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• DBCC CHECKDB (BatmanDb, REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS) &ndash; Are you Feeling Lucky?

  - by David Totzke

  I’m currently working for a client on a PowerBuilder to WPF migration.  It’s one of those “I could tell you, but I’d have to kill you” kind of clients and the quick-lime pits are currently occupied by the EMC tech…but I’ve said too much already. At approximately 3 or 4 pm that day users of the Batman[1] application here in Gotham[1] started to experience problems accessing the application.  Batman[2] is a document management system here that also integrates with the ERP system.  Very little goes on here that doesn’t involve Batman in some way.  The errors being received seemed to point to network issues (TCP protocol error, connection forcibly closed by the remote host etc…) but the real issue was much more insidious. Connecting to the database via SSMS and performing selects on certain tables underlying the application areas that were having problems started to reveal the issue.  You couldn’t do a SELECT * FROM MyTable without it bombing and giving the same error noted above.  A run of DBCC CHECKDB revealed 14 tables with corruption.  One of the tables with issues was the Document table.  Pretty central to a “document management” system.  Information was obtained from IT that a single drive in the SAN went bad in the night.  A new drive was in place and was working fine.  The partition that held the Batman database is configured for RAID Level 5 so a single drive failure shouldn’t have caused any trouble and yet, the database is corrupted.  They do hourly incremental backups here so the first thing done was to try a restore.  A restore of the most recent backup failed so they worked backwards until they hit a good point.  This successful restore was for a backup at 3AM – a full day behind.  This time also roughly corresponds with the time the SAN started to report the drive failure.  The plot thickens… I got my hands on the output from DBCC CHECKDB and noticed a pattern.  What’s sad is that nobody that should have noticed the pattern in the DBCC output did notice.  There was a rush to do things to try and recover the data before anybody really understood what was wrong with it in the first place.  Cooler heads must prevail in these circumstances and some investigation should be done and a plan of action laid out or you could end up making things worse[3].  DBCC CHECKDB also told us that: repair_allow_data_loss is the minimum repair level for the errors found by DBCC CHECKDB Yikes.  That means that the database is so messed up that you’re definitely going to lose some stuff when you repair it to get it back to a consistent state.  All the more reason to do a little more investigation into the problem.  Rescuing this database is preferable to having to export all of the data possible from this database into a new one.  This is a fifteen year old application with about seven hundred tables.  There are TRIGGERS everywhere not to mention the referential integrity constraints to deal with.  Only fourteen of the tables have an issue.  We have a good backup that is missing the last 24 hours of business which means we could have a “do-over” of yesterday but that’s not a very palatable option either. All of the affected tables had TEXT columns and all of the errors were about LOB data types and orphaned off-row data which basically means TEXT, IMAGE or NTEXT columns.  If we did a SELECT on an affected table and excluded those columns, we got all of the rows.  We exported that data into a separate database.  Things are looking up.  Working on a copy of the production database we then ran DBCC CHECKDB with REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS and that “fixed” everything up.   The allow data loss option will delete the bad rows.  This isn’t too horrible as we have all of those rows minus the text fields from out earlier export.  Now I could LEFT JOIN to the exported data to find the missing rows and INSERT them minus the TEXT column data. We had the restored data from the good 3AM backup that we could now JOIN to and, with fingers crossed, recover the missing TEXT column information.  We got lucky in that all of the affected rows were old and in the end we didn’t lose anything.  :O  All of the row counts along the way worked out and it looks like we dodged a major bullet here. We’ve heard back from EMC and it turns out the SAN firmware that they were running here is apparently buggy.  This thing is only a couple of months old.  Grrr…. They dispatched a technician that night to come and update it .  That explains why RAID didn’t save us. All-in-all this could have been a lot worse.  Given the root cause here, they basically won the lottery in not losing anything. Here are a few links to some helpful posts on the SQL Server Engine blog.  I love the title of the first one: Which part of 'REPAIR_ALLOW_DATA_LOSS' isn't clear? CHECKDB (Part 8): Can repair fix everything? (in fact, read the whole series) Ta da! Emergency mode repair (we didn’t have to resort to this one thank goodness)   Dave Just because I can…   [1] Names have been changed to protect the guilty. [2] I'm Batman. [3] And if I'm the coolest head in the room, you've got even bigger problems...

