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Windows Azure VMs - New "Stopped" VM Options Provide Cost-effective Flexibility for On-Demand Workloads

- by KeithMayer

Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/KeithMayer/archive/2013/06/22/windows-azure-vms---new-stopped-vm-options-provide-cost-effective.aspxDidn’t make it to TechEd this year? Don’t worry! This month, we’ll be releasing a new article series that highlights the Best of TechEd announcements and technical information for IT Pros. Today’s article focuses on a new, much-heralded enhancement to Windows Azure Infrastructure Services to make it more cost-effective for spinning VMs up and down on-demand on the Windows Azure cloud platform. NEW! VMs that are shutdown from the Windows Azure Management Portal will no longer continue to accumulate compute charges while stopped! Previous to this enhancement being available, the Azure platform maintained fabric resource reservations for VMs, even in a shutdown state, to ensure consistent resource availability when starting those VMs in the future. And, this meant that VMs had to be exported and completely deprovisioned when not in use to avoid compute charges. In this article, I'll provide more details on the scenarios that this enhancement best fits, and I'll also review the new options and considerations that we now have for performing safe shutdowns of Windows Azure VMs. Which scenarios does the new enhancement best fit? Being able to easily shutdown VMs from the Windows Azure Management Portal without continued compute charges is a great enhancement for certain cloud use cases, such as: On-demand dev/test/lab environments - Freely start and stop lab VMs so that they are only accumulating compute charges when being actively used. "Bursting" load-balanced web applications - Provision a number of load-balanced VMs, but keep the minimum number of VMs running to support "normal" loads. Easily start-up the remaining VMs only when needed to support peak loads. Disaster Recovery - Start-up "cold" VMs when needed to recover from disaster scenarios. BUT ... there is a consideration to keep in mind when using the Windows Azure Management Portal to shutdown VMs: although performing a VM shutdown via the Windows Azure Management Portal causes that VM to no longer accumulate compute charges, it also deallocates the VM from fabric resources to which it was previously assigned. These fabric resources include compute resources such as virtual CPU cores and memory, as well as network resources, such as IP addresses. This means that when the VM is later started after being shutdown from the portal, the VM could be assigned a different IP address or placed on a different compute node within the fabric. In some cases, you may want to shutdown VMs using the old approach, where fabric resource assignments are maintained while the VM is in a shutdown state. Specifically, you may wish to do this when temporarily shutting down or restarting a "7x24" VM as part of a maintenance activity. Good news - you can still revert back to the old VM shutdown behavior when necessary by using the alternate VM shutdown approaches listed below. Let's walk through each approach for performing a VM Shutdown action on Windows Azure so that we can understand the benefits and considerations of each... How many ways can I shutdown a VM? In Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, there's three general ways that can be used to safely shutdown VMs: Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM Stop VM via Windows PowerShell using Windows Azure PowerShell Module Although each of these options performs a safe shutdown of the guest operation system and the VM itself, each option handles the VM shutdown end state differently. Shutdown VM via Windows Azure Management Portal When clicking the Shutdown button at the bottom of the Virtual Machines page in the Windows Azure Management Portal, the VM is safely shutdown and "deallocated" from fabric resources. Shutdown button on Virtual Machines page in Windows Azure Management Portal When the shutdown process completes, the VM will be shown on the Virtual Machines page with a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status as shown in the figure below. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped (Deallocated)" Status "Deallocated" means that the VM configuration is no longer being actively associated with fabric resources, such as virtual CPUs, memory and networks. In this state, the VM will not continue to allocate compute charges, but since fabric resources are deallocated, the VM could receive a different internal IP address ( called "Dynamic IPs" or "DIPs" in Windows Azure ) the next time it is started. TIP: If you are leveraging this shutdown option and consistency of DIPs is important to applications running inside your VMs, you should consider using virtual networks with your VMs. Virtual networks permit you to assign a specific IP Address Space for use with VMs that are assigned to that virtual network. As long as you start VMs in the same order in which they were originally provisioned, each VM should be reassigned the same DIP that it was previously using. What about consistency of External IP Addresses? Great question! External IP addresses ( called "Virtual IPs" or "VIPs" in Windows Azure ) are associated with the cloud service in which one or more Windows Azure VMs are running. As long as at least 1 VM inside a cloud service remains in a "Running" state, the VIP assigned to a cloud service will be preserved. If all VMs inside a cloud service are in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status, then the cloud service may receive a different VIP when VMs are next restarted. TIP: If consistency of VIPs is important for the cloud services in which you are running VMs, consider keeping one VM inside each cloud service in the alternate VM shutdown state listed below to preserve the VIP associated with the cloud service. Shutdown Guest Operating System inside the VM When performing a Guest OS shutdown or restart ( ie., a shutdown or restart operation initiated from the Guest OS running inside the VM ), the VM configuration will not be deallocated from fabric resources. In the figure below, the VM has been shutdown from within the Guest OS and is shown with a "Stopped" VM status rather than the "Stopped ( Deallocated )" VM status that was shown in the previous figure. Note that it may require a few minutes for the Windows Azure Management Portal to reflect that the VM is in a "Stopped" state in this scenario, because we are performing an OS shutdown inside the VM rather than through an Azure management endpoint. Virtual Machine in a "Stopped" Status VMs shown in a "Stopped" status will continue to accumulate compute charges, because fabric resources are still being reserved for these VMs. However, this also means that DIPs and VIPs are preserved for VMs in this state, so you don't have to worry about VMs and cloud services getting different IP addresses when they are started in the future. Stop VM via Windows PowerShell In the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module, a new -StayProvisioned parameter has been added to the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet. This new parameter provides the flexibility to choose the VM configuration end result when stopping VMs using PowerShell: When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet without the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped and deallocated; that is, the VM will be left in a "Stopped ( Deallocated )" status just like the end result when a VM Shutdown operation is performed via the Windows Azure Management Portal. When running the Stop-AzureVM cmdlet with the -StayProvisioned parameter specified, the VM will be safely stopped but fabric resource reservations will be preserved; that is the VM will be left in a "Stopped" status just like the end result when performing a Guest OS shutdown operation. So, with PowerShell, you can choose how Windows Azure should handle VM configuration and fabric resource reservations when stopping VMs on a case-by-case basis. TIP: It's important to note that the -StayProvisioned parameter is only available in the latest version of the Windows Azure PowerShell Module. So, if you've previously downloaded this module, be sure to download and install the latest version to get this new functionality. Want to Learn More about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services? To learn more about Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, be sure to check-out these additional FREE resources: Become our next "Early Expert"! Complete the Early Experts "Cloud Quest" and build a multi-VM lab network in the cloud for FREE! Build some cool scenarios! Check out our list of over 20+ Step-by-Step Lab Guides based on key scenarios that IT Pros are implementing on Windows Azure Infrastructure Services TODAY! Looking forward to seeing you in the Cloud! - Keith Build Your Lab! Download Windows Server 2012 Don’t Have a Lab? Build Your Lab in the Cloud with Windows Azure Virtual Machines Want to Get Certified? Join our Windows Server 2012 "Early Experts" Study Group

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Migrating SQL Server Databases – The DBA’s Checklist (Part 1)

- by Sadequl Hussain

It is a fact of life: SQL Server databases change homes. They move from one instance to another, from one version to the next, from old servers to new ones. They move around as an organisation’s data grows, applications are enhanced or new versions of the database software are released. If not anything else, servers become old and unreliable and databases eventually need to find a new home. Consider the following scenarios: 1. A new database application is rolled out in a production server from the development or test environment 2. A copy of the production database needs to be installed in a test server for troubleshooting purposes 3. A copy of the development database is regularly refreshed in a test server during the system development life cycle 4. A SQL Server is upgraded to a newer version. This can be an in-place upgrade or a side-by-side migration 5. One or more databases need to be moved between different instances as part of a consolidation strategy. The instances can be running the same or different version of SQL Server 6. A database has to be restored from a backup file provided by a third party application vendor 7. A backup of the database is restored in the same or different instance for disaster recovery 8. A database needs to be migrated within the same instance: a. Files are moved from direct attached storage to storage area network b. The same database is copied under a different name for another application Migrating SQL Server database applications is a complex topic in itself. There are a number of components that can be involved: jobs, DTS or SSIS packages, logins or linked servers are only few pieces of the puzzle. However, in this article we will focus only on the central part of migration: the installation of the database itself. Unless it is an in-place upgrade, typically the database is taken from a source server and installed in a destination instance. Most of the time, a full backup file is used for the rollout. The backup file is either provided to the DBA or the DBA takes the backup and restores it in the target server. Sometimes the database is detached from the source and the files are copied to and attached in the destination. Regardless of the method of copying, moving, refreshing, restoring or upgrading the physical database, there are a number of steps the DBA should follow before and after it has been installed in the destination. It is these post database installation steps we are going to discuss below. Some of these steps apply in almost every scenario described above while some will depend on the type of objects contained within the database. Also, the principles hold regardless of the number of databases involved. Step 1: Make a copy of data and log files when attaching and detaching When detaching and attaching databases, ensure you have made copies of the data and log files if the destination is running a newer version of SQL Server. This is because once attached to a newer version, the database cannot be detached and attached back to an older version. Trying to do so will give you a message like the following: Server: Msg 602, Level 21, State 50, Line 1 Could not find row in sysindexes for database ID 6, object ID 1, index ID 1. Run DBCC CHECKTABLE on sysindexes. Connection Broken If you try to backup the attached database and restore it in the source, it will still fail. Similarly, if you are restoring the database in a newer version, it cannot be backed up or detached and put back in an older version of SQL. Unlike detach and attach method though, you do not lose the backup file or the original database here. When detaching and attaching a database, it is important you keep all the log files available along with the data files. It is possible to attach a database without a log file and SQL Server can be instructed to create a new log file, however this does not work if the database was detached when the primary file group was read-only. You will need all the log files in such cases. Step 2: Change database compatibility level Once the database has been restored or attached to a newer version of SQL Server, change the database compatibility level to reflect the newer version unless there is a compelling reason not to do so. When attaching or restoring from a previous version of SQL, the database retains the older version’s compatibility level. The only time you would want to keep a database with an older compatibility level is when the code within your database is no longer supported by SQL Server. For example, outer joins with *= or the =* operators were still possible in SQL 2000 (with a warning message), but not in SQL 2005 anymore. If your stored procedures or triggers are using this form of join, you would want to keep the database with an older compatibility level. For a list of compatibility issues between older and newer versions of SQL Server databases, refer to the Books Online under the sp_dbcmptlevel topic. Application developers and architects can help you in deciding whether you should change the compatibility level or not. You can always change the compatibility mode from the newest to an older version if necessary. To change the compatibility level, you can either use the database’s property from the SQL Server Management Studio or use the sp_dbcmptlevel stored procedure. Bear in mind that you cannot run the built-in reports for databases from SQL Server Management Studio if you keep the database with an older compatibility level. The following figure shows the error message I received when trying to run the “Disk Usage by Top Tables” report against a database. This database was hosted in a SQL Server 2005 system and still had a compatibility mode 80 (SQL 2000). Continues…

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, April 05, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, April 05, 2010New Projects.Net Data Form Wizard: A Basic .Net application that will connect to a SQL Server, allow you to select a database, then select from the user created tables, read the tabl...Agilisa Data.Controls: Agilisa DataControls provides ready to use Databound controls, encapsulating the data connection logic, caching, for ASP.NET Controls. Just drop th...algoritmia: A Python 3.1+ library of Data Structures and Algorithms. This library is being used to teach a course on Algorithms in my university. It contains ...Bag of Tricks: The original WPF Bag of tricks, now maintained by your friends at Pixel Lab.DIMIS: It is a simple asp.net system, just for practice!DotNetNuke® Postgres Data Provider: DNN PG Provider is a DotNetNuke® 4.9.2 Data Provider for PostgreSQL, an enterprise class open source database system. With DNN PG DataProvider y...Home Finance: This project develop to manage your home finance.House Repair Management System: House Repair Management SystemLaunchpadNET: LaunchpadNET is a C# library for interfacing your .NET program with the Novation Launchpad controller.Mapsui - UI for maps: Mapsui is a UI library for mapping applications. It is based on BruTile and SharpMap. It is designed to be fast and responsive.micronovo: micronovomicronovomicronovomicronovoNPlurk: The project goal is to provide a .NET implemented Plurk API wrapper. PowerExt: PowerExt is a Windows Explorer add-in written in C++. Primarily targeted at programmers, it adds an additional .NET tab to the File Properties dial...Python Multiple Dispatch: Multiple dispatch (AKA multimethods) for Python 3 via a metaclass and type annotations.SpugDisposeCheck - Visual Studio Addin for validating Sharepoint dispose objects: AddIn that wraps the SPDisposeCheck Tool from Microsoft and fully integrate it with Visual Studio.System.Tuples: System.Tuples is a small tuple library. It uses T4 to generate tuples, and is made to be compatible with .net 2.0, .net 3.0 and .net 3.5.WebStatistics Server for Windows Server: WebStatistics Server for Windows Server is a tool to create visitor and traffic statistics of a Windows Server running IIS Webserver. It includes a...whileActivity Test: This is a temporary project to test the whileActivity and the updateResourceActivity (Forefront Identity Manager 2010 rtm)XBMC NFO Exporter: XBMC Nfo Exporter is a simple utility that allows you to create reports based on your media XMBC NFO files.XML Flattener: A simple tool to flatten "pretty"-printed XML files into a single line for use in web service test situations, etc. xvanneste: Sources et exemples utilisés sur le site http://www.xvanneste.com et http://media.xvanneste.comzhengym: 这是我个人的测试项目New Releases.Net Data Form Wizard: Alpha: I am only providing the logical code at this point. I will release a completed project once it has basic functionality, at the moment it only gener....Net Data Form Wizard: Alpha Code: This is only the basic VB code to create a form from the database information.Alter gear SQL index Management: Setup 1.1.1: Changes : Added ability to save / delete connection stringsExcelDna: ExcelDna Version 0.24: This versions adds packing support for .config files, and fixes a bug where temp files were not cleaned up.Hash Calculator: HashCalculator 1.1: Added drag-and-drop support Fixed some bugsHeadCounter: HeadCounter 1.2.4 'Vaelastrasz': Added a basic bbcode option for forum posting to sites that do not support full bbcode implementations (e.g. Guild Portal)Home Access Plus+: v3.2.5.0: v3.2.5.0 Release Change Log: Added the booking system File Changes: ~/app_data/* ~/bin/CHS.dll ~/bin/CHS.pdb ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/...Home Access Plus+: v3.2.5.1: v3.2.5.1 Release Change Log: Fixed access to the booking system for non domain admin File Changes: ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/CHS Extranet.pdb...Howard van Rooijen's Code Samples: Getting Started with MongoDB and NoRM: Code to accompany the blog post A .NET Developer Guide to: MongoDB and NoRM This download contains the a solution with the following structure: G...iExporter - iTunes playlist exporting: iExporter gui v2.5.1.0 - console v1.2.1.0: Paypal donate! Fixed small bug for iExporter Gui When pressing the Select button more then once, the Deselect button would not disable the Export...IST435: Lab 2 Demo Solution: Lab 2 Demo Solution - OverviewThis is a demo solution for Lab 2 which meets the basic requirements of the lab. Note that this solution has the foll...JSINQ - LINQ to Objects for JavaScript: JSINQ 1.0.0.1: Minor bugfixes with the Enumerable and Dictionary implementations.Mavention: Mavention Instant Page Create: Mavention Instant Page Create allows you to create new Publishing Pages with a single mouse click. Screenshots and more information available @ htt...Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0 Marketing List Member Importer: Nocelab ExcelAddin - Release 2.2: Version: 2.2 Release Note: - Added tab in the task panel - Added test button to check MSCRM connection How to install: - Uninstall previous ve...Multiplayer Quiz: Release 1_6_903_0b: Latest beta release - please leave any bugs etc in comments.MVVM Light Toolkit: MVVM Light Toolkit V3 SP1: This release can be installed on top of V3, and adds the following features: Project and Item templates for Visual Studio 10 Express (phone editio...NPlurk: First release: This is first release of NPlurk and it's almost completely workable. Enjoy!Performance Analysis of Logs (PAL) Tool: PAL v2.0 Alpha 5: Export to Perfmon Log Template or Data Collector Set Added: Added the feature to export perfmon log templates (*.htm) for WinXP/2003 computers or D...Python Multiple Dispatch: v0.1: Initial release. I believe it is working fine.ReRemind: V7: - Added new notification: "Unread MMS" <- Default is enabled, so be sure to go into Config if you don't want this. - Config now supports sound and ...SharePhone: SharePhone v.1.0.2: Added support for retrieving user profiles and saving back to SharePoint Use clientContext.GetUserProfile(..) or clientContext.UpdateUserProfile(..)Shinkansen: compress, crunch, combine, and cache JavaScript and CSS: Shinkansen 1.0.0.033010: Added support for ASP.NET MVC. Download contains binaries only.SpugDisposeCheck - Visual Studio Addin for validating Sharepoint dispose objects: SpugDisposeCheck Beta Release [Stable]: SpugDisposeCheck - Visual Studio Addin for validating Sharepoint dispose objects You can download the Microsoft SPDisposeCheck Tool from here:http...Starter Kit Mytrip.Mvc.Entity: Mytrip.Mvc.Entity 1.0 RC2: EF Membership XML Membership UserManager FileManager Localization Captcha ClientValidation Theme CrossBrowser VS 2010 RC MVC 2 R...System.Tuples: System.Tuples for .net 2.0: The System.Tuples release for .net 3.0System.Tuples: System.Tuples for .net 3.0: The System.Tuples release for .net 3.0 Extension methods have been removed to remain compatible with 3.0System.Tuples: System.Tuples for .net 3.5: The System.Tuples release for .net 3.5 Contains full functionality of the library.WatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.03.00: Whats New Html (non Flash) TagCloud can be skinned 11 Skins added for Html Cloud Skin Orange Skin Purple Import/Export of Custom Tags Sett...whileActivity Test: Activity1.zip: ActivityLibrary1.zip contains the source code to do a testWindows Phone 7 Panorama control: panorama control v0.5: Control source code for v0.5. This is the first drop. Doens't include sample project.Windows Phone 7 Panorama control: panorama control v0.5 + samples: Control source code and sample project. This drop includes 2 samples projects : - PhoneApp - Windows Phone sample - SilverlightApp - Silverlight...XML Flattener: XML Flattener: A simple WinForms app--paste in your XML, hit Flatten, and copy the result.xvanneste: RestFul SharePoint: ListItem.xslt ListItems.xslt Lists.xslt ListItemSPChat.xslt RestFull.htm SPChat.htmZinc Launcher: Zinc Launcher 1.0.1.0: Zinc Launcher requires that Zinc be properly installed. It should work under Vista Media Center and 7 Media Center, although Vista is untested. Zin...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseASP.NET Ajax LibrarySilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesDotNetNuke® Community EditionMost Active ProjectsGraffiti CMSnopCommerce. Open Source online shop e-commerce solution.RawrFacebook Developer ToolkitjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETFarseer Physics EngineNcqrs Framework - A CQRS framework for .NETpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryN2 CMS

