top) cam._pos.Y = Ship_Position.Y; if ((int)Ship_Position.X > playerBounds.Left && (int)Ship_Position.X < playerBounds.Right) cam._pos.X = Ship_Position.X; //tried world bounds here if (!worldBounds.Contains(new Point((int)Ship_Position.X, (int)Ship_Position.Y))) Ship_Position -= new Vector2(0.0f, -tangentialVelocity * 2); if (!worldBounds.Contains(new Point((int)Ship_Position.X, (int)Ship_Position.Y))) Ship_Position -= new Vector2(0.0f, 2 * tangentialVelocity); } else if(Ship_Velocity != Vector2.Zero) { float i = Ship_Velocity.X; float j = Ship_Velocity.Y; Ship_Velocity.X = i -= friction * i; Ship_Velocity.Y = j -= friction * j; if ((int)Ship_Position.Y < playerBounds.Bottom && (int)Ship_Position.Y > playerBounds.Top) cam._pos.Y = Ship_Position.Y; if ((int)Ship_Position.X > playerBounds.Left && (int)Ship_Position.X < playerBounds.Right) cam._pos.X = Ship_Position.X; } if (keyState.IsKeyDown(Keys.Q)) { if (cam.Zoom < 2f) cam.Zoom += 0.05f; } if (keyState.IsKeyDown(Keys.A)) { if (cam.Zoom > 0.3f) cam.Zoom -= 0.05f; } } } } my 2d camera class using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework; using Microsoft.Xna.Framework.Graphics; namespace GamesCoursework_1 { public class Camera2d { protected float _zoom; // Camera Zoom public Matrix _transform; // Matrix Transform public Vector2 _pos; // Camera Position protected float _rotation; // Camera Rotation public int _viewportWidth, _viewportHeight; // viewport size public Camera2d(int ViewportWidth, int ViewportHeight) { _zoom = 1.0f; _rotation = 0.0f; _pos = Vector2.Zero; _viewportWidth = ViewportWidth; _viewportHeight = ViewportHeight; } // Sets and gets zoom public float Zoom { get { return _zoom; } set { _zoom = value; if (_zoom < 0.1f) _zoom = 0.1f; } // Negative zoom will flip image } public float Rotation { get { return _rotation; } set { _rotation = value; } } // Auxiliary function to move the camera public void Move(Vector2 amount) { _pos += amount; } // Get set position public Vector2 Pos { get { return _pos; } set { _pos = value; } } public Matrix get_transformation(GraphicsDevice graphicsDevice) { _transform = // Thanks to o KB o for this solution Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(-_pos.X, -_pos.Y, 0)) * Matrix.CreateRotationZ(Rotation) * Matrix.CreateScale(new Vector3(Zoom, Zoom, 1)) * Matrix.CreateTranslation(new Vector3(_viewportWidth * 0.5f, _viewportHeight * 0.5f, 0)); return _transform; } } }

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  • How to avoid double divide in loop?