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• Backup Your Windows Home Server Off-Site with Asus Webstorage

  - by Mysticgeek

  Windows Home Server lets you backup machines on your network easily. But what about backing up the server data? Today we take a look at ASUS WebStorage for Windows Home Server, which provides you with secure off-site backup for WHS. To use the ASUS WebStorage service you’ll need to sign up for a free account. It offers 1GB of free storage, then you can purchase an unlimited backup package for $39.99 for a year subscription. Note: They also offer online storage for individual PCs as well. Install ASUS WebStorage for WHS Browse to your shared folders on the server and open the Add-Ins folder and copy over the WHSConnectorSetup2.2.4.088.msi file (link below) then close out of the folder. Now launch Windows Home Server Console from one of the computers on your network, click Settings, then Add-ins. Under Available Add-ins click the Available tab and you’ll see the Asus WebStorage installer file we just copied over. Click the Install button. Installation kicks off and when it’s complete, you’ll need to close out of the console and reconnect. Using ASUS WebStorage WHS Connector  When you reconnect to WHS Console, scroll over to the ASUS WebStorage icon and click on Settings. Now log into your ASUS account… Now select the folders you want to backup to the WebStorage service. Select the radio button next to Enable to initialize the backup process… The backup process begins. You can change which folders are backed up simply by disabling the backup process, uncheck the folder(s), then enable the backup again. ASUS WebStorage Site After you have files backed up to the ASUS site, log into your account, and your presented with an overview of the amount of storage you’re using. It also shows what type of files are taking certain amounts of space.   You can browse through your backed up files and folders. It allows you to share and sync backed up data as well. Navigate to the file you want and you can easily download it by clicking on it, or share it out by clicking the share link below it. If you choose to share it, you’re provided with a link to the file to send out to other users.   Conclusion Users of Windows Home Server have been looking for an inexpensive cloud backup solution for quite some time. There are services such as JungleDisk, KeepVault, Wuala…etc. These services probably do a better job, but can start getting expensive once you start uploading a GBs of data. Another disappointment of ASUS WebStorage is you can only backup your WHS shares (from what we’ve been able to determine), it’s an “all or nothing” type of thing. You cannot go in and select individual files and folders. The initial upload speeds can be a bit slow as well, although that might have something to do with limited upload speeds on the DSL connection we used to test it. Retrieving your data from the ASUS site is a breeze though, and all the data files are organized quite well. The WHS Addin is very easy to install and use. If you’re looking for an off-site solution to backup your WHS data, you can test out ASUS WebStorage for free with a 1GB limit. This is good for testing the service and it might be exactly what you’re looking for. Other users may want a more advanced solution like KeepVault or CloudBerry…which is a front end for Amazon S3 storage. Download ASUS WebStorage WHS Addin Other WHS Offsite Backup Solutions CloudBerry, JungleDisk, KeepVault, Wuala Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Restore Files from Backups on Windows Home ServerGMedia Blog: Setting Up a Windows Home ServerCreate A Windows Home Server Home Computer Restore DiscRemove a Network Computer from Windows Home ServerShare Ubuntu Home Directories using Samba TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow

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• Modifying Service URLs with LINQ to Twitter