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How to deal with a poor team leader and a tester manager from hell? [closed]

- by Google

Let me begin by explaining my situation and give a little context to the situation. My company has around 15 developers but we're split up on two different areas. We have a fresh product team and the old product team. The old product team does mostly bug fixes/maintenance and a feature here and there. The fresh product had never been released and was new from the ground up. I am on the fresh product team. The team consists of three developers (myself, another developer and a senior developer). The senior is also our team leader. Our roles are as follows: Myself: building the administration client as well as build/release stuff Other dev: building the primary client Team lead: building the server In addition to the dev team, we interact with the test manager often. By "we" I mean me since I do the build stuff and give him the builds to test. Trial 1: The other developer on my team and I have both tried to talk to our manager about our team leader. About two weeks before release we went in his office and had a closed door meeting before our team lead got to work. We expressed our concerns about the product, its release date and our team leader. We expressed our team leader had a "rosey" image of the product's state. Our manager seemed to listen to what we said and thanked us for taking the initiative to speak with him about it. He got us an extra two weeks before release. The situation with the leader didn't change. In fact, it got a little worse. While we were using the two weeks to fix issues he was slacking off quite a bit. Just to name a few things, he installed Windows 8 on his dev machine during this time (claimed him machine was broke), he wrote a plugin for our office messenger that turned turned messages into speech, and one time when I went in his office he was making a 3D model in Blender (for "fun"). He felt the product was "pretty good" and ready for release. During this time I dealt with the test manager on a daily basis. Every bug or issue that popped up he would pretty much attack me personally (regardless of which component the bug was in). The test manager would often push his "views" of what needed to be done with the product. He virtually ordered me to change text on our installer and to add features to the installer and administration client. I tried to express how his suggestions were "valid ideas" but it was too close to release to do those kinds of things and to make matters worse, our technical writer had already finished documentation and such a change would not only affect the dev team but would affect the technical writer and marketing as well. I expressed I wasn't going to make those changes without marketing's consent as well as the technical writer and my manager's. He pretty much said I don't care about the product and said I don't do my job. I would like to take a moment to say I take my job seriously and I do my best. I am the kind of person that goes to work 30-40 mins early and usually leaves 30 minutes later than everyone else. Saying I don't care or do my job is just insulting. His "attacks" on me grew from day to day. Every bug that popped up he would usually comment on in some manner that jabbed me and the other developer. "Oh that bug! Yeah that should have been fixed by now, figures! If someone would do their job!" and other similar kinds of comments. Keep in mind 8 out of 10 bugs were in the server and had nothing to do with me and the other developer. That didn't seem to matter.. On one occasion they got pretty bad and we almost got into a yelling match so I decided to stop talking to him all together. I carried all communication through office email (with my manager cc'd). He never attacked me via email. He still attempted to get aggressive with me in person but I completely ignore him and my only response to any question is, "Ask my team leader." or "Ask a product manager." The product launched after our two week extension. Trial 2: The day after the product launch our team leader went on vacation (thanks....). At this time we got a lot of questions from the tech support... major issues with the product. All of these issues were bugs marked "resolved" by our lovely team leader (a typical situation that often popped up). This is where we currently are. The other developer has been with the company for about three years (I've been there only five months) and told me he was going to speak with our manager alone and hoped it would help get our concerns across a little better in a one-on-one. He spoke with the manager and directly addressed all of our concerns regarding our team leader and the test manager giving us (mostly me) hell. Our manager basically said he understood how hard we work and said he noticed it and there's no doubt about it. He said he spoke with the test manager about his temper. Regarding the team leader, he didn't say a whole lot. He suggested we sit down with the team leader and address our concerns (isn't that the manager's job?). We're still waiting to see if anything has changed but we doubt it. What can we do next? 1) Talk to the team leader (may stress relationship and make work awkward) I admit the team leader is generally a nice guy. He is just a horrible leader and working closely with him is painful. I still don't believe bringing this directly to the team leader would help at all and may negatively impact the situation. 2) I could quit. Other than this situation the job is pretty fantastic. I really like my other coworkers and we have quite a bit of freedom. 3) I could take the situation with the team leader to one of the owners. I would then be throwing my manager under the bus. 4) I could take the situation with the test manager to HR. Any suggestions? Comments?

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jQuery Templates - XHTML Validation

- by hajan

Many developers have already asked me about this. How to make XHTML valid the web page which uses jQuery Templates. Maybe you have already tried, and I don't know what are your results but here is my opinion regarding this. By default, Visual Studio.NET adds the xhtml1-transitional.dtd schema <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> So, if you try to validate your page which has jQuery Templates against this schema, your page won't be XHTML valid. Why? It's because when creating templates, we use HTML tags inside <script> ... </script> block. Yes, I know that the script block has type="text/html" but it's not supported in this schema, thus it's not valid. Let's try validate the following code Code <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <title>jQuery Templates :: XHTML Validation</title> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> $(function () { var attendees = [ { Name: "Hajan", Surname: "Selmani", speaker: true, phones: [070555555, 071888999, 071222333] }, { Name: "Denis", Surname: "Manski", phones: [070555555, 071222333] } ]; $("#myTemplate").tmpl(attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); </script> <script id="myTemplate" type="text/html"> <li> ${Name} ${Surname} {{if speaker}} (<font color="red">speaks</font>) {{else}} (attendee) {{/if}} </li> </script> </head> <body> <ol id="attendeesList"></ol> </body> </html> To validate it, go to http://validator.w3.org/#validate_by_input and copy paste the code rendered on client-side browser (it’s almost the same, only the template is rendered inside OL so LI tags are created for each item). Press CHECK and you will get: Result: 1 Errors, 2 warning(s) The error message says: Validation Output: 1 Error Line 21, Column 13: document type does not allow element "li" here <li> Yes, the <li> HTML element is not allowed inside the <script>, so how to make it valid? FIRST: Using <![CDATA][…]]> The first thing that came in my mind was the CDATA. So, by wrapping any HTML tag which is in script blog, inside <![CDATA[ ........ ]]> it will make our code valid. However, the problem is that the template won't render since the template tags {} cannot get evaluated if they are inside CDATA. Ok, lets try with another approach. SECOND: HTML5 validation Well, if we just remove the strikethrough part bellow of the !DOPCTYPE <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> our template is going to be checked as HTML5 and will be valid. Ok, there is another approach I've also tried: THIRD: Separate template to an external file We can separate the template to external file. I didn’t show how to do this previously, so here is the example. 1. Add HTML file with name Template.html in your ASPX website. 2. Place your defined template there without <script> tag Content inside Template.html <li> ${Name} ${Surname} {{if speaker}} (<font color="red">speaks</font>) {{else}} (attendee) {{/if}} </li> 3. Call the HTML file using $.get() jQuery ajax method and render the template with data using $.tmpl() function. $.get("/Templates/Template.html", function (template) { $.tmpl(template, attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); So the complete code is: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" > <head> <title>jQuery Templates :: XHTML Validation</title> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jquery.templates/beta1/jquery.tmpl.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> $(function () { var attendees = [ { Name: "Hajan", Surname: "Selmani", speaker: true, phones: [070555555, 071888999, 071222333] }, { Name: "Denis", Surname: "Manski", phones: [070555555, 071222333] } ]; $.get("/Templates/Template.html", function (template) { $.tmpl(template, attendees).appendTo("#attendeesList"); }); }); </script> </head> <body> <ol id="attendeesList"></ol> </body> </html> This document was successfully checked as XHTML 1.0 Transitional! Result: Passed If you have any additional methods for XHTML validation, you can share it :). Thanks,Hajan

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TechEd 2010 Day One – How I Travel

- by BuckWoody

Normally when I blog on the first day of a conference, well, there hasn’t been a first day yet. So I talk about the value of a conference or some other facet. And normally in my (non-conference) blogs, I show you how I have learned to be a data professional – things I’ve learned how to do over the years. But in all that time, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about a big part of my job – traveling. I’ve traveled a lot throughout the years, when I’ve taught, gone to conferences, consulted and in my current role assisting Microsoft customers with large-scale database system designs. So I’ll share a few thoughts about what I do. Keep in mind that I travel for short durations, just a day or so, and sometimes I travel internationally. For those I prepare differently – what I’m talking about here is what I do for a multi-day, same-country trip. Hopefully you find it useful. I’ll tag a few other travelers I know to add their thoughts. Preparing for Travel When I’m notified of a trip, I begin researching the location. I find the flights, hotel and (if I have to) a car to use while I’m away. We have an in-house system we use to book the travel, but when I travel not-for-Microsoft I use Expedia and Kayak to find what I need. Traveling on Sunday and Friday is the worst. I have to do it sometimes (like this week) and it’s always a bad idea. But you can blunt the impact by booking as early as you can stand it. That means I have to be up super-early, but the flights are normally on time. I stay flexible, and always have a backup plan in case the flights are delayed or canceled. For the hotel, I tend to go on the cheaper side, and I look for older hotels that have been renovated, or quirky ones. For instance, in Boise, ID recently I stayed at a 60’s-themed (think Mad-Men) hotel that was very cool. Always I go on the less expensive side – I find the “luxury” hotels nail me for Internet, food, everything. The cheaper places include all kinds of things, and even have breakfasts, shuttles and all kinds of things that start to add up. I even call ahead to make sure there’s an iron and ironing board available, since I’ll need those when I get there. I find any way I can not to get a car. I use mass-transit wherever possible, and try to make friends and pay their gas to take me places. In a pinch, I’ll use a taxi. It ends up being cheaper, faster, and less stressful all around. Packing Over the years I’ve learned never to check luggage whenever I can. To do that, I lay out everything I want to take with me on the bed, and then try and make sure I’m really going to use it. I wear a dark wool set of pants, which I can clean and wear in hot and cold climates. I bring undies and socks of course, and for most places I have to wear “dress up” shirts. I bring at least two print T-Shirts in case I want to dress down for something while I’m gone, but I only bring one set of shoes. All the clothes are rolled as tightly as possible as I learned in the military. Then I use those to cushion the electronics I take. For toiletries I bring a shaver, toothpaste and toothbrush, D/O and a small brush. Everything else the hotel will provide. For entertainment, I take a small Zune, a full PC-Headset (so I can make IP calls on the road) and my laptop. I don’t take books or anything else – everything is electronic. I use E-books (downloaded from our Library), Audio-Books (on the Zune) and I also bring along a Kaossilator (more here) to play music in the hotel room or even on the plane without being heard. If I can, I pack into one roll-on bag. There’s not a lot better than this one, but I also have a Bag I was given as a prize for something or other here at Microsoft. Either way, I like something with less pockets and more big, open compartments. Everything gets rolled up and packed in, with all of the wires and charges in small bags my wife made for me. The laptop (and anything I don’t want gate-checked) goes on top or in an outside pouch so I can grab it quickly if I have to gate-check the bag. As much as I can, I try to go in one bag. When I can’t (like this week) I use this bag since it can expand, roll up, crush and even be put away later. It’s super-heavy canvas and worth the price. This allows me to not check a bag. Journey Logistics The day of the trip, I have everything ready since I’m getting up early. I pack a few small snacks inside a plastic large-mouth water bottle, which protects the snacks and lets me get water in the terminal. I bring along those little powdered drink mixes to add to the water. At the airport, I make a beeline for the power-outlets. I charge up my laptop and phone, and download all my e-mails so I can work on them off-line in the air. I don’t travel as often as I used to – just every month or so now, so I don’t have a membership to an airline club. If I travel much more, I’ll invest in one again – they are WELL worth the money, for the wifi, food and quiet if for nothing else. I print out my logistics on paper and put that in my pocket – flight numbers, hotel addresses and phones for everything. That way if I have to make a change, I don’t have to boot up anything or even have power to be able to roll with the punches if things change. Working While Away While I’m away I realize I’m going to be swamped with things at the conference or with my clients. So I turn on Out-Of-Office notifications to let people know I won’t be as responsive, and I keep my Outlook calendar up to date so my co-workers know what I’m up to. I even update it with hotel and phone info in case they really need to reach me. I share my calendar with my wife so my family knows what I’m doing as well. I check my e-mail during breaks, but I only respond to them in the evening or early morning at the hotel. I tweet during conferences. The point is to be as present as possible during the event or when I’m at the clients. Both deserve it. So those are my initial thoughts. I’ll tag Brent Ozar, Brad McGeHee and Paul Randal, and they can tag whomever they wish. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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Easier ASP.NET MVC Routing

- by Steve Wilkes

I've recently refactored the way Routes are declared in an ASP.NET MVC application I'm working on, and I wanted to share part of the system I came up with; a really easy way to declare and keep track of ASP.NET MVC Routes, which then allows you to find the name of the Route which has been selected for the current request. Traditional MVC Route Declaration Traditionally, ASP.NET MVC Routes are added to the application's RouteCollection using overloads of the RouteCollection.MapRoute() method; for example, this is the standard way the default Route which matches /controller/action URLs is created: routes.MapRoute( "Default", "{controller}/{action}/{id}", new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }); The first argument declares that this Route is to be named 'Default', the second specifies the Route's URL pattern, and the third contains the URL pattern segments' default values. To then write a link to a URL which matches the default Route in a View, you can use the HtmlHelper.RouteLink() method, like this: @ this.Html.RouteLink("Default", new { controller = "Orders", action = "Index" }) ...that substitutes 'Orders' into the {controller} segment of the default Route's URL pattern, and 'Index' into the {action} segment. The {Id} segment was declared optional and isn't specified here. That's about the most basic thing you can do with MVC routing, and I already have reservations: I've duplicated the magic string "Default" between the Route declaration and the use of RouteLink(). This isn't likely to cause a problem for the default Route, but once you get to dozens of Routes the duplication is a pain. There's no easy way to get from the RouteLink() method call to the declaration of the Route itself, so getting the names of the Route's URL parameters correct requires some effort. The call to MapRoute() is quite verbose; with dozens of Routes this gets pretty ugly. If at some point during a request I want to find out the name of the Route has been matched.... and I can't. To get around these issues, I wanted to achieve the following: Make declaring a Route very easy, using as little code as possible. Introduce a direct link between where a Route is declared, where the Route is defined and where the Route's name is used, so I can use Visual Studio's Go To Definition to get from a call to RouteLink() to the declaration of the Route I'm using, making it easier to make sure I use the correct URL parameters. Create a way to access the currently-selected Route's name during the execution of a request. My first step was to come up with a quick and easy syntax for declaring Routes. 1 . An Easy Route Declaration Syntax I figured the easiest way of declaring a route was to put all the information in a single string with a special syntax. For example, the default MVC route would be declared like this: "{controller:Home}/{action:Index}/{Id}*" This contains the same information as the regular way of defining a Route, but is far more compact: The default values for each URL segment are specified in a colon-separated section after the segment name The {Id} segment is declared as optional simply by placing a * after it That's the default route - a pretty simple example - so how about this? routes.MapRoute( "CustomerOrderList", "Orders/{customerRef}/{pageNo}", new { controller = "Orders", action = "List", pageNo = UrlParameter.Optional }, new { customerRef = "^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$", pageNo = "^[0-9]+$" }); This maps to the List action on the Orders controller URLs which: Start with the string Orders/ Then have a {customerRef} set of characters and numbers Then optionally a numeric {pageNo}. And again, it’s quite verbose. Here's my alternative: "Orders/{customerRef:^[a-zA-Z0-9]+$}/{pageNo:^[0-9]+$}*->Orders/List" Quite a bit more brief, and again, containing the same information as the regular way of declaring Routes: Regular expression constraints are declared after the colon separator, the same as default values The target controller and action are specified after the -> The {pageNo} is defined as optional by placing a * after it With an appropriate parser that gave me a nice, compact and clear way to declare routes. Next I wanted to have a single place where Routes were declared and accessed. 2. A Central Place to Declare and Access Routes I wanted all my Routes declared in one, dedicated place, which I would also use for Route names when calling RouteLink(). With this in mind I made a single class named Routes with a series of public, constant fields, each one relating to a particular Route. With this done, I figured a good place to actually declare each Route was in an attribute on the field defining the Route’s name; the attribute would parse the Route definition string and make the resulting Route object available as a property. I then made the Routes class examine its own fields during its static setup, and cache all the attribute-created Route objects in an internal Dictionary. Finally I made Routes use that cache to register the Routes when requested, and to access them later when required. So the Routes class declares its named Routes like this: public static class Routes{ [RouteDefinition("Orders/{customerName}->Orders/Index")] public const string OrdersCustomerIndex = "OrdersCustomerIndex"; [RouteDefinition("Orders/{customerName}/{orderId:^([0-9]+)$}->Orders/Details")] public const string OrdersDetails = "OrdersDetails"; [RouteDefinition("{controller:Home}*/{action:Index}*")] public const string Default = "Default"; } ...which are then used like this: @ this.Html.RouteLink(Routes.Default, new { controller = "Orders", action = "Index" }) Now that using Go To Definition on the Routes.Default constant takes me to where the Route is actually defined, it's nice and easy to quickly check on the parameter names when using RouteLink(). Finally, I wanted to be able to access the name of the current Route during a request. 3. Recovering the Route Name The RouteDefinitionAttribute creates a NamedRoute class; a simple derivative of Route, but with a Name property. When the Routes class examines its fields and caches all the defined Routes, it has access to the name of the Route through the name of the field against which it is defined. It was therefore a pretty easy matter to have Routes give NamedRoute its name when it creates its cache of Routes. This means that the Route which is found in RequestContext.RouteData.Route is now a NamedRoute, and I can recover the Route's name during a request. For visibility, I made NamedRoute.ToString() return the Route name and URL pattern, like this: The screenshot is from an example project I’ve made on bitbucket; it contains all the named route classes and an MVC 3 application which demonstrates their use. I’ve found this way of defining and using Routes much tidier than the default MVC system, and you find it useful too

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Dynamically creating a Generic Type at Runtime