    - by ignaty
    Thank you for your help. My code looks like: var CatItems = ""; for(var x=0; x < data.PRODUCTS.length; x++) { if (x % 3 === 0) CatItems += '<li class="jcarousel-item jcarousel-item-horizontal jcarousel-item-'+[x]+' jcarousel-item-'+[x]+'-horizontal jcarousel-item-placeholder jcarousel-item-placeholder-horizontal">'; CatItems += '<div><a class="large_image" href="#"><img src="'+ data.PRODUCTS[x].product_img +'" alt="' + data.PRODUCTS[x].product_name +'"></a><h3 class="geo_17_darkbrown">' + data.PRODUCTS[x].product_name +'</h3>'; if ( data.PRODUCTS[x].product_onsale==1 ) { CatItems += '<img alt="sale" src="assets/images/sale.gif" class="sale"><span class="geo_17_red_linethr">&pound;'+ data.PRODUCTS[x].product_retailprice +'</span>&nbsp;&nbsp;<span class="price geo_17_darkbrown">&pound;'+ data.PRODUCTS[x].product_webprice +'</span>'; } else { CatItems += '<span class="price geo_17_darkbrown">&pound;'+ data.PRODUCTS[x].product_webprice +'</span>'; } if ( data.PRODUCTS[x].product_COLOURS ) { CatItems += '<span class="colour">'; for(var y=0; y < data.PRODUCTS[x].product_COLOURS.length; y++) { CatItems += '<span><a href="'+ data.PRODUCTS[x].product_COLOURS[y].colours_large +'"><img src="'+ data.PRODUCTS[x].product_COLOURS[y].colours_thumb +'" alt="'+ data.PRODUCTS[x].product_COLOURS[y].colour_name +'" /></a></span>'; } CatItems += '</span>'; } CatItems += '</div>'; if (x % 3 === 2) CatItems += '</li>'; } and it generates this: <div class="carousel_00 jcarousel-container jcarousel-container-horizontal" style="position: relative; display: block;"> <div class="jcarousel-clip jcarousel-clip-horizontal" style="overflow: hidden; position: relative;"> <ul class="jcarousel-list jcarousel-list-horizontal" style="overflow: hidden; position: relative; top: 0px; left: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; width: 7890px;"> <li class="jcarousel-item jcarousel-item-horizontal jcarousel-item-0 jcarousel-item-0-horizontal jcarousel-item-placeholder jcarousel-item-placeholder-horizontal"> <div> <a href="#" class="large_image"> <img alt="Elena Top" src="assets/images/dress1.gif"></a> <h3 class="geo_17_darkbrown">Elena Top</h3> <img class="sale" src="assets/images/sale.gif" alt="sale"> <span class="geo_17_red_linethr">£120 </span>&nbsp;&nbsp; <span class="price geo_17_darkbrown">£100 </span> <span class="colour"> <span> <a href="assets/images/colour.gif"> <img alt="Black" src="assets/images/black.gif"></a> </span> <span> <a href="assets/images/colour.gif"> <img alt="Brown" src="assets/images/brown.gif"></a> </span> <span> <a href="assets/images/colour.gif"> <img alt="Purple" src="assets/images/purple.gif"></a> </span> </span> </div> <div> <a href="#" class="large_image"> <img alt="Rachel Dress" src="assets/images/dress2.gif"></a> <h3 class="geo_17_darkbrown">Rachel Dress</h3> <span class="price geo_17_darkbrown">£120 </span> </div> <div> <a href="#" class="large_image"> <img alt="Elena Top" src="assets/images/dress3.gif"></a> <h3 class="geo_17_darkbrown">Elena Top</h3> <span class="price geo_17_darkbrown">£120 </span> </div> </li> <li class="jcarousel-item jcarousel-item-horizontal jcarousel-item-1 jcarousel-item-1-horizontal jcarousel-item-placeholder jcarousel-item-placeholder-horizontal" style="float: left; list-style: none outside none;" jcarouselindex="1"> </li> <li class="jcarousel-item jcarousel-item-horizontal jcarousel-item-3 jcarousel-item-3-horizontal jcarousel-item-placeholder jcarousel-item-placeholder-horizontal"> <div> <a href="#" class="large_image"> <img alt="Elena Top" src="assets/images/dress1.gif"></a> <h3 class="geo_17_darkbrown">Elena Top</h3> <span class="price geo_17_darkbrown">£120 </span> </div> <div> <a href="#" class="large_image"> <img alt="Elena Top" src="assets/images/dress2.gif"></a> <h3 class="geo_17_darkbrown">Elena Top</h3> <span class="price geo_17_darkbrown">£120 </span> </div> <div> <a href="#" class="large_image"> <img alt="Elena Top" src="assets/images/dress3.gif"></a> <h3 class="geo_17_darkbrown">Elena Top</h3> <span class="price geo_17_darkbrown">£120 </span> </div> </li> <li class="jcarousel-item jcarousel-item-horizontal jcarousel-item-6 jcarousel-item-6-horizontal jcarousel-item-placeholder jcarousel-item-placeholder-horizontal"> <div> <a href="#" class="large_image"> <img alt="Elena Top" src="assets/images/dress3.gif"></a> <h3 class="geo_17_darkbrown">Elena Top</h3> <span class="price geo_17_darkbrown">£120 </span> </div> <div> <a href="#" class="large_image"> <img alt="Elena Top" src="assets/images/dress3.gif"></a> <h3 class="geo_17_darkbrown">Elena Top</h3> <span class="price geo_17_darkbrown">£120 </span> </div> </li> </ul> </div> <div class="jcarousel-prev jcarousel-prev-horizontal jcarousel-prev-disabled jcarousel-prev-disabled-horizontal" style="display: block;" disabled="true"> </div> <div class="jcarousel-next jcarousel-next-horizontal" style="display: block;" disabled="false"> </div> <div class="jcarousel-control geo_10_darkbrown_capital"> 7 products&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; <a href="#">1</a> <a href="#">2</a> <a href="#">3</a> <a href="#">4</a> <a href="#">5</a> <a href="#">6</a> <a href="#" class="last">7</a> </div> </div> It works like it should, put every 3 div's in li. but I have another problem with divide. It divide "x" inside the loop. For example in JS: <li class="jcarousel-item jcarousel-item-horizontal jcarousel-item-'+[x]+' jcarousel-item-'+[x]+'-horizontal jcarousel-item-placeholder jcarousel-item-placeholder-horizontal"> And HTML out is: <li class="jcarousel-item jcarousel-item-horizontal jcarousel-item-0 jcarousel-item-0-horizontal jcarousel-item-placeholder jcarousel-item-placeholder-horizontal"></li> then <li class="jcarousel-item jcarousel-item-horizontal jcarousel-item-3 jcarousel-item-3-horizontal jcarousel-item-placeholder jcarousel-item-placeholder-horizontal"></li> then <li class="jcarousel-item jcarousel-item-horizontal jcarousel-item-6 jcarousel-item-6-horizontal jcarousel-item-placeholder jcarousel-item-placeholder-horizontal"></li> etc... What I need is that count goes as 0-1-2-3-4-5-etc, but with divide it goes 0-3-6-etc and jCarousel insert blank li's 1-2, 4-5, 7-8. How I can avoid "x" divide inside the loop? Tnak you!