  - by Joe Mayo

  It’s funny that two posts so close together speak about flexibility with the LINQ to Twitter provider.  There are certain things you know from experience on when to make software more flexible and when to save time.  This is another one of those times when I got lucky and made the right choice up front. I’m talking about the ability to switch URLs. It only makes sense that Twitter should begin versioning their API as it matures.  In fact, most of the entire API has moved to the v1 URL at “https://api.twitter.com/1/”, except for search and trends.  Recently, Twitter introduced the available and local trends, but hung them off the new v1, and left the rest of the trends API on the old URL. To implement this, I muscled my way into the expression tree during CreateRequestProcessor to figure out which trend I was dealing with; perhaps not elegant, but the code is in the right place and that’s what factories are for.  Anyway, the point is that I wouldn’t have to do this kind of stuff (as much fun as it is), if Twitter would have more consistency. Having went to Chirp last week and seeing the evolution of the API, it looks like my wish is coming true.  …now if they would just get their stuff together on the mess they made with geo-location and places… but again, that’s all transparent if your using LINQ to Twitter because I pulled all of that together in a consistent way so that you don’t have to. Normally, when Twitter makes a change, code breaks and I have to scramble to get the fixes in-place.  This time, in the case of a URL change, the adjustment is easy and no-one has to wait for me.  Essentially, all you need to do is change the URL passed to the TwitterContext constructor.  Here’s an example of instantiating a TwitterContext now: using (var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth, "https://api.twitter.com/1/", "https://search.twitter.com/")) The third parameter constructor is the SearchUrl, which is used for Search and Trend APIs. You probably know what’s coming next; another constructor, but with the SearchUrl parameter set to the new URL as follows: using (var twitterCtx = new TwitterContext(auth, "https://api.twitter.com/1/", "https://api.twitter.com/1/")) One consequence of setting the URL this way is that you set the URL for both Trends and Search.  Since Search is still using the old URL, this is going to break for Search queries. You could always instantiate a special TwitterContext instance for Search queries, with the old URL set. Alternatively, you can use the TwitterContext’s SearchUrl property. Here’s an example: twitterCtx.SearchUrl = "https://api.twitter.com/1/"; var trends = (from trend in twitterCtx.Trends where trend.Type == TrendType.Daily && trend.Date == DateTime.Now.AddDays(-2).Date select trend) .ToList(); Notice how I set the SearchUrl property just-in-time for the query. This allows you to target the URL for each specific query. Whichever way you prefer to configure the URL, it’s your choice. So, now you know how to set the URL to be used for Trend queries and how to prevent whacking your Search queries. I’ll be updating the Trend API to use same URL as all other APIs soon, so the only API left to use the SearchUrl will be Search, but for the short term, it’s Trends and Search. Until I make this change, you’ll have a viable work-around by setting the URL yourself, as explained above. These were the Search and Trend URLs, but you might be curious about the second parameter of the TwitterContext constructor; that’s the URL for all other APIs (the BaseUrl), except for Trend and Search. Similarly, you can use the TwitterContext’s BaseUrl property to set the BaseUrl. Setting the BaseUrl can be useful when communicating with other services. In addition to Twitter changing URLs, the Twitter API has been adopted by other companies, such as Identi.ca, Tumblr, and  WordPress.  This capability lets you use LINQ to Twitter with any of these services.  This is a testament to the success of the Twitter API and it’s popularity. No doubt we’ll have hills and valleys to traverse as the Twitter API matures, but hopefully there will be enough flexibility in LINQ to Twitter to make these changes as transparent as possible for you. @JoeMayo

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• SQL SERVER – Recover the Accidentally Renamed Table