- by Rick Strahl

I learned something new today. Not uncommon, but it's a core .NET runtime feature I simply did not know although I know I've run into this issue a few times and worked around it in other ways. Today there was no working around it and a few folks on Twitter pointed me in the right direction. The question I ran into is: How do I create a type instance of a generic type when I have dynamically acquired the type at runtime? Yup it's not something that you do everyday, but when you're writing code that parses objects dynamically at runtime it comes up from time to time. In my case it's in the bowels of a custom JSON parser. After some thought triggered by a comment today I realized it would be fairly easy to implement two-way Dictionary parsing for most concrete dictionary types. I could use a custom Dictionary serialization format that serializes as an array of key/value objects. Basically I can use a custom type (that matches the JSON signature) to hold my parsed dictionary data and then add it to the actual dictionary when parsing is complete. Generic Types at Runtime One issue that came up in the process was how to figure out what type the Dictionary<K,V> generic parameters take. Reflection actually makes it fairly easy to figure out generic types at runtime with code like this: if (arrayType.GetInterface("IDictionary") != null) { if (arrayType.IsGenericType) { var keyType = arrayType.GetGenericArguments()[0]; var valueType = arrayType.GetGenericArguments()[1]; … } } The GetArrayType method gets passed a type instance that is the array or array-like object that is rendered in JSON as an array (which includes IList, IDictionary, IDataReader and a few others). In my case the type passed would be something like Dictionary<string, CustomerEntity>. So I know what the parent container class type is. Based on the the container type using it's then possible to use GetGenericTypeArguments() to retrieve all the generic types in sequential order of definition (ie. string, CustomerEntity). That's the easy part. Creating a Generic Type and Providing Generic Parameters at RunTime The next problem is how do I get a concrete type instance for the generic type? I know what the type name and I have a type instance is but it's generic, so how do I get a type reference to keyvaluepair<K,V> that is specific to the keyType and valueType above? Here are a couple of things that come to mind but that don't work (and yes I tried that unsuccessfully first): Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<keyType, valueType>); Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<typeof(keyType), typeof(valueType)>); The problem is that this explicit syntax expects a type literal not some dynamic runtime value, so both of the above won't even compile. I turns out the way to create a generic type at runtime is using a fancy bit of syntax that until today I was completely unaware of: Type elementType = typeof(keyvalue<,>).MakeGenericType(keyType, valueType); The key is the type(keyvalue<,>) bit which looks weird at best. It works however and produces a non-generic type reference. You can see the difference between the full generic type and the non-typed (?) generic type in the debugger: The nonGenericType doesn't show any type specialization, while the elementType type shows the string, CustomerEntity (truncated above) in the type name. Once the full type reference exists (elementType) it's then easy to create an instance. In my case the parser parses through the JSON and when it completes parsing the value/object it creates a new keyvalue<T,V> instance. Now that I know the element type that's pretty trivial with: // Objects start out null until we find the opening tag resultObject = Activator.CreateInstance(elementType); Here the result object is picked up by the JSON array parser which creates an instance of the child object (keyvalue<K,V>) and then parses and assigns values from the JSON document using the types key/value property signature. Internally the parser then takes each individually parsed item and adds it to a list of List<keyvalue<K,V>> items. Parsing through a Generic type when you only have Runtime Type Information When parsing of the JSON array is done, the List needs to be turned into a defacto Dictionary<K,V>. This should be easy since I know that I'm dealing with an IDictionary, and I know the generic types for the key and value. The problem is again though that this needs to happen at runtime which would mean using several Convert.ChangeType() calls in the code to dynamically cast at runtime. Yuk. In the end I decided the easier and probably only slightly slower way to do this is a to use the dynamic type to collect the items and assign them to avoid all the dynamic casting madness: else if (IsIDictionary) { IDictionary dict = Activator.CreateInstance(arrayType) as IDictionary; foreach (dynamic item in items) { dict.Add(item.key, item.value); } return dict; } This code creates an instance of the generic dictionary type first, then loops through all of my custom keyvalue<K,V> items and assigns them to the actual dictionary. By using Dynamic here I can side step all the explicit type conversions that would be required in the three highlighted areas (not to mention that this nested method doesn't have access to the dictionary item generic types here). Static <- -> Dynamic Dynamic casting in a static language like C# is a bitch to say the least. This is one of the few times when I've cursed static typing and the arcane syntax that's required to coax types into the right format. It works but it's pretty nasty code. If it weren't for dynamic that last bit of code would have been a pretty ugly as well with a bunch of Convert.ChangeType() calls to litter the code. Fortunately this type of type convulsion is rather rare and reserved for system level code. It's not every day that you create a string to object parser after all :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in .NET CSharp Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths

- by Renso

Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths ASP.Net includes quite a plethora of properties to retrieve path information about the current request, control and application. There's a ton of information available about paths on the Request object, some of it appearing to overlap and some of it buried several levels down, and it can be confusing to find just the right path that you are looking for. To keep things straight I thought it a good idea to summarize the path options along with descriptions and example paths. I wrote a post about this a long time ago in 2004 and I find myself frequently going back to that page to quickly figure out which path I’m looking for in processing the current URL. Apparently a lot of people must be doing the same, because the original post is the second most visited even to this date on this blog to the tune of nearly 500 hits per day. So, I decided to update and expand a bit on the original post with a little more information and clarification based on the original comments. Request Object Paths Available Here's a list of the Path related properties on the Request object (and the Page object). Assume a path like http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx for the paths below where webstore is the name of the virtual. Request Property Description and Value ApplicationPath Returns the web root-relative logical path to the virtual root of this app. /webstore/ PhysicalApplicationPath Returns local file system path of the virtual root for this app. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore PhysicalPath Returns the local file system path to the current script or path. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore\admin\paths.aspx Path FilePath CurrentExecutionFilePath All of these return the full root relative logical path to the script page including path and scriptname. CurrentExcecutionFilePath will return the ‘current’ request path after a Transfer/Execute call while FilePath will always return the original request’s path. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath Returns an ASP.NET root relative virtual path to the script or path for the current request. If in a Transfer/Execute call the transferred Path is returned. ~/admin/paths.aspx PathInfo Returns any extra path following the script name. If no extra path is provided returns the root-relative path (returns text in red below). string.Empty if no PathInfo is available. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx/ExtraPathInfo RawUrl Returns the full root relative URL including querystring and extra path as a string. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 Url Returns a fully qualified URL including querystring and extra path. Note this is a Uri instance rather than string. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 UrlReferrer The fully qualified URL of the page that sent the request. This is also a Uri instance and this value is null if the page was directly accessed by typing into the address bar or using an HttpClient based Referrer client Http header. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/default.aspx?Info Control.TemplateSourceDirectory Returns the logical path to the folder of the page, master or user control on which it is called. This is useful if you need to know the path only to a Page or control from within the control. For non-file controls this returns the Page path. /webstore/admin/ As you can see there’s a ton of information available there for each of the three common path formats: Physical Path is an OS type path that points to a path or file on disk. Logical Path is a Web path that is relative to the Web server’s root. It includes the virtual plus the application relative path. ~/ (Root-relative) Path is an ASP.NET specific path that includes ~/ to indicate the virtual root Web path. ASP.NET can convert virtual paths into either logical paths using Control.ResolveUrl(), or physical paths using Server.MapPath(). Root relative paths are useful for specifying portable URLs that don’t rely on relative directory structures and very useful from within control or component code. You should be able to get any necessary format from ASP.NET from just about any path or script using these mechanisms. ~/ Root Relative Paths and ResolveUrl() and ResolveClientUrl() ASP.NET supports root-relative virtual path syntax in most of its URL properties in Web Forms. So you can easily specify a root relative path in a control rather than a location relative path: <asp:Image runat="server" ID="imgHelp" ImageUrl="~/images/help.gif" /> ASP.NET internally resolves this URL by using ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif") to arrive at the root-relative URL of /webstore/images/help.gif which uses the Request.ApplicationPath as the basepath to replace the ~. By convention any custom Web controls also should use ResolveUrl() on URL properties to provide the same functionality. In your own code you can use Page.ResolveUrl() or Control.ResolveUrl() to accomplish the same thing: string imgPath = this.ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif"); imgHelp.ImageUrl = imgPath; Unfortunately ResolveUrl() is limited to WebForm pages, so if you’re in an HttpHandler or Module it’s not available. ASP.NET Mvc also has it’s own more generic version of ResolveUrl in Url.Decode: <script src="<%= Url.Content("~/scripts/new.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> which is part of the UrlHelper class. In ASP.NET MVC the above sort of syntax is actually even more crucial than in WebForms due to the fact that views are not referencing specific pages but rather are often path based which can lead to various variations on how a particular view is referenced. In a Module or Handler code Control.ResolveUrl() unfortunately is not available which in retrospect seems like an odd design choice – URL resolution really should happen on a Request basis not as part of the Page framework. Luckily you can also rely on the static VirtualPathUtility class: string path = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/admin/paths.aspx"); VirtualPathUtility also many other quite useful methods for dealing with paths and converting between the various kinds of paths supported. One thing to watch out for is that ToAbsolute() will throw an exception if a query string is provided and doesn’t work on fully qualified URLs. I wrote about this topic with a custom solution that works fully qualified URLs and query strings here (check comments for some interesting discussions too). Similar to ResolveUrl() is ResolveClientUrl() which creates a fully qualified HTTP path that includes the protocol and domain name. It’s rare that this full resolution is needed but can be useful in some scenarios. Mapping Virtual Paths to Physical Paths with Server.MapPath() If you need to map root relative or current folder relative URLs to physical URLs or you can use HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(). Inside of a Page you can do the following: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("~/scripts/ww.jquery.js")); MapPath is pretty flexible and it understands both ASP.NET style virtual paths as well as plain relative paths, so the following also works. string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("scripts/silverlight.js"); as well as dot relative syntax: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("../scripts/jquery.js"); Once you have the physical path you can perform standard System.IO Path and File operations on the file. Remember with physical paths and IO or copy operations you need to make sure you have permissions to access files and folders based on the Web server user account that is active (NETWORK SERVICE, ASPNET typically). Note the Server.MapPath will not map up beyond the virtual root of the application for security reasons. Server and Host Information Between these settings you can get all the information you may need to figure out where you are at and to build new Url if necessary. If you need to build a URL completely from scratch you can get access to information about the server you are accessing: Server Variable Function and Example SERVER_NAME The of the domain or IP Address wwww.west-wind.com or 127.0.0.1 SERVER_PORT The port that the request runs under. 80 SERVER_PORT_SECURE Determines whether https: was used. 0 or 1 APPL_MD_PATH ADSI DirectoryServices path to the virtual root directory. Note that LM typically doesn’t work for ADSI access so you should replace that with LOCALHOST or the machine’s NetBios name. /LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT/webstore Request.Url and Uri Parsing If you still need more control over the current request URL or you need to create new URLs from an existing one, the current Request.Url Uri property offers a lot of control. Using the Uri class and UriBuilder makes it easy to retrieve parts of a URL and create new URLs based on existing URL. The UriBuilder class is the preferred way to create URLs – much preferable over creating URIs via string concatenation. Uri Property Function Scheme The URL scheme or protocol prefix. http or https Port The port if specifically specified. DnsSafeHost The domain name or local host NetBios machine name www.west-wind.com or rasnote LocalPath The full path of the URL including script name and extra PathInfo. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx Query The query string if any ?id=1 The Uri class itself is great for retrieving Uri parts, but most of the properties are read only if you need to modify a URL in order to change it you can use the UriBuilder class to load up an existing URL and modify it to create a new one. Here are a few common operations I’ve needed to do to get specific URLs: Convert the Request URL to an SSL/HTTPS link For example to take the current request URL and converted it to a secure URL can be done like this: UriBuilder build = new UriBuilder(Request.Url); build.Scheme = "https"; build.Port = -1; // don't inject portUri newUri = build.Uri; string newUrl = build.ToString(); Retrieve the fully qualified URL without a QueryString AFAIK, there’s no native routine to retrieve the current request URL without the query string. It’s easy to do with UriBuilder however: UriBuilder builder = newUriBuilder(Request.Url); builder.Query = ""; stringlogicalPathWithoutQuery = builder.ToString();

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Creating A SharePoint Parent/Child List Relationship– SharePoint 2010 Edition

- by Mark Rackley

Hey blog readers… It has been almost 2 years since I posted my most read blog on creating a Parent/Child list relationship in SharePoint 2007: Creating a SharePoint List Parent / Child Relationship - Out of the Box And then a year ago I improved on my method and redid the blog post… still for SharePoint 2007: Creating a SharePoint List Parent/Child Relationship – VIDEO REMIX Since then many of you have been asking me how to get this to work in SharePoint 2010, and frankly I have just not had time to look into it. I wish I could have jumped into this sooner, but have just recently began to look at it. Well.. after all this time I have actually come up with two solutions that work, neither of them are as clean as I’d like them to be, but I wanted to get something in your hands that you can start using today. Hopefully in the coming weeks and months I’ll be able to improve upon this further and give you guys some better options. For the most part, the process is identical to the 2007 process, but you have probably found out that the list view web parts in 2010 behave differently, and getting the Parent ID to your new child form can be a pain in the rear (at least that’s what I’ve discovered). Anyway, like I said, I have found a couple of solutions that work. If you know of a better one, please let us know as it bugs me that this not as eloquent as my 2007 implementation. Getting on the same page First thing I’d recommend is recreating this blog: Creating a SharePoint List Parent/Child Relationship – VIDEO REMIX in SharePoint 2010… There are some vague differences, but it’s basically the same… Here’s a quick video of me doing this in SP 2010: Creating Lists necessary for this blog post Now that you have the lists created, lets set up the New Time form to use a QueryString variable to populate the Parent ID field: Creating parameters in Child’s new item form to set parent ID Did I talk fast enough through both of those videos? Hopefully by now that stuff is old hat to you, but I wanted to make sure everyone could get on the same page. Okay… let’s get started. Solution 1 – XSLTListView with Javascript This solution is the more elegant of the two, however it does require the use of a little javascript. The other solution does not use javascript, but it also doesn’t use the pretty new SP 2010 pop-ups. I’ll let you decide which you like better. The basic steps of this solution are: Inserted a Related Item View Insert a ContentEditorWebPart Insert script in ContentEditorWebPart that pulls the ID from the Query string and calls the method to insert a new item on the child entry form Hide the toolbar from data view to remove “add new item” link. Again, you don’t HAVE to use a CEWP, you could just put the javascript directly in the page using SPD. Anyway, here is how I did it: Using Related Item View / JavaScript Here’s the JavaScript I used in my Content Editor Web Part: <script type="text/javascript"> function NewTime() { // Get the Query String values and split them out into the vals array var vals = new Object(); var qs = location.search.substring(1, location.search.length); var args = qs.split("&"); for (var i=0; i < args.length; i++) { var nameVal = args[i].split("="); var temp = unescape(nameVal[1]).split('+'); nameVal[1] = temp.join(' '); vals[nameVal[0]] = nameVal[1]; } var issueID = vals["ID"]; //use this to bring up the pretty pop up NewItem2(event,"http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID=" + issueID); //use this to open a new window //window.location="http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID=" + issueID; } </script> Solution 2 – DataFormWebPart and exact same 2007 Process This solution is a little more of a hack, but it also MUCH more close to the process we did in SP 2007. So, if you don’t mind not having the pretty pop-up and prefer the comforts of what you are used to, you can give this one a try. The basics steps are: Insert a DataFormWebPart instead of the List Data View Create a Parameter on DataFormWebPart to store “ID” Query String Variable Filter DataFormWebPart using Parameter Insert a link at bottom of DataForm Web part that points to the Child’s new item form and passes in the Parent Id using the Parameter. See.. like I told you, exact same process as in 2007 (except using the DataFormWeb Part). The DataFormWebPart also requires a lot more work to make it look “pretty” but it’s just table rows and cells, and can be configured pretty painlessly. Here is that video: Using DataForm Web Part One quick update… if you change the link in this solution from: <tr> <td><a href="http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID={$IssueIDParam}">Click here to create new item...</a> </td> </tr> to: <tr> <td> <a href="javascript:NewItem2(event,'http://sp2010dev:1234/Lists/Time/NewForm.aspx?IssueID={$IssueIDParam}');">Click here to create new item...</a> </td> </tr> It will open up in the pretty pop up and act the same as solution one… So… both Solutions will now behave the same to the end user. Just depends on which you want to implement. That’s all for now… Remember in both solutions when you have them working, you can make the “IssueID” invisible to users by using the “ms-hidden” class (it’s my previous blog post on the subject up there). That’s basically all there is to it! No pithy or witty closing this time… I am sorry it took me so long to dive into this and I hope your questions are answered. As I become more polished myself I will try to come up with a cleaner solution that will make everyone happy… As always, thanks for taking the time to stop by.

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DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network

Even though IPv6 might not be that important within your local network it might be good to get yourself into shape, and be able to provide some details of your infrastructure automatically to your network clients. This is the second article in a series on IPv6 configuration: Configure IPv6 on your Linux system DHCPv6: Provide IPv6 information in your local network Enabling DNS for IPv6 infrastructure Accessing your web server via IPv6 Piece of advice: This is based on my findings on the internet while reading other people's helpful articles and going through a couple of man-pages on my local system. IPv6 addresses for everyone (in your network) Okay, after setting up the configuration of your local system, it might be interesting to enable all your machines in your network to use IPv6. There are two options to solve this kind of requirement... Either you're busy like a bee and you go around to configure each and every system manually, or you're more the lazy and effective type of network administrator and you prefer to work with Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). Obviously, I'm of the second type. Enabling dynamic IPv6 address assignments can be done with a new or an existing instance of a DHCPd. In case of Ubuntu-based installation this might be isc-dhcp-server. The isc-dhcp-server allows address pooling for IP and IPv6 within the same package, you just have to run to independent daemons for each protocol version. First, check whether isc-dhcp-server is already installed and maybe running your machine like so: $ service isc-dhcp-server6 status In case, that the service is unknown, you have to install it like so: $ sudo apt-get install isc-dhcp-server Please bear in mind that there is no designated installation package for IPv6. Okay, next you have to create a separate configuration file for IPv6 address pooling and network parameters called /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf. This file is not automatically provided by the package, compared to IPv4. Again, use your favourite editor and put the following lines: $ sudo nano /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf authoritative;default-lease-time 14400; max-lease-time 86400;log-facility local7;subnet6 2001:db8:bad:a55::/64 { option dhcp6.name-servers 2001:4860:4860::8888, 2001:4860:4860::8844; option dhcp6.domain-search "ios.mu"; range6 2001:db8:bad:a55::100 2001:db8:bad:a55::199; range6 2001:db8:bad:a55::/64 temporary;} Next, save the file and start the daemon as a foreground process to see whether it is going to listen to requests or not, like so: $ sudo /usr/sbin/dhcpd -6 -d -cf /etc/dhcp/dhcpd6.conf eth0 The parameters are explained quickly as -6 we want to run as a DHCPv6 server, -d we are sending log messages to the standard error descriptor (so you should monitor your /var/log/syslog file, too), and we explicitely want to use our newly created configuration file (-cf). You might also use the command switch -t to test the configuration file prior to running the server. In my case, I ended up with a couple of complaints by the server, especially reporting that the necessary lease file wouldn't exist. So, ensure that the lease file for your IPv6 address assignments is present: $ sudo touch /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd6.leases$ sudo chown dhcpd:dhcpd /var/lib/dhcp/dhcpd6.leases Now, you should be good to go. Stop your foreground process and try to run the DHCPv6 server as a service on your system: $ sudo service isc-dhcp-server6 startisc-dhcp-server6 start/running, process 15883 Check your log file /var/log/syslog for any kind of problems. Refer to the man-pages of isc-dhcp-server and you might check out Chapter 22.6 of Peter Bieringer's IPv6 Howto. The instructions regarding DHCPv6 on the Ubuntu Wiki are not as complete as expected and it might not be as helpful as this article or Peter's HOWTO. But see for yourself. Does the client get an IPv6 address? Running a DHCPv6 server on your local network surely comes in handy but it has to work properly. The following paragraphs describe briefly how to check the IPv6 configuration of your clients, Linux - ifconfig or ip command First, you have enable IPv6 on your Linux by specifying the necessary directives in the /etc/network/interfaces file, like so: $ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces iface eth1 inet6 dhcp Note: Your network device might be eth0 - please don't just copy my configuration lines. Then, either restart your network subsystem, or enable the device manually using the dhclient command with IPv6 switch, like so: $ sudo dhclient -6 You would either use the ifconfig or (if installed) the ip command to check the configuration of your network device like so: $ sudo ifconfig eth1eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:1d:09:5d:8d:98 inet addr:192.168.160.147 Bcast:192.168.160.255 Mask:255.255.255.0 inet6 addr: 2001:db8:bad:a55::193/64 Scope:Global inet6 addr: fe80::21d:9ff:fe5d:8d98/64 Scope:Link UP BROADCAST RUNNING MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1 Looks good, the client has an IPv6 assignment. Now, let's see whether DNS information has been provided, too. $ less /etc/resolv.conf # Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)# DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTENnameserver 2001:4860:4860::8888nameserver 2001:4860:4860::8844nameserver 192.168.1.2nameserver 127.0.1.1search ios.mu Nicely done. Windows - netsh Per description on TechNet the netsh is defined as following: "Netsh is a command-line scripting utility that allows you to, either locally or remotely, display or modify the network configuration of a computer that is currently running. Netsh also provides a scripting feature that allows you to run a group of commands in batch mode against a specified computer. Netsh can also save a configuration script in a text file for archival purposes or to help you configure other servers." And even though TechNet states that it applies to Windows Server (only), it is also available on Windows client operating systems, like Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8. In order to get or even set information related to IPv6 protocol, we have to switch the netsh interface context prior to our queries. Open a command prompt in Windows and run the following statements: C:\Users\joki>netshnetsh>interface ipv6netsh interface ipv6>show interfaces Select the device index from the Idx column to get more details about the IPv6 address and DNS server information (here: I'm going to use my WiFi device with device index 11), like so: netsh interface ipv6>show address 11 Okay, address information has been provided. Now, let's check the details about DNS and resolving host names: netsh interface ipv6> show dnsservers 11 Okay, that looks good already. Our Windows client has a valid IPv6 address lease with lifetime information and details about the configured DNS servers. Talking about DNS server... Your clients should be able to connect to your network servers via IPv6 using hostnames instead of IPv6 addresses. Please read on about how to enable a local named with IPv6.