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  • Cannot Start MySQL Server on Fresh MAMP Install

    - by alexpelan
    I'm using Mac OS X 10.6.2 on my Macbook Pro. I can get the apache server to start, but not the mysql server, on both the default apache and default MAMP ports. When I try to go to my start page, I get the message "Error: Could not connect to MySQL server!" . Here's what's in my mysql error log: 00513 02:00:07 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.pid ended 100513 02:00:16 mysqld_safe Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /Applications/MAMP/db/mysql 100513 2:00:16 [Warning] The syntax '--log_slow_queries' is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. Please use '--slow_query_log'/'--slow_query_log_file' instead. 100513 2:00:16 [Warning] You have forced lower_case_table_names to 0 through a command-line option, even though your file system '/Applications/MAMP/db/mysql/' is case insensitive. This means that you can corrupt a MyISAM table by accessing it with different cases. You should consider changing lower_case_table_names to 1 or 2 100513 2:00:16 [Warning] One can only use the --user switch if running as root 100513 2:00:16 [Note] Plugin 'FEDERATED' is disabled. 100513 2:00:16 [Note] Plugin 'ndbcluster' is disabled. InnoDB: Error: log file /usr/local/mysql/data/ib_logfile0 is of different size 0 5242880 bytes InnoDB: than specified in the .cnf file 0 16777216 bytes! 100513 2:00:16 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' init function returned error. 100513 2:00:16 [ERROR] Plugin 'InnoDB' registration as a STORAGE ENGINE failed. 100513 2:00:16 [ERROR] /Applications/MAMP/Library/libexec/mysqld: unknown option '--skip-bdb' 100513 2:00:16 [ERROR] Aborting 100513 2:00:16 [Note] /Applications/MAMP/Library/libexec/mysqld: Shutdown complete 100513 02:00:16 mysqld_safe mysqld from pid file /Applications/MAMP/tmp/mysql/mysql.pid ended A couple of things: 1) There are a bunch of different .cnf files that come with MAMP (my-huge, my-medium, etc.)...how can I tell which one is actually being used? 2) I deleted the ib_logfile0 and ib_logfile1 as recommended by another post on serverfault, and then ended up with more errors: 100519 16:01:30 InnoDB: Log file /usr/local/mysql/data/ib_logfile0 did not exist: new to be created InnoDB: Setting log file /usr/local/mysql/data/ib_logfile0 size to 16 MB InnoDB: Database physically writes the file full: wait... 100519 16:01:30 InnoDB: Log file /usr/local/mysql/data/ib_logfile1 did not exist: new to be created InnoDB: Setting log file /usr/local/mysql/data/ib_logfile1 size to 16 MB InnoDB: Database physically writes the file full: wait... InnoDB: The log sequence number in ibdata files does not match InnoDB: the log sequence number in the ib_logfiles! 100519 16:01:31 InnoDB: Database was not shut down normally! InnoDB: Starting crash recovery. InnoDB: Reading tablespace information from the .ibd files... InnoDB: Restoring possible half-written data pages from the doublewrite InnoDB: buffer... 100519 16:01:31 InnoDB: Started; log sequence number 0 44556 100519 16:01:31 [ERROR] /Applications/MAMP/Library/libexec/mysqld: unknown option '--skip-bdb' 100519 16:01:31 [ERROR] Aborting And then I got this the next time I tried to run it: InnoDB: Unable to lock /usr/local/mysql/data/ibdata1, error: 35 InnoDB: Check that you do not already have another mysqld process InnoDB: using the same InnoDB data or log files. Sorry that this is a lot of information, but I don't want to leave anything out. Thanks.