  - by pinaldave

  I have no answer to following question. I saw a desperate email marked as urgent delivered in my mailbox. “I accidentally renamed table in my SSMS. I was scrolling very fast and I made mistakes. It was either because I double clicked or clicked on F2 (shortcut key for renaming). However, I have made the mistake and now I have no idea how to fix this. I am in big trouble. Help me get my original tablename.” I have seen many similar scenarios in my life and they give me a very good opportunity to preach wisdom but when the house is burning, we cannot talk about how we should have conserved the water earlier. The goal at that point is to put off the fire as fast as we can. I decided to answer this email with my best knowledge. If you have renamed the table, I think you pretty much is out of luck. Here are few things which you can do which can give you idea about what your tablename can be if you are lucky. Method 1: (Not Recommended but try your luck) Check your naming convention of your system. I have often seen that many organizations name their index as IX_TableName_Colms or name their keys as FK_TableName1_TableName2_Cols. If your organization is following the same you can get the name from your table, you may refer your keys. Again, note that this is quite possible that your tablename was already renamed and your keys were not updated. This can easily lead you to select incorrect name. I think follow this if you are confident or move to the next method. Method 2: (Not Recommended but try your luck) This method is also based on your orgs naming convention. If you use the name of the table in any columnname (some organizations use tablename in their incremental identity column name), you can get that name from there. Method 3: (Not Recommended but try your luck) If you know where your table was used in your stored procedures, you can script your stored procedure and find the name of the table back. Method 4: (Try your luck) All the best organizations first create a data model of the schema and there is good chance that this table is used there, you should take your chances and refer original document. If your organization is good at managing docs or source code, you will get the name of the table back for sure. Method 5: (It WORKS but try on a development server) There is no sure way to get you the name of the table which you accidentally renamed however, there is one way which will work for sure. You need to take your latest full backup and restore it on your development server (remember not on production or where you have renamed this column). Now restore latest differential file of the full backup. Now restore all the log files one by one making sure that you are restoring before the point of time of you renamed the tablename. Now go to explore and this will give you the name of the table which you have renamed. If you are confident that the same table existed with the same name when the last full backup was made, you do not have to go to all the steps. You can just get the name of the table directly from last backup’s restore. Read the article about Backup Timeline. Wisdom: How can I miss to preach wisdom when I get the opportunity to do so? Here are a few points to remember. Use a different account to explore production environment. Do not use the same account which have all the rights and permissions all the time. Use the account which has read only permissions if there are no modification required. Use policy based management to prevent changes which are accidental. If there was policy of valid names, the accidental change of the table was not possible unless it was intentional delibarate changes. Have a proper auditing of the system in place. You can use DDL triggers but be careful with its usage (get it reviewed properly first). (Add your suggestion here) I guess Method 5 will work all the time (using point in time restore). Everything else is chance of luck and if you are lucky are bad – you will get further incorrect name. Now go back and read the first line of this blog. Out of five method four methods are just lucky guesses. The method 5 will work but again it is a lengthy process if the size of the database is huge or if you do not have full backup. Did I miss anything obvious? Please leave a comment and I will publish your answer with due credit. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Puzzle, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Limiting Audit Exposure and Managing Risk – Q&A and Follow-Up Conversation