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MIX 2010 Covert Operations Day 2 Silverlight + Windows 7 Phone

- by GeekAgilistMercenary

Left the Circus Circus and headed to the geek circus at Mandalay Bay. Got in, got some breakfast, met a few more people and headed to the keynote. Upon arriving the crew I was hanging with at the event; Erik Mork, Beth Murray, and Brian Henderson and I were entertained with several other thousand geeks by the wicked yo-yoing. The first video demo of something was of Bing Maps and various aspects of Microsoft Research integrated together. Namely the pictures, put in place, on real 3d element maps of various environments. Silverlight Scott Guthrie, as one would guess, kicked off the keynote. His first point was that user experience has become a priority at Microsoft. This can be seen by any observant soul with the release and push of Expression, Silverlight, and the other tools. This is even more apparent when one takes note of Microsoft bringing in people that can actually do good design and putting them at the forefront. The next thing Scott brought up was a few key points about Silverlight. Currently Silverlight is a little over 2 years old and has achieved a pretty solid 60% penetration. Silverlight has all sorts of capabilities that have been developed and are now provided as open source including; ad injection, smoothing, playback editing, and more. Another thing he showed, which really struck me as awesome being in the analytics space, was the Olympics and a quick glimpse of the ad statistics, viewer experience, video playback performance, audience trends, and overall viewer participation. All of it rendered in Silverlight in beautiful detail. The key piece of Scott's various points were all punctuated with the fact that all of this code is available as open source. Not only is Microsoft really delving into this design element of things, they're getting involved in the right ways. One of the last points I'll bring up about Silverlight 4 is the ability to have HD video on a monitor, and an entirely different activity being done on the other monitor, effectively making Silverlight the only RIA framework that supports multi-monitor support. Overall, Silverlight is continuing to impress – providing superior capabilities tit-for-tat with the competition. Windows 7 Phone The Windows 7 Phone has 3 primary buttons (yes, more than the iPhone, don't let your mind explode!!). Start, Search, and Back control all of the needed functionality of the phone. At the same time, of course, there is the multi-touch, touch, and other interactive abilities of the interface. The intent, once start is pressed is to have all the information that a phone owner wants displayed immediately. Avoiding the scrolling through pages of apps or rolling a ball to get through multitudes of other non-interactive phone interfaces. The Windows 7 Phone simply has the data right in front of you, basically a phone dashboard. From there it is easy to dive into the interactive areas of the phone. Each area of the interface of the phone is broken into hubs. These hubs include applications, data, and other things based on a relative basis. This basis being determined by the user. These applications interact on many other levels, and form a kind of relationship between each other adding more and more meta-data to the phone user, their interactions between the applications, and of course the social element of their interactions on the phone. This makes this phone a practical must have for a marketer involved in social media. The level of wired together interaction is massive, and of course, if you've seen Office Outlook 2010 you know that the power that is pulled into the phone by being tied to Outlook is massive. Joe Belfiore also showed several UI & specifically UX elements of the phone interface that allows paging to be instinctual by simple clipped items, flipping page to page, and other excellent user experience advances for phone devices. Belfiore's also showed how his people hub had a massive list of people, with pictures, all from various different social networks and other associated relations. The rendering, speed, and viewing of these people's, their pictures, their social network information, and other characteristics was smooth and in some situations unbelievably rendered. This demo showed some of the great power of the beta phone, which isn't even as powerful as the planned end device. Joe finished up by jumping into the music, videos, and other media with the Zune Component of the Windows 7 Mobile Phone. This was all good stuff, but I'll get to what really sold me on the media element in a moment. When Joe was done, Scott Guthrie stepped back up to walk through building a Windows 7 Mobile Phone. This is were I have to give serious props. He built this application, in Visual Studio 2010, in front of 2000+ people. That was cool, but what really was amazing that he build the application in about 2 minutes. The IDE, side by side design that is standard in Visual Studio is light years ahead of x-Code or any of the iPhone IDEs. The Windows 7 Mobile System, if it can get market penetration, poses a technologically superior development and phone platform over anything on the market right now. The biggest problem with the phone, is it just isn't available yet. I personally can't wait for a chance to build some apps for the new Windows Phone. Netflix, I May Start Up an Account Again! When I get my Windows 7 Phone device, I am absolutely getting a Netflix account again. The Vertigo crew, as I wrote on Twitter "#MIX10 Props @seesharp on @netflix demo", displayed an application on the phone for Netflix that actually ran HD Video of Rescue Me (with Dennis Leary). The video played back smooth as it would on a dedicated computer, I was instantly sold. So this didn't actually sell me on the phone, because I'm already sold, but it did sell me whole heartedly on the media capabilities of the pending phone. Anyway, I try not to do this but I may double post today. Lunch is over and I'm off to another session very near and dear to the heart of my occupation, Analytics Tracking. Stay tuned and I should have that post up by the end of the day. Original Post – Check out my other blog for even more technical ramblings and reads.

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Generate Strongly Typed Observable Events for the Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx)

- by Bobby Diaz

I must have tried reading through the various explanations and introductions to the new Reactive Extensions for .NET before the concepts finally started sinking in. The article that gave me the ah-ha moment was over on SilverlightShow.net and titled Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight. The author did a good job comparing the "normal" way of handling events vs. the new "reactive" methods. Admittedly, I still have more to learn about the Rx Framework, but I wanted to put together a sample project so I could start playing with the new Observable and IObservable<T> constructs. I decided to throw together a whiteboard application in Silverlight based on the Drawing with Rx example on the aforementioned article. At the very least, I figured I would learn a thing or two about a new technology, but my real goal is to create a fun application that I can share with the kids since they love drawing and coloring so much! Here is the code sample that I borrowed from the article: var mouseMoveEvent = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonDown"); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonUp"); var draggingEvents = from pos in mouseMoveEvent .SkipUntil(mouseLeftButtonDown) .TakeUntil(mouseLeftButtonUp) .Let(mm => mm.Zip(mm.Skip(1), (prev, cur) => new { X2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X, X1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X, Y2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y, Y1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y })).Repeat() select pos; draggingEvents.Subscribe(p => { Line line = new Line(); line.Stroke = new SolidColorBrush(Colors.Black); line.StrokeEndLineCap = PenLineCap.Round; line.StrokeLineJoin = PenLineJoin.Round; line.StrokeThickness = 5; line.X1 = p.X1; line.Y1 = p.Y1; line.X2 = p.X2; line.Y2 = p.Y2; this.LayoutRoot.Children.Add(line); }); One thing that was nagging at the back of my mind was having to deal with the event names as strings, as well as the verbose syntax for the Observable.FromEvent<TEventArgs>() method. I came up with a couple of static/helper classes to resolve both issues and also created a T4 template to auto-generate these helpers for any .NET type. Take the following code from the above example: var mouseMoveEvent = Observable.FromEvent<MouseEventArgs>(this, "MouseMove"); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonDown"); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Observable.FromEvent<MouseButtonEventArgs>(this, "MouseLeftButtonUp"); Turns into this with the new static Events class: var mouseMoveEvent = Events.Mouse.Move.On(this); var mouseLeftButtonDown = Events.Mouse.LeftButtonDown.On(this); var mouseLeftButtonUp = Events.Mouse.LeftButtonUp.On(this); Or better yet, just remove the variable declarations altogether: var draggingEvents = from pos in Events.Mouse.Move.On(this) .SkipUntil(Events.Mouse.LeftButtonDown.On(this)) .TakeUntil(Events.Mouse.LeftButtonUp.On(this)) .Let(mm => mm.Zip(mm.Skip(1), (prev, cur) => new { X2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X, X1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).X, Y2 = cur.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y, Y1 = prev.EventArgs.GetPosition(this).Y })).Repeat() select pos; The Move, LeftButtonDown and LeftButtonUp members of the Events.Mouse class are readonly instances of the ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> class that provide type-safe access to the events via the On() method. Here is the code for the class: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; namespace System.Linq { /// <summary> /// Represents an event that can be managed via the <see cref="Observable"/> API. /// </summary> /// <typeparam name="TTarget">The type of the target.</typeparam> /// <typeparam name="TEventArgs">The type of the event args.</typeparam> public class ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> where TEventArgs : EventArgs { /// <summary> /// Initializes a new instance of the <see cref="ObservableEvent"/> class. /// </summary> /// <param name="eventName">Name of the event.</param> protected ObservableEvent(String eventName) { EventName = eventName; } /// <summary> /// Registers the specified event name. /// </summary> /// <param name="eventName">Name of the event.</param> /// <returns></returns> public static ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs> Register(String eventName) { return new ObservableEvent<TTarget, TEventArgs>(eventName); } /// <summary> /// Creates an enumerable sequence of event values for the specified target. /// </summary> /// <param name="target">The target.</param> /// <returns></returns> public IObservable<IEvent<TEventArgs>> On(TTarget target) { return Observable.FromEvent<TEventArgs>(target, EventName); } /// <summary> /// Gets or sets the name of the event. /// </summary> /// <value>The name of the event.</value> public string EventName { get; private set; } } } And this is how it's used: /// <summary> /// Categorizes <see cref="ObservableEvents"/> by class and/or functionality. /// </summary> public static partial class Events { /// <summary> /// Implements a set of predefined <see cref="ObservableEvent"/>s /// for the <see cref="System.Windows.System.Windows.UIElement"/> class /// that represent mouse related events. /// </summary> public static partial class Mouse { /// <summary>Represents the MouseMove event.</summary> public static readonly ObservableEvent<UIElement, MouseEventArgs> Move = ObservableEvent<UIElement, MouseEventArgs>.Register("MouseMove"); // additional members omitted... } } The source code contains a static Events class with prefedined members for various categories (Key, Mouse, etc.). There is also an Events.tt template that you can customize to generate additional event categories for any .NET type. All you should have to do is add the name of your class to the types collection near the top of the template: types = new Dictionary<String, Type>() { //{ "Microsoft.Maps.MapControl.Map, Microsoft.Maps.MapControl", null } { "System.Windows.FrameworkElement, System.Windows", null }, { "Whiteboard.MainPage, Whiteboard", null } }; The template is also a bit rough at this point, but at least it generates code that *should* compile. Please let me know if you run into any issues with it. Some people have reported errors when trying to use T4 templates within a Silverlight project, but I was able to get it to work with a little black magic... You can download the source code for this project or play around with the live demo. Just be warned that it is at a very early stage so don't expect to find much today. I plan on adding alot more options like pen colors and sizes, saving, printing, etc. as time permits. HINT: hold down the ESC key to erase! Enjoy! Additional Resources Using Reactive Extensions in Silverlight DevLabs: Reactive Extensions for .NET (Rx) Rx Framework Part III - LINQ to Events - Generating GetEventName() Wrapper Methods using T4

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 22, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 22, 2010New ProjectsDocument Toolkit Extensions: Document Toolkit Extensions provide a variety of samples, document converters and helpers for Document Toolkit, a fast, feature-rich and 100% clien...dream: dreamEnhanced Web Controls: The Enhanced Web Control Library Contains web controls that enhance the functionality of the microsoft input controls. New functionality includes l...Europe Engulfed: Europe Engulfed is a PC version of the classic GMT board war game of the same name simulating World War II in the European theater. It is develope...eXpress Persistent Objects (XPO) Toolkit: eXpress Persistent Objects (XPO) Toolkit provides extensions to the DevExpress Object-Relational Mapping Suite.FBGraph.NET: Write apps for Facebook's Graph API using .NET. Includes support for C#, VB.NET, ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC.HugeFlow.OOB: Silverlight OOB Library It supports useful custom controls. WindowChrome, InstallScreen. LivePad: LivePad, It can be used to record your life journey. LivePad，可以用来记录您的人生历程。Management listings: The project is management adsMerthin: Merthin is an F# based Framework which boundaries are not defined yet. For now a bit of linear algebra.Mobile Exchange: Mobile Exchange is a .NET Compact Framework library and sample application for accessing the Stack Exchange API available on sites like Stack Overf...PC/SC Micro: PC/SC Micro is an API and a library. The API is a subset of the PC/SC Lite API and allows a .NET Micro Framework application to communicate with ...SerialPortLogger: SerialPortLogger is a simple monitoring application which montors the serial port and outputs to a database.SharePoint NNTP List Sync: Syncronizes NNTP groups with SharePoint lists and offers post/reply capability. Sets item date as post date and attempts to lookup user in local d...Simple Help System: Simple Help System (SHS) je jednoduchý nápovědný systém jak pro vývojáře tak pro obyčejné lidi. Vyvýjeno v C#.SoulHackers Demon Unite(Chinese version): SoulHackers Demon Unite calculate program, for Chinese version on PlayStationTPager: Mercurial pager with color support on WindowsWork Item Query Administration: Work Item Query Administration (wiqadmin) is command-line utility to manage work item queries in Team Foundation Server. For any TeamProject you ca...XPlatformCPP: A cross platform C++ rendering API, that uses either OpenGL 2.1 or Direct3D 9.0c as a backend. Works with Win32API (Windows), Xlib (Linux,etc...), ...Xshell: Xshell is a replacement for the Windows Explorer shell designed for Media Center/Home Theater PCs.عبر السـدم: عبر السدم هي لعبة ثلاثية الأبعاد من إنجاز أعضاء الشبكة العربية لمطوري الألعاب بالاعتماد على تقنية XNA. http://www.agdn-online.com http://www.ag...New ReleasesAzure Publish-Subscribe: Azure Pub-Sub Developer Manual v0.1: Very early alpha of the documentation. It's an early look at the architecture only.Chaow Framework: Chaow Framework V1.00: Project Description Chaow Framework is the set of class libraries designed for enhancing standard .NET framework. It allows you to write more simpl...Document Toolkit Extensions: Document Toolkit Extensions Beta 1: The first public beta release of Document Toolkit and Document Toolkit Extensions.DotNetNuke Russian Language packs: Core Russian Language Pack for DNN 05.04.02: Core Russian Language Pack for DNN 05.04.02 Добавлены несколько ресурсов из новой редакции... Исправлены ошибки и описки.DynamicJson: Release 1.2.0.0: Fix - Deserialize(cast) can't convert to dynamic[] Fix - Deserialize(cast) throw exception if has getonly propertyEnhanced Web Controls: Enhanced Web Controls: This download includes the Enhanced Web Control Library DLL. Also inlcuded is the most recently tested version of the Ajax Control Toolkit, you may...Europe Engulfed: Europe Engulfed: This is the first release for the Codeplex-based project. It includes all source code changes up to and including Change Set 50762. To use: copy ...Extend SmallBasic: Teaching Extensions v.017: added a quiz for spiderweb recipeFree Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.1.0 Released: Hi, This release contains the following enhancements: Mouse events for TrendLine have been implemented. You can go through Visifire documentation...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.5.3 Released: Hi, This release contains the following enhancements: Mouse events for TrendLine have been implemented. You can go through Visifire documentation...GreedyRSS: GreedyRSS 2.1: SuchSofts GreedyRSS平台整体更新至2.1版，重写了大量代码，可见还不够成熟稳定。此外还有以下几点主要更新：增加一个辅助类Settings，参见http://semify.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!7CB96C25969B3811!2345.entry...HugeFlow.OOB: HugeFlow.OOB 0.9 Beta for SL4: First release!NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.05.21.001: Changes since the last build:2010-05-20 23:20:17 Jarek Kowalski added tests for CsvLayout, refactored TargetWithLayoutHeaderAndFooter 2010-05-20 2...patterns & practices SharePoint Guidance: SPG 2010 Drop11: SharePoint Guidance Drop Notes Microsoft patterns and practices What's in this Drop: Docs/CHM ** *DropLocation\CHM\SharePointGuidance.chm ...Persian Date/Time support for MsSQL: Build 59 (STABLE): Removed CreateDateTimeWmS() ! Use public static PersianDateTime CreateDateTime(int year, int month, int day, int hour, int min, int sec) instead. ...PiPiBugNet: 增加了创建新Bug界面: 增加了创建新Bug界面，尚未编写代码Rule 18 - Love your clipboard: Rule 18 (Beta version): This is the beta of the next release for Rule 18. Use if you feel comfortable with software that has minimal real world testing applied. Current...Scrum Sprint Monitor: v1.0.0.48591: What is new in this release? #6132 - Bug with open work hours; Added support for MSF for Agile process template; Improved data reporting in the...sGSHOPedit: sGSHOPedit v1.0 (Alpha): -SharePoint NNTP List Sync: 1.0 Release: You may need to change the posting server within the layouts, it is hard coded A webpart wsp is not provided because you should customize the sou...Silverlight Report Library: Version 2.0: - Upgraded to Silverlight 4.0 RTW - ReportHeader control added which is templateable - PagePrinting and PagePrinted events added - PageBreak ad...Snoop, the WPF Spy Utility: Snoop 2.5.1: This is a minor bug fix release for Snoop. In particular, I have fixed the installers so that they create separately named shortcuts ... for each ...SoulHackers Demon Unite(Chinese version): WCFTestClient: This program is using WCF and .NET 4.0. This version is include unite 2 and unite 3 and check what can unite. Element unite is not included yet.SqlServerExtensions: V 0.1 beta: Version 0.1 BetaStackOverflow.Net: StackOverflow.Net for Silverlight public beta: The beta version of StackOverflow.Net for silverlight 4StackOverflow.Net: StackOverflow.Net for Windows Phone 7 public beta: The Windows Phone 7 version of StackOverflow.netStackOverflow.Net: StackOverflow.Net public beta: A public beta to go along with with the public beta of the Stack Exchange APIStyleCop+: StyleCop+ 0.8: Added new extended rule for SA1502. SP1502 has an option which allows constructors to be placed on a single line.SynthExport: SynthExport 1.1.0: Added support for extraction of camera parameters The number of images in coordinate systems is now shown Added status label Improved user ex...TPager: TPager-20100521: First releaseVCC: Latest build, v2.1.30521.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWcfDoc: 1.0.5: Targeting .NET 4.0.Work Item Query Administration: 1.0: This is the first release an contains the following commands: list import export rename deleteMost Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesASP.NETMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise Librarypatterns & practices: Windows Azure Security GuidanceCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and SilverlightSQL Server PowerShell ExtensionsGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationBlogEngine.NETCodeReviewNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModulePHPExcel

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 29, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 29, 2010New ProjectsASP.NET MVC Time Planner: ASP.NET MVC based time planner is example solution that introduces ASP.NET MVC, MSSQL AJAX and jQuery development.Blit Scripting Engine: Blit Scripting Engine provides developers using Microsofts XNA Framework the ability to implement a scripting solution to their games and other pro...Expression Evaluator: This is an article on how to build a basic expression evaluator. It can evaluate any numerical expression combined with trigonometric functions for...Log Analyzer: This project has the aim to help developers to see live log/trace from their application applying visual styles to the grabbed text.LParse: LParse is a monadic parser combinator library, similar to Haskell’s Parsec. It allows you create parsers on C# language. All parsers are first-clas...NeatHtml: NeatHtml™ is a highly-portable open source website component that displays untrusted content securely, efficiently, and accessibly. Untrusted conte...NeatUpload: The NeatUpload ™ ASP.NET component allows developers to stream uploaded files to storage (filesystem or database) and allows users to monitor uplo...NSoup: NSoup is a .NET port of the jsoup (http://jsoup.org) HTML parser and sanitizer originally written in Java. jsoup originally written by Jonathan He...Ordering: c# farm softwarephone7: Project for Windows Phone 7RestCall: A very simple library to make a simple REST call and deserialize to an object. It uses WCF REST Starter Kit and the .net serializer in: System.Runt...SCSM CSV Connector: CSV Connector allows you to specify a data file and mapping location and a scheuled interval in minutes. 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Logarithmic...Fulcrum: Fulcrum 1.0: Initial release.Git Source Control Provider: V 0.3: V 0.3 Add automatic status refresh when files in solution folder changedIBCSharp: IBCSharp 1.04: What IBCSharp 1.04.zip unzips to: http://i50.tinypic.com/205qofl.png IBCSharp Change Log 1.04 - 5/28/2010 Updated IBClient.dll to IB API version...MapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 May 28 2010: This shifts the projection library to System.Spatial.Projections instead of MWProj4. This also fixes a meter/feet conversion error.Microsoft Health Common User Interface: Release 8.2.51.000: This is version 8.2 of the Microsoft® Health Common User Interface Control Toolkit. This release includes code updates to controls as listed below....NeatHtml: NeatHtml-trunk.221: Adds support for Internet Explorer Mobile 6.NeatUpload: NeatUpload-1.3.25: Fixes the following bugs: SWFUpload.swf could not be served by a CDN because it was embedded without setting allowScriptAccess="always". 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The next version has a better review...Simple.NET: Simple.Mocking 1.0.0.6: Initial version of a new mocking framework for .NET Revision 1: Expect.AnyInocationOn<T>(T target) changed to Expect.AnyInocationOn(object target...Sonic.Net: Sonic.Net v1.0.1 For Unity 2.0: This Version is a port to VS2010 of the codebase with support for unity 2.0. note: currently follows the xsd schema of the previous unity Configur...Squiggle - A Free open source Lan Messenger: Squiggle 1.0.2: v1.0 Release.Team Foundation Server Explorer: Beta 1: The first public beta release of the TFS Explorer.thinktecture WSCF.blue: WSCF.blue V1 Update (1.0.8): Bug fix release with the following fix: When an XmlArrayAttribute decorated member has IsNullable=false, and the List<T> or Collection option is s...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30528.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVisual Studio 2010 AutoScroller Extension: AutoScroller v0.4: A Visual studio 2010 auto-scroller extension. 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256 Windows Azure Worker Roles, Windows Kinect and a 90's Text-Based Ray-Tracer

- by Alan Smith

For a couple of years I have been demoing a simple render farm hosted in Windows Azure using worker roles and the Azure Storage service. At the start of the presentation I deploy an Azure application that uses 16 worker roles to render a 1,500 frame 3D ray-traced animation. At the end of the presentation, when the animation was complete, I would play the animation delete the Azure deployment. The standing joke with the audience was that it was that it was a “$2 demo”, as the compute charges for running the 16 instances for an hour was $1.92, factor in the bandwidth charges and it’s a couple of dollars. The point of the demo is that it highlights one of the great benefits of cloud computing, you pay for what you use, and if you need massive compute power for a short period of time using Windows Azure can work out very cost effective. The “$2 demo” was great for presenting at user groups and conferences in that it could be deployed to Azure, used to render an animation, and then removed in a one hour session. I have always had the idea of doing something a bit more impressive with the demo, and scaling it from a “$2 demo” to a “$30 demo”. The challenge was to create a visually appealing animation in high definition format and keep the demo time down to one hour. This article will take a run through how I achieved this. Ray Tracing Ray tracing, a technique for generating high quality photorealistic images, gained popularity in the 90’s with companies like Pixar creating feature length computer animations, and also the emergence of shareware text-based ray tracers that could run on a home PC. In order to render a ray traced image, the ray of light that would pass from the view point must be tracked until it intersects with an object. At the intersection, the color, reflectiveness, transparency, and refractive index of the object are used to calculate if the ray will be reflected or refracted. Each pixel may require thousands of calculations to determine what color it will be in the rendered image. Pin-Board Toys Having very little artistic talent and a basic understanding of maths I decided to focus on an animation that could be modeled fairly easily and would look visually impressive. I’ve always liked the pin-board desktop toys that become popular in the 80’s and when I was working as a 3D animator back in the 90’s I always had the idea of creating a 3D ray-traced animation of a pin-board, but never found the energy to do it. Even if I had a go at it, the render time to produce an animation that would look respectable on a 486 would have been measured in months. PolyRay Back in 1995 I landed my first real job, after spending three years being a beach-ski-climbing-paragliding-bum, and was employed to create 3D ray-traced animations for a CD-ROM that school kids would use to learn physics. I had got into the strange and wonderful world of text-based ray tracing, and was using a shareware ray-tracer called PolyRay. PolyRay takes a text file describing a scene as input and, after a few hours processing on a 486, produced a high quality ray-traced image. The following is an example of a basic PolyRay scene file. background Midnight_Blue static define matte surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.7 } define matte_white texture { matte { color white } } define matte_black texture { matte { color dark_slate_gray } } define position_cylindrical 3 define lookup_sawtooth 1 define light_wood <0.6, 0.24, 0.1> define median_wood <0.3, 0.12, 0.03> define dark_wood <0.05, 0.01, 0.005> define wooden texture { noise surface { ambient 0.2 diffuse 0.7 specular white, 0.5 microfacet Reitz 10 position_fn position_cylindrical position_scale 1 lookup_fn lookup_sawtooth octaves 1 turbulence 1 color_map( [0.0, 0.2, light_wood, light_wood] [0.2, 0.3, light_wood, median_wood] [0.3, 0.4, median_wood, light_wood] [0.4, 0.7, light_wood, light_wood] [0.7, 0.8, light_wood, median_wood] [0.8, 0.9, median_wood, light_wood] [0.9, 1.0, light_wood, dark_wood]) } } define glass texture { surface { ambient 0 diffuse 0 specular 0.2 reflection white, 0.1 transmission white, 1, 1.5 }} define shiny surface { ambient 0.1 diffuse 0.6 specular white, 0.6 microfacet Phong 7 } define steely_blue texture { shiny { color black } } define chrome texture { surface { color white ambient 0.0 diffuse 0.2 specular 0.4 microfacet Phong 10 reflection 0.8 } } viewpoint { from <4.000, -1.000, 1.000> at <0.000, 0.000, 0.000> up <0, 1, 0> angle 60 resolution 640, 480 aspect 1.6 image_format 0 } light <-10, 30, 20> light <-10, 30, -20> object { disc <0, -2, 0>, <0, 1, 0>, 30 wooden } object { sphere <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, 1.00 chrome } object { cylinder <0.000, 0.000, 0.000>, <0.000, 0.000, -4.000>, 0.50 chrome } After setting up the background and defining colors and textures, the viewpoint is specified. The “camera” is located at a point in 3D space, and it looks towards another point. The angle, image resolution, and aspect ratio are specified. Two lights are present in the image at defined coordinates. The three objects in the image are a wooden disc to represent a table top, and a sphere and cylinder that intersect to form a pin that will be used for the pin board toy in the final animation. When the image is rendered, the following image is produced. The pins are modeled with a chrome surface, so they reflect the environment around them. Note that the scale of the pin shaft is not correct, this will be fixed later. Modeling the Pin Board The frame of the pin-board is made up of three boxes, and six cylinders, the front box is modeled using a clear, slightly reflective solid, with the same refractive index of glass. The other shapes are modeled as metal. object { box <-5.5, -1.5, 1>, <5.5, 5.5, 1.2> glass } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.04>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.09> steely_blue } object { box <-5.5, -1.5, -0.52>, <5.5, 5.5, -0.59> steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, -1.2, 1.4>, <5.2, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <-5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <-5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <5.2, 5.2, 1.4>, <5.2, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, -1.2, 1.4>, <0, -1.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } object { cylinder <0, 5.2, 1.4>, <0, 5.2, -0.74>, 0.2 steely_blue } In order to create the matrix of pins that make up the pin board I used a basic console application with a few nested loops to create two intersecting matrixes of pins, which models the layout used in the pin boards. The resulting image is shown below. The pin board contains 11,481 pins, with the scene file containing 23,709 lines of code. For the complete animation 2,000 scene files will be created, which is over 47 million lines of code. Each pin in the pin-board will slide out a specific distance when an object is pressed into the back of the board. This is easily modeled by setting the Z coordinate of the pin to a specific value. In order to set all of the pins in the pin-board to the correct position, a bitmap image can be used. The position of the pin can be set based on the color of the pixel at the appropriate position in the image. When the Windows Azure logo is used to set the Z coordinate of the pins, the following image is generated. The challenge now was to make a cool animation. The Azure Logo is fine, but it is static. Using a normal video to animate the pins would not work; the colors in the video would not be the same as the depth of the objects from the camera. In order to simulate the pin board accurately a series of frames from a depth camera could be used. Windows Kinect The Kenect controllers for the X-Box 360 and Windows feature a depth camera. The Kinect SDK for Windows provides a programming interface for Kenect, providing easy access for .NET developers to the Kinect sensors. The Kinect Explorer provided with the Kinect SDK is a great starting point for exploring Kinect from a developers perspective. Both the X-Box 360 Kinect and the Windows Kinect will work with the Kinect SDK, the Windows Kinect is required for commercial applications, but the X-Box Kinect can be used for hobby projects. The Windows Kinect has the advantage of providing a mode to allow depth capture with objects closer to the camera, which makes for a more accurate depth image for setting the pin positions. Creating a Depth Field Animation The depth field animation used to set the positions of the pin in the pin board was created using a modified version of the Kinect Explorer sample application. In order to simulate the pin board accurately, a small section of the depth range from the depth sensor will be used. Any part of the object in front of the depth range will result in a white pixel; anything behind the depth range will be black. Within the depth range the pixels in the image will be set to RGB values from 0,0,0 to 255,255,255. A screen shot of the modified Kinect Explorer application is shown below. The Kinect Explorer sample application was modified to include slider controls that are used to set the depth range that forms the image from the depth stream. This allows the fine tuning of the depth image that is required for simulating the position of the pins in the pin board. The Kinect Explorer was also modified to record a series of images from the depth camera and save them as a sequence JPEG files that will be used to animate the pins in the animation the Start and Stop buttons are used to start and stop the image recording. En example of one of the depth images is shown below. Once a series of 2,000 depth images has been captured, the task of creating the animation can begin. Rendering a Test Frame In order to test the creation of frames and get an approximation of the time required to render each frame a test frame was rendered on-premise using PolyRay. The output of the rendering process is shown below. The test frame contained 23,629 primitive shapes, most of which are the spheres and cylinders that are used for the 11,800 or so pins in the pin board. The 1280x720 image contains 921,600 pixels, but as anti-aliasing was used the number of rays that were calculated was 4,235,777, with 3,478,754,073 object boundaries checked. The test frame of the pin board with the depth field image applied is shown below. The tracing time for the test frame was 4 minutes 27 seconds, which means rendering the2,000 frames in the animation would take over 148 hours, or a little over 6 days. Although this is much faster that an old 486, waiting almost a week to see the results of an animation would make it challenging for animators to create, view, and refine their animations. It would be much better if the animation could be rendered in less than one hour. Windows Azure Worker Roles The cost of creating an on-premise render farm to render animations increases in proportion to the number of servers. The table below shows the cost of servers for creating a render farm, assuming a cost of $500 per server. Number of Servers Cost 1 $500 16 $8,000 256 $128,000 As well as the cost of the servers, there would be additional costs for networking, racks etc. Hosting an environment of 256 servers on-premise would require a server room with cooling, and some pretty hefty power cabling. The Windows Azure compute services provide worker roles, which are ideal for performing processor intensive compute tasks. With the scalability available in Windows Azure a job that takes 256 hours to complete could be perfumed using different numbers of worker roles. The time and cost of using 1, 16 or 256 worker roles is shown below. Number of Worker Roles Render Time Cost 1 256 hours $30.72 16 16 hours $30.72 256 1 hour $30.72 Using worker roles in Windows Azure provides the same cost for the 256 hour job, irrespective of the number of worker roles used. Provided the compute task can be broken down into many small units, and the worker role compute power can be used effectively, it makes sense to scale the application so that the task is completed quickly, making the results available in a timely fashion. The task of rendering 2,000 frames in an animation is one that can easily be broken down into 2,000 individual pieces, which can be performed by a number of worker roles. Creating a Render Farm in Windows Azure The architecture of the render farm is shown in the following diagram. The render farm is a hybrid application with the following components: · On-Premise o Windows Kinect – Used combined with the Kinect Explorer to create a stream of depth images. o Animation Creator – This application uses the depth images from the Kinect sensor to create scene description files for PolyRay. These files are then uploaded to the jobs blob container, and job messages added to the jobs queue. o Process Monitor – This application queries the role instance lifecycle table and displays statistics about the render farm environment and render process. o Image Downloader – This application polls the image queue and downloads the rendered animation files once they are complete. · Windows Azure o Azure Storage – Queues and blobs are used for the scene description files and completed frames. A table is used to store the statistics about the rendering environment. The architecture of each worker role is shown below. The worker role is configured to use local storage, which provides file storage on the worker role instance that can be use by the applications to render the image and transform the format of the image. The service definition for the worker role with the local storage configuration highlighted is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceDefinition name="CloudRay" > <WorkerRole name="CloudRayWorkerRole" vmsize="Small"> <Imports> </Imports> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" /> </ConfigurationSettings> <LocalResources> <LocalStorage name="RayFolder" cleanOnRoleRecycle="true" /> </LocalResources> </WorkerRole> </ServiceDefinition> The two executable programs, PolyRay.exe and DTA.exe are included in the Azure project, with Copy Always set as the property. PolyRay will take the scene description file and render it to a Truevision TGA file. As the TGA format has not seen much use since the mid 90’s it is converted to a JPG image using Dave's Targa Animator, another shareware application from the 90’s. Each worker roll will use the following process to render the animation frames. 1. The worker process polls the job queue, if a job is available the scene description file is downloaded from blob storage to local storage. 2. PolyRay.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments to render the image as a TGA file. 3. DTA.exe is started in a process with the appropriate command line arguments convert the TGA file to a JPG file. 4. The JPG file is uploaded from local storage to the images blob container. 5. A message is placed on the images queue to indicate a new image is available for download. 6. The job message is deleted from the job queue. 7. The role instance lifecycle table is updated with statistics on the number of frames rendered by the worker role instance, and the CPU time used. The code for this is shown below. public override void Run() { // Set environment variables string polyRayPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), PolyRayLocation); string dtaPath = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), DTALocation); LocalResource rayStorage = RoleEnvironment.GetLocalResource("RayFolder"); string localStorageRootPath = rayStorage.RootPath; JobQueue jobQueue = new JobQueue("renderjobs"); JobQueue downloadQueue = new JobQueue("renderimagedownloadjobs"); CloudRayBlob sceneBlob = new CloudRayBlob("scenes"); CloudRayBlob imageBlob = new CloudRayBlob("images"); RoleLifecycleDataSource roleLifecycleDataSource = new RoleLifecycleDataSource(); Frames = 0; while (true) { // Get the render job from the queue CloudQueueMessage jobMsg = jobQueue.Get(); if (jobMsg != null) { // Get the file details string sceneFile = jobMsg.AsString; string tgaFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".tga"); string jpgFile = sceneFile.Replace(".pi", ".jpg"); string sceneFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, sceneFile); string tgaFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, tgaFile); string jpgFilePath = Path.Combine(localStorageRootPath, jpgFile); // Copy the scene file to local storage sceneBlob.DownloadFile(sceneFilePath); // Run the ray tracer. string polyrayArguments = string.Format("\"{0}\" -o \"{1}\" -a 2", sceneFilePath, tgaFilePath); Process polyRayProcess = new Process(); polyRayProcess.StartInfo.FileName = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), polyRayPath); polyRayProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = polyrayArguments; polyRayProcess.Start(); polyRayProcess.WaitForExit(); // Convert the image string dtaArguments = string.Format(" {0} /FJ /P{1}", tgaFilePath, Path.GetDirectoryName (jpgFilePath)); Process dtaProcess = new Process(); dtaProcess.StartInfo.FileName = Path.Combine(Environment.GetEnvironmentVariable("RoleRoot"), dtaPath); dtaProcess.StartInfo.Arguments = dtaArguments; dtaProcess.Start(); dtaProcess.WaitForExit(); // Upload the image to blob storage imageBlob.UploadFile(jpgFilePath); // Add a download job. downloadQueue.Add(jpgFile); // Delete the render job message jobQueue.Delete(jobMsg); Frames++; } else { Thread.Sleep(1000); } // Log the worker role activity. roleLifecycleDataSource.Alive ("CloudRayWorker", RoleLifecycleDataSource.RoleLifecycleId, Frames); } } Monitoring Worker Role Instance Lifecycle In order to get more accurate statistics about the lifecycle of the worker role instances used to render the animation data was tracked in an Azure storage table. The following class was used to track the worker role lifecycles in Azure storage. public class RoleLifecycle : TableServiceEntity { public string ServerName { get; set; } public string Status { get; set; } public DateTime StartTime { get; set; } public DateTime EndTime { get; set; } public long SecondsRunning { get; set; } public DateTime LastActiveTime { get; set; } public int Frames { get; set; } public string Comment { get; set; } public RoleLifecycle() { } public RoleLifecycle(string roleName) { PartitionKey = roleName; RowKey = Utils.GetAscendingRowKey(); Status = "Started"; StartTime = DateTime.UtcNow; LastActiveTime = StartTime; EndTime = StartTime; SecondsRunning = 0; Frames = 0; } } A new instance of this class is created and added to the storage table when the role starts. It is then updated each time the worker renders a frame to record the total number of frames rendered and the total processing time. These statistics are used be the monitoring application to determine the effectiveness of use of resources in the render farm. Rendering the Animation The Azure solution was deployed to Windows Azure with the service configuration set to 16 worker role instances. This allows for the application to be tested in the cloud environment, and the performance of the application determined. When I demo the application at conferences and user groups I often start with 16 instances, and then scale up the application to the full 256 instances. The configuration to run 16 instances is shown below. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole"> <Instances count="16" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> About six minutes after deploying the application the first worker roles become active and start to render the first frames of the animation. The CloudRay Monitor application displays an icon for each worker role instance, with a number indicating the number of frames that the worker role has rendered. The statistics on the left show the number of active worker roles and statistics about the render process. The render time is the time since the first worker role became active; the CPU time is the total amount of processing time used by all worker role instances to render the frames. Five minutes after the first worker role became active the last of the 16 worker roles activated. By this time the first seven worker roles had each rendered one frame of the animation. With 16 worker roles u and running it can be seen that one hour and 45 minutes CPU time has been used to render 32 frames with a render time of just under 10 minutes. At this rate it would take over 10 hours to render the 2,000 frames of the full animation. In order to complete the animation in under an hour more processing power will be required. Scaling the render farm from 16 instances to 256 instances is easy using the new management portal. The slider is set to 256 instances, and the configuration saved. We do not need to re-deploy the application, and the 16 instances that are up and running will not be affected. Alternatively, the configuration file for the Azure service could be modified to specify 256 instances. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <ServiceConfiguration serviceName="CloudRay" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/ServiceHosting/2008/10/ServiceConfiguration" osFamily="1" osVersion="*"> <Role name="CloudRayWorkerRole"> <Instances count="256" /> <ConfigurationSettings> <Setting name="DataConnectionString" value="DefaultEndpointsProtocol=https;AccountName=cloudraydata;AccountKey=..." /> </ConfigurationSettings> </Role> </ServiceConfiguration> Six minutes after the new configuration has been applied 75 new worker roles have activated and are processing their first frames. Five minutes later the full configuration of 256 worker roles is up and running. We can see that the average rate of frame rendering has increased from 3 to 12 frames per minute, and that over 17 hours of CPU time has been utilized in 23 minutes. In this test the time to provision 140 worker roles was about 11 minutes, which works out at about one every five seconds. We are now half way through the rendering, with 1,000 frames complete. This has utilized just under three days of CPU time in a little over 35 minutes. The animation is now complete, with 2,000 frames rendered in a little over 52 minutes. The CPU time used by the 256 worker roles is 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes with an average frame rate of 38 frames per minute. The rendering of the last 1,000 frames took 16 minutes 27 seconds, which works out at a rendering rate of 60 frames per minute. The frame counts in the server instances indicate that the use of a queue to distribute the workload has been very effective in distributing the load across the 256 worker role instances. The first 16 instances that were deployed first have rendered between 11 and 13 frames each, whilst the 240 instances that were added when the application was scaled have rendered between 6 and 9 frames each. Completed Animation I’ve uploaded the completed animation to YouTube, a low resolution preview is shown below. Pin Board Animation Created using Windows Kinect and 256 Windows Azure Worker Roles The animation can be viewed in 1280x720 resolution at the following link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5jy6bvSxWc Effective Use of Resources According to the CloudRay monitor statistics the animation took 6 days, 7 hours and 22 minutes CPU to render, this works out at 152 hours of compute time, rounded up to the nearest hour. As the usage for the worker role instances are billed for the full hour, it may have been possible to render the animation using fewer than 256 worker roles. When deciding the optimal usage of resources, the time required to provision and start the worker roles must also be considered. In the demo I started with 16 worker roles, and then scaled the application to 256 worker roles. It would have been more optimal to start the application with maybe 200 worker roles, and utilized the full hour that I was being billed for. This would, however, have prevented showing the ease of scalability of the application. The new management portal displays the CPU usage across the worker roles in the deployment. The average CPU usage across all instances is 93.27%, with over 99% used when all the instances are up and running. This shows that the worker role resources are being used very effectively. Grid Computing Scenarios Although I am using this scenario for a hobby project, there are many scenarios where a large amount of compute power is required for a short period of time. Windows Azure provides a great platform for developing these types of grid computing applications, and can work out very cost effective. · Windows Azure can provide massive compute power, on demand, in a matter of minutes. · The use of queues to manage the load balancing of jobs between role instances is a simple and effective solution. · Using a cloud-computing platform like Windows Azure allows proof-of-concept scenarios to be tested and evaluated on a very low budget. · No charges for inbound data transfer makes the uploading of large data sets to Windows Azure Storage services cost effective. (Transaction charges still apply.) Tips for using Windows Azure for Grid Computing Scenarios I found the implementation of a render farm using Windows Azure a fairly simple scenario to implement. I was impressed by ease of scalability that Azure provides, and by the short time that the application took to scale from 16 to 256 worker role instances. In this case it was around 13 minutes, in other tests it took between 10 and 20 minutes. The following tips may be useful when implementing a grid computing project in Windows Azure. · Using an Azure Storage queue to load-balance the units of work across multiple worker roles is simple and very effective. The design I have used in this scenario could easily scale to many thousands of worker role instances. · Windows Azure accounts are typically limited to 20 cores. If you need to use more than this, a call to support and a credit card check will be required. · Be aware of how the billing model works. You will be charged for worker role instances for the full clock our in which the instance is deployed. Schedule the workload to start just after the clock hour has started. · Monitor the utilization of the resources you are provisioning, ensure that you are not paying for worker roles that are idle. · If you are deploying third party applications to worker roles, you may well run into licensing issues. Purchasing software licenses on a per-processor basis when using hundreds of processors for a short time period would not be cost effective. · Third party software may also require installation onto the worker roles, which can be accomplished using start-up tasks. Bear in mind that adding a startup task and possible re-boot will add to the time required for the worker role instance to start and activate. An alternative may be to use a prepared VM and use VM roles. · Consider using the Windows Azure Autoscaling Application Block (WASABi) to autoscale the worker roles in your application. When using a large number of worker roles, the utilization must be carefully monitored, if the scaling algorithms are not optimal it could get very expensive!