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  • Moving users folder on Windows-7 to another partition - bad idea?

    - by Donat
    Hi, I'd like to re-submit here a question posted by Benjol on Aug 17at 5:57 "Moving users folder on Windows Vista to another partition - bad idea?" (I can't post one than one link until I earn "10 reputation" and removed my "answer" there to post my follow-up questions here). I am anxiously getting ready at long last to to carry out a clean install (using custom install option) from Vista to Windows-7 Home Premium 64bit with the free upgrade I received late October. For my Vista system I successfully set-up last Summer a multi-partitions scheme with Users and Program Data on a a different partition than the operating system (see link below, and its subsequent links in my comment for details). http://tuts4tech.net/2009/08/05/windows-7-move-the-users-and-program-files-directories-to-a-different-partition/comment-page-1/#comment-562 I was planning a similar set-up for windows 7, a little more streamlined, with OS, Program Files on C:, Users and Program Data on D:, and TV media recording on a separate partition. Reading the Question submitted by Benjol, I am second guessing too. Is moving Users and Program Data on a different partition than the default primary partition with OS and Program Files such a good idea? The couple of people I talked to at the official Microsoft Windows 7 booth at CES 2010 gave the same answer to the intention of moving the Users profile folder to another partition. In a nutshell, they all told me that they used to do this in XP and less in Vista but not anymore with Windows 7... "It is stable, after two months still no problem" I had the feeling it was a scripted answer to emphasize how Windows 7 is so stable and efficient... (Will Windows-7 system not become bugged down over the course of several months to a year or two? Only time will tell) Long story short, I share the same view than Benjol expressed with respect to being "able to backup and restore system and user data independently." I just received a 2TB usb2, eSATA external hard drive as a back-up drive, which includes NTI Shadow 4 (4.1.0.150) for back-up solution. I took note of the issue with NTUSER.DAT and I will read more about Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) for Windows 7. I am willing to put the effort if placing Users and Program Data on a different partition would allow to restore a fresher OS+Program image when the system gets bugged down. Questions: Is it such a bad idea? What is the "easy route" referred by Benjol in his post? Is it to just relocate folders to another partition using the Folder property tool? (It is not practical for several users and might not provide a straightforward restore process of just OS and Program Files when needed.) I am starting to learn about Windows 7 libraries. Would Windows 7 libraries be another alternative to achieve this? All this reading to decide how to organize the partition scheme for my custom system is starting to be confusing. I apologize for this lengthy Question. It is my first day here on SuperUser and I am just learning how different from a discussion thread it is. Thank you in advance for all your suggestions and comments. Donat

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