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Click Once Deployment Process and Issue Resolution

- by Geordie

Introduction We are adopting Click Once as a deployment standard for Thick .Net application clients. The latest version of this tool has matured it to a point where it can be used in an enterprise environment. This guide will identify how to use Click Once deployment and promote code trough the dev, test and production environments. Why Use Click Once over SCCM If we already use SCCM why add Click Once to the deployment options. The advantages of Click Once are their ability to update the code in a single location and have the update flow automatically down to the user community. There have been challenges in the past with getting configuration updates to download but these can now be achieved. With SCCM you can do the same thing but it then needs to be packages and pushed out to users. Each time a new user is added to an application, time needs to be spent by an administrator, to push out any required application packages. With Click Once the user would go to a web link and the application and pre requisites will automatically get installed. New Deployment Steps Overview The deployment in an enterprise environment includes several steps as the solution moves through the development life cycle before being released into production. To make mitigate risk during the release phase, it is important to ensure the solution is not deployed directly into production from the development tools. Although this is the easiest path, it can introduce untested code into production and result in unexpected results. 1. Deploy the client application to a development web server using Visual Studio 2008 Click Once deployment tools. Once potential production versions of the solution are being generated, ensure the production install URL is specified when deploying code from Visual Studio. (For details see ‘Deploying Click Once Code from Visual Studio’) 2. xCopy the code to the test server. Run the MageUI tool to update the URLs, signing and version numbers to match the test server. (For details see ‘Moving Click Once Code to a new Server without using Visual Studio’) 3. xCopy the code to the production server. Run the MageUI tool to update the URLs, signing and version numbers to match the production server. The certificate used to sign the code should be provided by a certificate authority that will be trusted by the client machines. Finally make sure the setup.exe contains the production install URL. If not redeploy the solution from Visual Studio to the dev environment specifying the production install URL. Then xcopy the install.exe file from dev to production. (For details see ‘Moving Click Once Code to a new Server without using Visual Studio’) Detailed Deployment Steps Deploying Click Once Code From Visual Studio Open Visual Studio and create a new WinForms or WPF project. In the solution explorer right click on the project and select ‘Publish’ in the context menu. The ‘Publish Wizard’ will start. Enter the development deployment path. This could be a local directory or web site. When first publishing the solution set this to a development web site and Visual basic will create a site with an install.htm page. Click Next. Select weather the application will be available both online and offline. Then click Finish. Once the initial deployment is completed, republish the solution this time mapping to the directory that holds the code that was just published. This time the Publish Wizard contains and additional option. The setup.exe file that is created has the install URL hardcoded in it. It is this screen that allows you to specify the URL to use. At some point a setup.exe file must be generated for production. Enter the production URL and deploy the solution to the dev folder. This file can then be saved for latter use in deployment to production. During development this URL should be pointing to development site to avoid accidently installing the production application. Visual studio will publish the application to the desired location in the process it will create an anonymous ‘pfx’ certificate to sign the deployment configuration files. A production certificate should be acquired in preparation for deployment to production. Directory structure created by Visual Studio Application files created by Visual Studio Development web site (install.htm) created by Visual Studio Migrating Click Once Code to a new Server without using Visual Studio To migrate the Click Once application code to a new server, a tool called MageUI is needed to modify the .application and .manifest files. The MageUI tool is usually located – ‘C:\Program Files\Microsoft SDKs\Windows\v6.0A\Bin’ folder or can be downloaded from the web. When deploying to a new environment copy all files in the project folder to the new server. In this case the ‘ClickOnceSample’ folder and contents. The old application versions can be deleted, in this case ‘ClickOnceSample_1_0_0_0’ and ‘ClickOnceSample_1_0_0_1’. Open IIS Manager and create a virtual directory that points to the project folder. Also make the publish.htm the default web page. Run the ManeUI tool and then open the .application file in the root project folder (in this case in the ‘ClickOnceSample’ folder). Click on the Deployment Options in the left hand list and update the URL to the new server URL and save the changes. When MageUI tries to save the file it will prompt for the file to be signed. This step cannot be bypassed if you want the Click Once deployment to work from a web site. The easiest solution to this for test is to use the auto generated certificate that Visual Studio created for the project. This certificate can be found with the project source code. To save time go to File>Preferences and configure the ‘Use default signing certificate’ fields. Future deployments will only require application files to be transferred to the new server. The only difference is then updating the .application file the ‘Version’ must be updated to match the new version and the ‘Application Reference’ has to be update to point to the new .manifest file. Updating the Configuration File of a Click Once Deployment Package without using Visual Studio When an update to the configuration file is required, modifying the ClickOnceSample.exe.config.deploy file will not result in current users getting the new configurations. We do not want to go back to Visual Studio and generate a new version as this might introduce unexpected code changes. A new version of the application can be created by copying the folder (in this case ClickOnceSample_1_0_0_2) and pasting it into the application Files directory. Rename the directory ‘ClickOnceSample_1_0_0_3’. In the new folder open the configuration file in notepad and make the configuration changes. Run MageUI and open the manifest file in the newly copied directory (ClickOnceSample_1_0_0_3). Edit the manifest version to reflect the newly copied files (in this case 1.0.0.3). Then save the file. Open the .application file in the root folder. Again update the version to 1.0.0.3. Since the file has not changed the Deployment Options/Start Location URL should still be correct. The application Reference needs to be updated to point to the new versions .manifest file. Save the file. Next time a user runs the application the new version of the configuration file will be down loaded. It is worth noting that there are 2 different types of configuration parameter; application and user. With Click Once deployment the difference is significant. When an application is downloaded the configuration file is also brought down to the client machine. The developer may have written code to update the user parameters in the application. As a result each time a new version of the application is down loaded the user parameters are at risk of being overwritten. With Click Once deployment the system knows if the user parameters are still the default values. If they are they will be overwritten with the new default values in the configuration file. If they have been updated by the user, they will not be overwritten. Settings configuration view in Visual Studio Production Deployment When deploying the code to production it is prudent to disable the development and test deployment sites. This will allow errors such as incorrect URL to be quickly identified in the initial testing after deployment. If the sites are active there is no way to know if the application was downloaded from the production deployment and not redirected to test or dev. Troubleshooting Clicking the install button on the install.htm page fails. Error: URLDownloadToCacheFile failed with HRESULT '-2146697210' Error: An error occurred trying to download <file> This is due to the setup.exe file pointing to the wrong location. ‘The setup.exe file that is created has the install URL hardcoded in it. It is this screen that allows you to specify the URL to use. At some point a setup.exe file must be generated for production. Enter the production URL and deploy the solution to the dev folder. This file can then be saved for latter use in deployment to production. During development this URL should be pointing to development site to avoid accidently installing the production application.’

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Of C# Iterators and Performance

- by James Michael Hare

Some of you reading this will be wondering, "what is an iterator" and think I'm locked in the world of C++. Nope, I'm talking C# iterators. No, not enumerators, iterators. So, for those of you who do not know what iterators are in C#, I will explain it in summary, and for those of you who know what iterators are but are curious of the performance impacts, I will explore that as well. Iterators have been around for a bit now, and there are still a bunch of people who don't know what they are or what they do. I don't know how many times at work I've had a code review on my code and have someone ask me, "what's that yield word do?" Basically, this post came to me as I was writing some extension methods to extend IEnumerable<T> -- I'll post some of the fun ones in a later post. Since I was filtering the resulting list down, I was using the standard C# iterator concept; but that got me wondering: what are the performance implications of using an iterator versus returning a new enumeration? So, to begin, let's look at a couple of methods. This is a new (albeit contrived) method called Every(...). The goal of this method is to access and enumeration and return every nth item in the enumeration (including the first). So Every(2) would return items 0, 2, 4, 6, etc. Now, if you wanted to write this in the traditional way, you may come up with something like this: public static IEnumerable<T> Every<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, int interval) { List<T> newList = new List<T>(); int count = 0; foreach (var i in list) { if ((count++ % interval) == 0) { newList.Add(i); } } return newList; } So basically this method takes any IEnumerable<T> and returns a new IEnumerable<T> that contains every nth item. Pretty straight forward. The problem? Well, Every<T>(...) will construct a list containing every nth item whether or not you care. What happens if you were searching this result for a certain item and find that item after five tries? You would have generated the rest of the list for nothing. Enter iterators. This C# construct uses the yield keyword to effectively defer evaluation of the next item until it is asked for. This can be very handy if the evaluation itself is expensive or if there's a fair chance you'll never want to fully evaluate a list. We see this all the time in Linq, where many expressions are chained together to do complex processing on a list. This would be very expensive if each of these expressions evaluated their entire possible result set on call. Let's look at the same example function, this time using an iterator: public static IEnumerable<T> Every<T>(this IEnumerable<T> list, int interval) { int count = 0; foreach (var i in list) { if ((count++ % interval) == 0) { yield return i; } } } Notice it does not create a new return value explicitly, the only evidence of a return is the "yield return" statement. What this means is that when an item is requested from the enumeration, it will enter this method and evaluate until it either hits a yield return (in which case that item is returned) or until it exits the method or hits a yield break (in which case the iteration ends. Behind the scenes, this is all done with a class that the CLR creates behind the scenes that keeps track of the state of the iteration, so that every time the next item is asked for, it finds that item and then updates the current position so it knows where to start at next time. It doesn't seem like a big deal, does it? But keep in mind the key point here: it only returns items as they are requested. Thus if there's a good chance you will only process a portion of the return list and/or if the evaluation of each item is expensive, an iterator may be of benefit. This is especially true if you intend your methods to be chainable similar to the way Linq methods can be chained. For example, perhaps you have a List<int> and you want to take every tenth one until you find one greater than 10. We could write that as: List<int> someList = new List<int>(); // fill list here someList.Every(10).TakeWhile(i => i <= 10); Now is the difference more apparent? If we use the first form of Every that makes a copy of the list. It's going to copy the entire list whether we will need those items or not, that can be costly! With the iterator version, however, it will only take items from the list until it finds one that is > 10, at which point no further items in the list are evaluated. So, sounds neat eh? But what's the cost is what you're probably wondering. So I ran some tests using the two forms of Every above on lists varying from 5 to 500,000 integers and tried various things. Now, iteration isn't free. If you are more likely than not to iterate the entire collection every time, iterator has some very slight overhead: Copy vs Iterator on 100% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 5 Copy 5 5 5 Iterator 5 50 50 Copy 28 50 50 Iterator 27 500 500 Copy 227 500 500 Iterator 247 5000 5000 Copy 2266 5000 5000 Iterator 2444 50,000 50,000 Copy 24,443 50,000 50,000 Iterator 24,719 500,000 500,000 Copy 250,024 500,000 500,000 Iterator 251,521 Notice that when iterating over the entire produced list, the times for the iterator are a little better for smaller lists, then getting just a slight bit worse for larger lists. In reality, given the number of items and iterations, the result is near negligible, but just to show that iterators come at a price. However, it should also be noted that the form of Every that returns a copy will have a left-over collection to garbage collect. However, if we only partially evaluate less and less through the list, the savings start to show and make it well worth the overhead. Let's look at what happens if you stop looking after 80% of the list: Copy vs Iterator on 80% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 4 Copy 5 5 4 Iterator 5 50 40 Copy 27 50 40 Iterator 23 500 400 Copy 215 500 400 Iterator 200 5000 4000 Copy 2099 5000 4000 Iterator 1962 50,000 40,000 Copy 22,385 50,000 40,000 Iterator 19,599 500,000 400,000 Copy 236,427 500,000 400,000 Iterator 196,010 Notice that the iterator form is now operating quite a bit faster. But the savings really add up if you stop on average at 50% (which most searches would typically do): Copy vs Iterator on 50% of Collection (10,000 iterations) Collection Size Num Iterated Type Total ms 5 2 Copy 5 5 2 Iterator 4 50 25 Copy 25 50 25 Iterator 16 500 250 Copy 188 500 250 Iterator 126 5000 2500 Copy 1854 5000 2500 Iterator 1226 50,000 25,000 Copy 19,839 50,000 25,000 Iterator 12,233 500,000 250,000 Copy 208,667 500,000 250,000 Iterator 122,336 Now we see that if we only expect to go on average 50% into the results, we tend to shave off around 40% of the time. And this is only for one level deep. If we are using this in a chain of query expressions it only adds to the savings. So my recommendation? If you have a resonable expectation that someone may only want to partially consume your enumerable result, I would always tend to favor an iterator. The cost if they iterate the whole thing does not add much at all -- and if they consume only partially, you reap some really good performance gains. Next time I'll discuss some of my favorite extensions I've created to make development life a little easier and maintainability a little better.

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Physical Directories vs. MVC View Paths

- by Rick Strahl

This post falls into the bucket of operator error on my part, but I want to share this anyway because it describes an issue that has bitten me a few times now and writing it down might keep it a little stronger in my mind. I've been working on an MVC project the last few days, and at the end of a long day I accidentally moved one of my View folders from the MVC Root Folder to the project root. It must have been at the very end of the day before shutting down because tests and manual site navigation worked fine just before I quit for the night. I checked in changes and called it a night. Next day I came back, started running the app and had a lot of breaks with certain views. Oddly custom routes to these controllers/views worked, but stock /{controller}/{action} routes would not. After a bit of spelunking I realized that "Hey one of my View Folders is missing", which made some sense given the error messages I got. I looked in the recycle bin - nothing there, so rather than try to figure out what the hell happened, just restored from my last SVN checkin. At this point the folders are back… but… view access still ends up breaking for this set of views. Specifically I'm getting the Yellow Screen of Death with: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current context Here's the full error: Server Error in '/ClassifiedsWeb' Application. Compilation ErrorDescription: An error occurred during the compilation of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific error details and modify your source code appropriately.Compiler Error Message: CS0103: The name 'model' does not exist in the current contextSource Error: Line 1: @model ClassifiedsWeb.EntryViewModel Line 2: @{ Line 3: ViewBag.Title = Model.Entry.Title + " - " + ClassifiedsBusiness.App.Configuration.ApplicationName; Source File: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml Line: 1 Compiler Warning Messages: Show Detailed Compiler Output: Show Complete Compilation Source: Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:4.0.30319; ASP.NET Version:4.0.30319.272 Here's what's really odd about this error: The views now do exist in the /Views/Classifieds folder of the project, but it appears like MVC is trying to execute the views directly. This is getting pretty weird, man! So I hook up some break points in my controllers to see if my controller actions are getting fired - and sure enough it turns out they are not - but only for those views that were previously 'lost' and then restored from SVN. WTF? At this point I'm thinking that I must have messed up one of the config files, but after some more spelunking and realizing that all the other Controller views work, I give up that idea. Config's gotta be OK if other controllers and views are working. Root Folders and MVC Views don't mix As I mentioned the problem was the fact that I inadvertantly managed to drag my View folder to the root folder of the project. Here's what this looks like in my FUBAR'd project structure after I copied back /Views/Classifieds folder from SVN: There's the actual root folder in the /Views folder and the accidental copy that sits of the root. I of course did not notice the /Classifieds folder at the root because it was excluded and didn't show up in the project. Now, before you call me a complete idiot remember that this happened by accident - an accidental drag probably just before shutting down for the night. :-) So why does this break? MVC should be happy with views in the /Views/Classifieds folder right? While MVC might be happy, IIS is not. The fact that there is a physical folder on disk takes precedence over MVC's routing. In other words if a URL exists that matches a route the pysical path is accessed first. What happens here is that essentially IIS is trying to execute the .cshtml pages directly without ever routing to the Controller methods. In the error page I showed above my clue should have been that the view was served as: c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Classifieds\Show.cshtml rather than c:\Projects2010\Clients\GorgeNet\Classifieds\ClassifiedsWeb\Views\Classifieds\Show.cshtml But of course I didn't notice that right away, just skimming to the end and looking at the file name. The reason that /classifieds/list actually fires that file is that the ASP.NET Web Pages engine looks for physical files on disk that match a path. IOW, when calling Web Pages you drop the .cshtml off the Razor page and IIS will serve that just fine. So: /classifieds/list looks and tries to find /classifieds/list.cshtml and executes that script. And that is exactly what's happening. Web Pages is trying to execute the .cshtml file and it fails because Web Pages knows nothing about the @model tag which is an MVC specific template extension. This is why my breakpoints in the controller methods didn't fire and it also explains why the error mentions that the @model key word is invalid (@model is an MVC provided template enhancement to the Razor Engine). The solution of course is super simple: Delete the accidentally created root folder and the problem is solved. Routing and Physical Paths I've run into problems with this before actually. In the past I've had a number of applications that had a physical /Admin folder which also would conflict with an MVC Admin controller. More than once I ended up wondering why the index route (/Admin/) was not working properly. If a physical /Admin folder exists /Admin will not route to the Index action (or whatever default action you have set up, but instead try to list the directory or show the default document in the folder. The only way to force the index page through MVC is to explicitly use /Admin/Index. Makes perfect sense once you realize the physical folder is there, but that's easy to forget in an MVC application. As you might imagine after a few times of running into this I gave up on the Admin folder and moved everything into MVC views to handle those operations. Still it's one of those things that can easily bite you, because the behavior and error messages seem to point at completely different problems. Moral of the story is: If you see routing problems where routes are not reaching obvious controller methods, always check to make sure there's isn't a physical path being mapped by IIS instead. That way you won't feel stupid like I did after trying a million things for about an hour before discovering my sloppy mousing behavior :-)© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in MVC IIS7 Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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My Code Kata–A Solution Kata

- by Glav

There are many developers and coders out there who like to do code Kata’s to keep their coding ability up to scratch and to practice their skills. I think it is a good idea. While I like the concept, I find them dead boring and of minimal purpose. Yes, they serve to hone your skills but that’s about it. They are often quite abstract, in that they usually focus on a small problem set requiring specific solutions. It is fair enough as that is how they are designed but again, I find them quite boring. What I personally like to do is go for something a little larger and a little more fun. It takes a little more time and is not as easily executed as a kata though, but it services the same purposes from a practice perspective and allows me to continue to solve some problems that are not directly part of the initial goal. This means I can cover a broader learning range and have a bit more fun. If I am lucky, sometimes they even end up being useful tools. With that in mind, I thought I’d share my current ‘kata’. It is not really a code kata as it is too big. I prefer to think of it as a ‘solution kata’. The code is on bitbucket here. What I wanted to do was create a kind of simplistic virtual world where I can create a player, or a class, stuff it into the world, and see if it survives, and can navigate its way to the exit. Requirements were pretty simple: Must be able to define a map to describe the world using simple X,Y co-ordinates. Z co-ordinates as well if you feel like getting clever. Should have the concept of entrances, exists, solid blocks, and potentially other materials (again if you want to get clever). A coder should be able to easily write a class which will act as an inhabitant of the world. An inhabitant will receive stimulus from the world in the form of surrounding environment and be able to make a decision on action which it passes back to the ‘world’ for processing. At a minimum, an inhabitant will have sight and speed characteristics which determine how far they can ‘see’ in the world, and how fast they can move. Coders who write a really bad ‘inhabitant’ should not adversely affect the rest of world. Should allow multiple inhabitants in the world. So that was the solution I set out to act as a practice solution and a little bit of fun. It had some interesting problems to solve and I figured, if it turned out ok, I could potentially use this as a ‘developer test’ for interviews. Ask a potential coder to write a class for an inhabitant. Show the coder the map they will navigate, but also mention that we will use their code to navigate a map they have not yet seen and a little more complex. I have been playing with solution for a short time now and have it working in basic concepts. Below is a screen shot using a very basic console visualiser that shows the map, boundaries, blocks, entrance, exit and players/inhabitants. The yellow asterisks ‘*’ are the players, green ‘O’ the entrance, purple ‘^’ the exit, maroon/browny ‘#’ are solid blocks. The players can move around at different speeds, knock into each others, and make directional movement decisions based on what they see and who is around them. It has been quite fun to write and it is also quite fun to develop different players to inject into the world. The code below shows a really simple implementation of an inhabitant that can work out what to do based on stimulus from the world. It is pretty simple and just tries to move in some direction if there is nothing blocking the path. public class TestPlayer:LivingEntity { public TestPlayer() { Name = "Beta Boy"; LifeKey = Guid.NewGuid(); } public override ActionResult DecideActionToPerform(EcoDev.Core.Common.Actions.ActionContext actionContext) { try { var action = new MovementAction(); // move forward if we can if (actionContext.Position.ForwardFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.ForwardFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Forward; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.LeftFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.LeftFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Left; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.RearFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.RearFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Back; return action; } } if (actionContext.Position.RightFacingPositions.Length > 0) { if (CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(actionContext.Position.RightFacingPositions[0])) { action.DirectionToMove = MovementDirection.Right; return action; } } return action; } catch (Exception ex) { World.WriteDebugInformation("Player: "+ Name, string.Format("Player Generated exception: {0}",ex.Message)); throw ex; } } private bool CheckAccessibilityOfMapBlock(MapBlock block) { if (block == null || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowEntry || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowExit || block.Accessibility == MapBlockAccessibility.AllowPotentialEntry) { return true; } return false; } } It is simple and it seems to work well. The world implementation itself decides the stimulus context that is passed to he inhabitant to make an action decision. All movement is carried out on separate threads and timed appropriately to be as fair as possible and to cater for additional skills such as speed, and eventually maybe stamina, strength, with actions like fighting. It is pretty fun to make up random maps and see how your inhabitant does. You can download the code from here. Along the way I have played with parallel extensions to make the compute intensive stuff spread across all cores, had to heavily factor in visibility of methods and properties so design of classes was paramount, work out movement algorithms that play fairly in the world and properly favour the players with higher abilities, as well as a host of other issues. So that is my ‘solution kata’. If I keep going with it, I may develop a web interface for it where people can upload assemblies and watch their player within a web browser visualiser and maybe even a map designer. What do you do to keep the fires burning?

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Learning content for MCSDs: Web Applications and Windows Store Apps using HTML5

Recently, I started again to learn for various Microsoft certifications. First candidate on my way to MSCD: Web Applications is the Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3. Motivation to go for a Microsoft exam I guess, this is quite personal but let me briefly describe my intentions to go that exam. First, I'm doing web development since the 1990's. Working with HTML, CSS and Javascript is happening almost daily in my workspace. And honestly, I do not only do 'pure' web development but already integrated several HTML/CSS/Javascript frontend UIs into an existing desktop application (written in Visual FoxPro) inclusive two-way communication and data exchange. Hm, might be an interesting topic for another blog article here... Second, this exam has a very interesting aspect which is listed at the bottom of the exam's details: Credit Toward Certification When you pass Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3, you complete the requirements for the following certification(s): Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Specialist Exam 70-480: Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3: counts as credit toward the following certification(s): MCSD: Web Applications MCSD: Windows Store Apps using HTML5 So, passing one single exam will earn you specialist certification straight-forward, and opens the path to higher levels of certifications. Preparations and learning path Well, due to a newsletter from Microsoft Learning (MSL) I caught interest in picking up the circumstances and learning materials for this particular exam. As of writing this article there is a promotional / voucher code available which enables you to register for this exam for free! Simply register yourself with or log into your existing account at Prometric, choose the exam for a testing facility near to you and enter the voucher code HTMLJMP (available through 31.03.2013 or while supplies last). Hurry up, there are restrictions... As stated above, I'm already very familiar with web development and the programming flavours involved into this. But of course, it is always good to freshen up your knowledge and reflect on yourself. Microsoft is putting a lot of effort to attract any kind of developers into the 'App Development'. Whether it is for the Windows 8 Store or the Windows Phone 8 Store, doesn't really matter. They simply need more apps. This demand for skilled developers also comes with a nice side-effect: Lots and lots of material to study. During the first couple of hours, I could easily gather high quality preparation material - again for free! Following is just a small list of starting points. If you have more resources, please drop me a message in the comment section, and I'll be glad to update this article accordingly. Developing HTML5 Apps Jump Start This is an accelerated jump start video course on development of HTML5 Apps for Windows 8. There are six modules that are split into two video sessions per module. Very informative and intense course material. This is packed stuff taken from an official preparation course for exam 70-480. Developing Windows Store Apps with HTML5 Jump Start Again, an accelerated preparation video course on Windows 8 Apps. There are six modules with two video sessions each which will catapult you to your exam. This is also related to preps for exam 70-481. Programming Windows 8 Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Kraig Brockschmidt delves into the ups and downs of Windows 8 App development over 800+ pages. Great eBook to read, study, and to practice the samples - best of all, it's for free. codeSHOW() This is a Windows 8 HTML/JS project with the express goal of demonstrating simple development concepts for the Windows 8 platform. Code, code and more code... absolutely great stuff to study and practice. Microsoft Virtual Academy I already wrote about the MVA in a previous article. Well, if you haven't registered yourself yet, now is the time. The list is not complete for sure, but this might keep you busy for at least one or even two weeks to go through the material. Please don't hesitate to add more resources in the comment section. Right now, I'm already through all videos once, and digging my way through chapter 4 of Kraig's book. Additional material - Pluralsight Apart from those free online resources, I also following some courses from the excellent library of Pluralsight. They already have their own section for Windows 8 development, but of course, you get companion material about HTML5, CSS and Javascript in other sections, too. Introduction to Building Windows 8 Applications Building Windows 8 Applications with JavaScript and HTML Selling Windows 8 Apps HTML5 Fundamentals Using HTML5 and CSS3 HTML5 Advanced Topics CSS3 etc... Interesting to see that Michael Palermo provides his course material on multiple platforms. Fantastic! You might also pay a visit to his personal blog. Hm, it just came to my mind that Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight publishes so-called '24 hours Learning Paths' based on courses available in the course library. Would be interested to see a combination for Windows 8 App development using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript in the future. Recommended workspace environment Well, you might have guessed it but this requires Windows 8, Visual Studio 2012 Express or another flavour, and a valid Developers License. Due to an MSDN subscription I working on VS 2012 Premium with some additional tools by Telerik. Honestly, the fastest way to get you up and running for Windows 8 App development is the source code archive of codeSHOW(). It does not only give you all source code in general but contains a couple of SDKs like Bing Maps, Microsoft Advertising, Live ID, and Telerik Windows 8 controls... for free! Hint: Get the Windows Phone 8 SDK as well. Don't worry, while you are studying the material for Windows 8 you will be able to leverage from this knowledge to development for the phone platform, too. It takes roughly one to two hours to get your workspace and learning environment, at least this was my time frame due to slow internet connection and an aged spare machine. ;-) Oh, before I forget to mention it, as soon as you're done, go quickly to the Windows Store and search for ClassBrowserPlus. You might not need it ad hoc for your development using HTML5, CSS and Javascript but I think that it is a great developer's utility that enables you to view the properties, methods and events (along with help text) for all Windows 8 classes. It's always good to look behind the scenes and to explore how it is made. Idea: Start/join a learning group The way you learn new things or intensify your knowledge in a certain technology is completely up to your personal preference. Back in my days at the university, we used to meet once or twice a week in a small quiet room to exchange our progress, questions and problems we ran into. In general, I recommend to any software craftsman to lift your butt and get out to exchange with other developers. Personally, I like this approach, as it gives you new points of view and an insight into others' own experience with certain techniques and how they managed to solve tricky issues. Just keep it relaxed and not too formal after all, and you might a have a good time away from your dull office desk. Give your machine a break, too.

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SQL University: Database testing and refactoring tools and examples

- by Mladen Prajdic

This is a post for a great idea called SQL University started by Jorge Segarra also famously known as SqlChicken on Twitter. It’s a collection of blog posts on different database related topics contributed by several smart people all over the world. So this week is mine and we’ll be talking about database testing and refactoring. In 3 posts we’ll cover: SQLU part 1 - What and why of database testing SQLU part 2 - What and why of database refactoring SQLU part 3 - Database testing and refactoring tools and examples This is the third and last part of the series and in it we’ll take a look at tools we can test and refactor with plus some an example of the both. Tools of the trade First a few thoughts about how to go about testing a database. I'm firmily against any testing tools that go into the database itself or need an extra database. Unit tests for the database and applications using the database should all be in one place using the same technology. By using database specific frameworks we fragment our tests into many places and increase test system complexity. Let’s take a look at some testing tools. 1. NUnit, xUnit, MbUnit All three are .Net testing frameworks meant to unit test .Net application. But we can test databases with them just fine. I use NUnit because I’ve always used it for work and personal projects. One day this might change. So the thing to remember is to be flexible if something better comes along. All three are quite similar and you should be able to switch between them without much problem. 2. TSQLUnit As much as this framework is helpful for the non-C# savvy folks I don’t like it for the reason I stated above. It lives in the database and thus fragments the testing infrastructure. Also it appears that it’s not being actively developed anymore. 3. DbFit I haven’t had the pleasure of trying this tool just yet but it’s on my to-do list. From what I’ve read and heard Gojko Adzic (@gojkoadzic on Twitter) has done a remarkable job with it. 4. Redgate SQL Refactor and Apex SQL Refactor Neither of these refactoring tools are free, however if you have hardcore refactoring planned they are worth while looking into. I’ve only used the Red Gate’s Refactor and was quite impressed with it. 5. Reverting the database state I’ve talked before about ways to revert a database to pre-test state after unit testing. This still holds and I haven’t changed my mind. Also make sure to read the comments as they are quite informative. I especially like the idea of setting up and tearing down the schema for each test group with NHibernate. Testing and refactoring example We’ll take a look at the simple schema and data test for a view and refactoring the SELECT * in that view. We’ll use a single table PhoneNumbers with ID and Phone columns. Then we’ll refactor the Phone column into 3 columns Prefix, Number and Suffix. Lastly we’ll remove the original Phone column. Then we’ll check how the view behaves with tests in NUnit. The comments in code explain the problem so be sure to read them. I’m assuming you know NUnit and C#. T-SQL Code C# test code USE tempdbGOCREATE TABLE PhoneNumbers( ID INT IDENTITY(1,1), Phone VARCHAR(20))GOINSERT INTO PhoneNumbers(Phone)SELECT '111 222333 444' UNION ALLSELECT '555 666777 888'GO-- notice we don't have WITH SCHEMABINDINGCREATE VIEW vPhoneNumbersAS SELECT * FROM PhoneNumbersGO-- Let's take a look at what the view returns -- If we add a new columns and rows both tests will failSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers GO -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will SUCCEED -- refactor to split Phone column into 3 partsALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Prefix VARCHAR(3)ALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Number VARCHAR(6)ALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers ADD Suffix VARCHAR(3)GO-- update the new columnsUPDATE PhoneNumbers SET Prefix = LEFT(Phone, 3), Number = SUBSTRING(Phone, 5, 6), Suffix = RIGHT(Phone, 3)GO-- remove the old columnALTER TABLE PhoneNumbers DROP COLUMN PhoneGO-- This returns unexpected results!-- it returns 2 columns ID and Phone even though -- we don't have a Phone column anymore.-- Notice that the data is from the Prefix column-- This is a danger of SELECT *SELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will FAIL -- for a fix we have to call sp_refreshview -- to refresh the view definitionEXEC sp_refreshview 'vPhoneNumbers'-- after the refresh the view returns 4 columns-- this breaks the input/output behavior of the database-- which refactoring MUST NOT doSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will FAIL -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will FAIL -- to fix the input/output behavior change problem -- we have to concat the 3 columns into one named PhoneALTER VIEW vPhoneNumbersASSELECT ID, Prefix + ' ' + Number + ' ' + Suffix AS PhoneFROM PhoneNumbersGO-- now it works as expectedSELECT *FROM vPhoneNumbers -- DoesViewReturnCorrectColumns test will SUCCEED -- DoesViewReturnCorrectData test will SUCCEED -- clean upDROP VIEW vPhoneNumbersDROP TABLE PhoneNumbers [Test]public void DoesViewReturnCoorectColumns(){ // conn is a valid SqlConnection to the server's tempdb // note the SET FMTONLY ON with which we return only schema and no data using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SET FMTONLY ON; SELECT * FROM vPhoneNumbers", conn)) { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); dt.Load(cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)); // test returned schema: number of columns, column names and data types Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns.Count, 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[0].Caption, "ID"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[0].DataType, typeof(int)); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[1].Caption, "Phone"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Columns[1].DataType, typeof(string)); }} [Test]public void DoesViewReturnCorrectData(){ // conn is a valid SqlConnection to the server's tempdb using (SqlCommand cmd = new SqlCommand("SELECT * FROM vPhoneNumbers", conn)) { DataTable dt = new DataTable(); dt.Load(cmd.ExecuteReader(CommandBehavior.CloseConnection)); // test returned data: number of rows and their values Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows.Count, 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[0]["ID"], 1); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[0]["Phone"], "111 222333 444"); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[1]["ID"], 2); Assert.AreEqual(dt.Rows[1]["Phone"], "555 666777 888"); }} With this simple example we’ve seen how a very simple schema can cause a lot of problems in the whole application/database system if it doesn’t have tests. Imagine what would happen if some outside process would depend on that view. It would get wrong data and propagate it silently throughout the system. And that is not good. So have tests at least for the crucial parts of your systems. And with that we conclude the Database Testing and Refactoring week at SQL University. Hope you learned something new and enjoy the learning weeks to come. Have fun!

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At most how many customized P3 attributes could be added into Agile?

- by Jie Chen

I have one customer/Oracle Partner Consultant asking me such question: how many customized attributes can be allowed to add to Agile's subclass Page Three? I never did research against this because Agile User Guide never says this and theoretically Agile supports unlimited amount of customized attributes, unless the browser itself cannot handle them in allocated memory. However my customers says when to add almost 1000 attributes, the browser (Web Client) will not show any Page Three attributes, including all the out-of-box attributes. Let's see why. Analysis It is horrible to add 1000 attributes manually. Let's do it by a batch SQL like below to add them to Item's subclass Page Three tab. Do not execute below SQL because it will not take effect due to your different node id. CREATE OR REPLACE PROCEDURE createP3Text(v_name IN VARCHAR2) IS v_nid NUMBER; v_pid NUMBER; BEGIN select SEQNODETABLE.nextval into v_nid from dual; Insert Into nodeTable ( id,parentID,description,objType,inherit,helpID,version,name ) values ( v_nid,2473003, v_name ,1,0,0,0, v_name); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,925, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,0,0,0,0,1,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,0,0,0,0,2,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,2,0,1,3,'50'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,5, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,2,0,1,6,'50'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,2,0,0,7,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,8,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,9,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,1,0,1,10,v_name); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,0,0,0,0,11,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,11743,1,14,'2'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,30, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,2,1,0,1,38, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,59,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,60,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,724,0,61, null); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,1,0,0,232,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,233,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,12239,1,415,'13307'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,2,1,0,0,605,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,610,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,1,4,1,451,0,716,'1'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,795,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,2000008821,1,864,'2'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,1,923,'0'); Insert Into propertyTable ( ID,parentID,readOnly,attType,dataType,selection,visible,propertyID,value ) values ( SEQPROPERTYTABLE.nextval,v_nid,0,4,1,451,0,719,'0'); Insert Into tableInfo ( tabID,tableID,classID,att,ordering ) values ( 2473005,1501,2473002,v_nid,9999); commit; END createP3Text; / BEGIN FOR i in 1..1000 LOOP createP3Text('MyText' || i); END LOOP; END; / DROP PROCEDURE createP3Text; COMMIT; Now restart Agile Server and check the Server's log, we noticed below: ***** Node Created : 85625 ***** Property Created : 184579 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + Agile PLM Server Starting Up... + +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ However the previously log before batch SQL is ***** Node Created : 84625 ***** Property Created : 157579 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ + Agile PLM Server Starting Up... + +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Obviously we successfully imported 1000 (85625-84625) attributes. Now go to JavaClient and confirm if we have them or not. Theoretically we are able to open such item object and see all these 1000 attributes and their values, but we get below error. We have no error tips in server log. But never mind we have the Java Console for JavaClient. If to open the same item in JavaClient we get a clear error and detailed trace in Java Console. ORA-01795: maximum number of expressions in a list is 1000 java.sql.SQLException: ORA-01795: maximum number of expressions in a list is 1000 at oracle.jdbc.driver.DatabaseError.throwSqlException(DatabaseError.java:125) ... ... at weblogic.jdbc.wrapper.PreparedStatement.executeQuery(PreparedStatement.java:128) at com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.AgileFlexUtil.setFlexValuesForOneRowTable(AgileFlexUtil.java:1104) at com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.BaseFlexTableDAO.loadExtraFlexAttValues(BaseFlexTableDAO.java:111) at com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.BasePageThreeDAO.loadTable(BasePageThreeDAO.java:108) If you are interested in the background of the problem, you may de-compile the class com.agile.pc.cmserver.base.AgileFlexUtil.setFlexValuesForOneRowTable and find the root cause that Agile happens to hit Oracle Database's limitation that more than 1000 values in the "IN" clause. Check here http://ora-01795.ora-code.com If you need Oracle Agile's final solution, please contact Oracle Agile Support. Performance Below two screenshot are jvm heap usage from before-SQL and after-SQL. We can see there is no big memory gap between two cases. So definitely there is no performance impact to Agile Application Server unless you have more than 1000 attributes for EACH of your dozens of subclasses. And for client, 1000 attributes should not impact the browser's performance because in HTML we only use dt and dd for each attribute's pair: label and value. It is quite lightweight.

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SQL SERVER – Thinking about Deprecated, Discontinued Features and Breaking Changes while Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 – Guest Post by Nakul Vachhrajani

- by pinaldave

Nakul Vachhrajani is a Technical Specialist and systems development professional with iGATE having a total IT experience of more than 7 years. Nakul is an active blogger with BeyondRelational.com (150+ blogs), and can also be found on forums at SQLServerCentral and BeyondRelational.com. Nakul has also been a guest columnist for SQLAuthority.com and SQLServerCentral.com. Nakul presented a webcast on the “Underappreciated Features of Microsoft SQL Server” at the Microsoft Virtual Tech Days Exclusive Webcast series (May 02-06, 2011) on May 06, 2011. He is also the author of a research paper on Database upgrade methodologies, which was published in a CSI journal, published nationwide. In addition to his passion about SQL Server, Nakul also contributes to the academia out of personal interest. He visits various colleges and universities as an external faculty to judge project activities being carried out by the students. Disclaimer: The opinions expressed herein are his own personal opinions and do not represent his employer’s view in anyway. Blog | LinkedIn | Twitter | Google+ Let us hear the thoughts of Nakul in first person - Those who have been following my blogs would be aware that I am recently running a series on the database engine features that have been deprecated in Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Based on the response that I have received, I was quite surprised to know that most of the audience found these to be breaking changes, when in fact, they were not! It was then that I decided to write a little piece on how to plan your database upgrade such that it works with the next version of Microsoft SQL Server. Please note that the recommendations made in this article are high-level markers and are intended to help you think over the specific steps that you would need to take to upgrade your database. Refer the documentation – Understand the terms Change is the only constant in this world. Therefore, whenever customer requirements, newer architectures and designs require software vendors to make a change to the keywords, functions, etc; they ensure that they provide their end users sufficient time to migrate over to the new standards before dropping off the old ones. Microsoft does that too with it’s Microsoft SQL Server product. Whenever a new SQL Server release is announced, it comes with a list of the following features: Breaking changes These are changes that would break your currently running applications, scripts or functionalities that are based on earlier version of Microsoft SQL Server These are mostly features whose behavior has been changed keeping in mind the newer architectures and designs Lesson: These are the changes that you need to be most worried about! Discontinued features These features are no longer available in the associated version of Microsoft SQL Server These features used to be “deprecated” in the prior release Lesson: Without these changes, your database would not be compliant/may not work with the version of Microsoft SQL Server under consideration Deprecated features These features are those that are still available in the current version of Microsoft SQL Server, but are scheduled for removal in a future version. These may be removed in either the next version or any other future version of Microsoft SQL Server The features listed for deprecation will compose the list of discontinued features in the next version of SQL Server Lesson: Plan to make necessary changes required to remove/replace usage of the deprecated features with the latest recommended replacements Once a feature appears on the list, it moves from bottom to the top, i.e. it is first marked as “Deprecated” and then “Discontinued”. We know of “Breaking change” comes later on in the product life cycle. What this means is that if you want to know what features would not work with SQL Server 2012 (and you are currently using SQL Server 2008 R2), you need to refer the list of breaking changes and discontinued features in SQL Server 2012. Use the tools! There are a lot of tools and technologies around us, but it is rarely that I find teams using these tools religiously and to the best of their potential. Below are the top two tools, from Microsoft, that I use every time I plan a database upgrade. The SQL Server Upgrade Advisor Ever since SQL Server 2005 was announced, Microsoft provides a small, very light-weight tool called the “SQL Server upgrade advisor”. The upgrade advisor analyzes installed components from earlier versions of SQL Server, and then generates a report that identifies issues to fix either before or after you upgrade. The analysis examines objects that can be accessed, such as scripts, stored procedures, triggers, and trace files. Upgrade Advisor cannot analyze desktop applications or encrypted stored procedures. Refer the links towards the end of the post to know how to get the Upgrade Advisor. The SQL Server Profiler Another great tool that you can use is the one most SQL Server developers & administrators use often – the SQL Server profiler. SQL Server Profiler provides functionality to monitor the “Deprecation” event, which contains: Deprecation announcement – equivalent to features to be deprecated in a future release of SQL Server Deprecation final support – equivalent to features to be deprecated in the next release of SQL Server You can learn more using the links towards the end of the post. A basic checklist There are a lot of finer points that need to be taken care of when upgrading your database. But, it would be worth-while to identify a few basic steps in order to make your database compliant with the next version of SQL Server: Monitor the current application workload (on a test bed) via the Profiler in order to identify usage of features marked as Deprecated If none appear, you are all set! (This almost never happens) Note down all the offending queries and feature usages Run analysis sessions using the SQL Server upgrade advisor on your database Based on the inputs from the analysis report and Profiler trace sessions, Incorporate solutions for the breaking changes first Next, incorporate solutions for the discontinued features Revisit and document the upgrade strategy for your deployment scenarios Revisit the fall-back, i.e. rollback strategies in case the upgrades fail Because some programming changes are dependent upon the SQL server version, this may need to be done in consultation with the development teams Before any other enhancements are incorporated by the development team, send out the database changes into QA QA strategy should involve a comparison between an environment running the old version of SQL Server against the new one Because minimal application changes have gone in (essential changes for SQL Server version compliance only), this would be possible As an ongoing activity, keep incorporating changes recommended as per the deprecated features list As a DBA, update your coding standards to ensure that the developers are using ANSI compliant code – this code will require a change only if the ANSI standard changes Remember this: Change management is a continuous process. Keep revisiting the product release notes and incorporate recommended changes to stay prepared for the next release of SQL Server. May the power of SQL Server be with you! Links Referenced in this post Breaking changes in SQL Server 2012: Link Discontinued features in SQL Server 2012: Link Get the upgrade advisor from the Microsoft Download Center at: Link Upgrade Advisor page on MSDN: Link Profiler: Review T-SQL code to identify objects no longer supported by Microsoft: Link Upgrading to SQL Server 2012 by Vinod Kumar: Link Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology Tagged: Upgrade

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Writing the tests for FluentPath

- by Bertrand Le Roy

Writing the tests for FluentPath is a challenge. The library is a wrapper around a legacy API (System.IO) that wasn’t designed to be easily testable. If it were more testable, the sensible testing methodology would be to tell System.IO to act against a mock file system, which would enable me to verify that my code is doing the expected file system operations without having to manipulate the actual, physical file system: what we are testing here is FluentPath, not System.IO. Unfortunately, that is not an option as nothing in System.IO enables us to plug a mock file system in. As a consequence, we are left with few options. A few people have suggested me to abstract my calls to System.IO away so that I could tell FluentPath – not System.IO – to use a mock instead of the real thing. That in turn is getting a little silly: FluentPath already is a thin abstraction around System.IO, so layering another abstraction between them would double the test surface while bringing little or no value. I would have to test that new abstraction layer, and that would bring us back to square one. Unless I’m missing something, the only option I have here is to bite the bullet and test against the real file system. Of course, the tests that do that can hardly be called unit tests. They are more integration tests as they don’t only test bits of my code. They really test the successful integration of my code with the underlying System.IO. In order to write such tests, the techniques of BDD work particularly well as they enable you to express scenarios in natural language, from which test code is generated. Integration tests are being better expressed as scenarios orchestrating a few basic behaviors, so this is a nice fit. The Orchard team has been successfully using SpecFlow for integration tests for a while and I thought it was pretty cool so that’s what I decided to use. Consider for example the following scenario: Scenario: Change extension Given a clean test directory When I change the extension of bar\notes.txt to foo Then bar\notes.txt should not exist And bar\notes.foo should exist This is human readable and tells you everything you need to know about what you’re testing, but it is also executable code. What happens when SpecFlow compiles this scenario is that it executes a bunch of regular expressions that identify the known Given (set-up phases), When (actions) and Then (result assertions) to identify the code to run, which is then translated into calls into the appropriate methods. Nothing magical. Here is the code generated by SpecFlow: [NUnit.Framework.TestAttribute()] [NUnit.Framework.DescriptionAttribute("Change extension")] public virtual void ChangeExtension() { TechTalk.SpecFlow.ScenarioInfo scenarioInfo = new TechTalk.SpecFlow.ScenarioInfo("Change extension", ((string[])(null))); #line 6 this.ScenarioSetup(scenarioInfo); #line 7 testRunner.Given("a clean test directory"); #line 8 testRunner.When("I change the extension of " + "bar\\notes.txt to foo"); #line 9 testRunner.Then("bar\\notes.txt should not exist"); #line 10 testRunner.And("bar\\notes.foo should exist"); #line hidden testRunner.CollectScenarioErrors();} The #line directives are there to give clues to the debugger, because yes, you can put breakpoints into a scenario: The way you usually write tests with SpecFlow is that you write the scenario first, let it fail, then write the translation of your Given, When and Then into code if they don’t already exist, which results in running but failing tests, and then you write the code to make your tests pass (you implement the scenario). In the case of FluentPath, I built a simple Given method that builds a simple file hierarchy in a temporary directory that all scenarios are going to work with: [Given("a clean test directory")] public void GivenACleanDirectory() { _path = new Path(SystemIO.Path.GetTempPath()) .CreateSubDirectory("FluentPathSpecs") .MakeCurrent(); _path.GetFileSystemEntries() .Delete(true); _path.CreateFile("foo.txt", "This is a text file named foo."); var bar = _path.CreateSubDirectory("bar"); bar.CreateFile("baz.txt", "bar baz") .SetLastWriteTime(DateTime.Now.AddSeconds(-2)); bar.CreateFile("notes.txt", "This is a text file containing notes."); var barbar = bar.CreateSubDirectory("bar"); barbar.CreateFile("deep.txt", "Deep thoughts"); var sub = _path.CreateSubDirectory("sub"); sub.CreateSubDirectory("subsub"); sub.CreateFile("baz.txt", "sub baz") .SetLastWriteTime(DateTime.Now); sub.CreateFile("binary.bin", new byte[] {0x00, 0x01, 0x02, 0x03, 0x04, 0x05, 0xFF}); } Then, to implement the scenario that you can read above, I had to write the following When: [When("I change the extension of (.*) to (.*)")] public void WhenIChangeTheExtension( string path, string newExtension) { var oldPath = Path.Current.Combine(path.Split('\\')); oldPath.Move(p => p.ChangeExtension(newExtension)); } As you can see, the When attribute is specifying the regular expression that will enable the SpecFlow engine to recognize what When method to call and also how to map its parameters. For our scenario, “bar\notes.txt” will get mapped to the path parameter, and “foo” to the newExtension parameter. And of course, the code that verifies the assumptions of the scenario: [Then("(.*) should exist")] public void ThenEntryShouldExist(string path) { Assert.IsTrue(_path.Combine(path.Split('\\')).Exists); } [Then("(.*) should not exist")] public void ThenEntryShouldNotExist(string path) { Assert.IsFalse(_path.Combine(path.Split('\\')).Exists); } These steps should be written with reusability in mind. They are building blocks for your scenarios, not implementation of a specific scenario. Think small and fine-grained. In the case of the above steps, I could reuse each of those steps in other scenarios. Those tests are easy to write and easier to read, which means that they also constitute a form of documentation. Oh, and SpecFlow is just one way to do this. Rob wrote a long time ago about this sort of thing (but using a different framework) and I highly recommend this post if I somehow managed to pique your interest: http://blog.wekeroad.com/blog/make-bdd-your-bff-2/ And this screencast (Rob always makes excellent screencasts): http://blog.wekeroad.com/mvc-storefront/kona-3/ (click the “Download it here” link)

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