  - by Tanu Sood

  Thanks to all who attended the live ISACA webcast on Limiting Audit Exposure and Managing Risk with Metrics-Driven Identity Analytics. We were really fortunate to have Don Sparks from ISACA moderate the webcast featuring Stuart Lincoln, Vice President, IT P&L Client Services, BNP Paribas, North America and Neil Gandhi, Principal Product Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics. Stuart’s insights given the team’s role in providing IT for P&L Client Services and his tremendous experience in identity management and establishing sustainable compliance programs were true value-add at yesterday’s webcast. And if you are a healthcare organization looking to solve your compliance and security challenges, we recommend you join us for a live webcast on Tuesday, November 29 at 10 am PT. The webcast will feature experts from Kaiser Permanente, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Oracle and the focus of the discussion will be around the compliance challenges a healthcare organization faces and best practices for tackling those. Here are the details: Healthcare IT News Webcast: Managing Risk and Enforcing Compliance in Healthcare with Identity Analytics Tuesday, November 29, 201110:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET Register Today The ISACA webcast replay is now available on-demand and the slides are also available for download. Since we didn’t have time to address all the questions we received during the live Q&A portion of the webcast, we have captured responses to the remaining questions here. Please continue to provide us your feedback and insights from your experience in deploying identity compliance solutions. Q. Can you please clarify the mechanism utilized to populate the Identity Warehouse from each individual application's access management function / files? A. Oracle Identity Analytics (OIA) supports direct imports from applications. Data collection is based on Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) that eliminates the need to write connectors to different applications. Oracle Identity Analytics’ import engine supports complex entitlement feeds saved as either text files or XML. The imports can be scheduled on a periodic basis or triggered as needed. If the applications are synchronized with a user provisioning solution like Oracle Identity Manager, Oracle Identity Analytics has a seamless integration to pull in data from Oracle Identity Manager. Q.  Can you provide a short summary of the new features in your latest release of Oracle Identity Analytics? A. Oracle recently announced availability of enhanced Oracle Identity Analytics. This release focused on easing the certification process by offering risk analytics driven certification, advanced certification screens, business centric views and significant improvement in performance including 3X faster data imports, 3X faster certification campaign generation and advanced auto-certification features, that  will allow organizations to improve user productivity by up to 80%. Closed-loop risk feedback and IT policy monitoring with Oracle Identity Manager, a leading user provisioning solution, allows for more accurate certification reviews. And, OIA's improved performance enables customers to scale compliance initiatives supporting millions of user entitlements across thousands of applications, whether on premise or in the cloud, without compromising speed or integrity. Q. Will ISACA grant a CPE credit for attending this ISACA-sponsored webinar today? A. From ISACA: Hello and thank you for your interest in the 2011 ISACA Webinar Program!  Unfortunately, there are no CPEs offered for this program, archived or live.  We will be looking into the feasibility of offering them in the future.  Q. Would you be able to use this to help manage licenses for software? That is to say - could it track software that is not used by a user, thus eliminating the software license? A. OIA’s integration with Oracle Identity Manager, a leading user provisioning solution, allows organizations to detect ghost accounts or unused accounts via account reconciliation. Based on company’s policies, this could trigger an automated workflow for account deletion or asking for further investigation. Closed-loop feedback between the two solutions would then allow visibility into the complete audit trail of when the account was detected, the action taken, by whom, when and the current status. Q. We have quarterly attestations and .xls mechanisms are not working. Once the identity data is correlated in Identity Analytics, do you then automate access certification? A. OIA’s identity warehouse analyzes and correlates identity data across various resources that allows OIA to determine a user’s risk profile, who the access review request should go to, along with all the relevant access details of the user. The access certification manager gets notification on what to review, when and the relevant data is presented in a business friendly screen. Based on the result of the access certification process, actions are triggered and results recorded and archived. Access review managers have visual risk indicators that also allow them to prioritize access certification tasks and efforts. Q. How does Oracle Identity Analytics work with Cloud Security? A. For enterprises looking to build their own cloud(s), Oracle offers a set of security services that cloud developers can leverage including Oracle Identity Analytics.  For enterprises looking to manage their compliance requirements but without hosting those in-house and instead having a hosting provider offer managed Identity Management services to the organizations, Oracle Identity Analytics can be leveraged much the same way as you’d in an on-premise (within the enterprise) environment. In fact, organizations today are leveraging Oracle Identity Analytics to manage identity compliance in both these ways. Q. Would you recommend this as a cost effective solution for a smaller organization with @ 2,500 users? A. The key return-on-investment (ROI) on Oracle Identity Analytics is derived from automating compliance processes thereby eliminating administrative overhead, minimizing errors, maintaining cost- and time-effective sustainable compliance processes and minimizing audit exposures and penalties.  Of course, there are other tangible benefits that are derived from an Oracle Identity Analytics implementation as outlined in the webcast. For a quantitative analysis of your requirements and potential ROI calculation, we recommend you refer to the Forrester Study on Total Economic Impact of Oracle Identity Analytics. For an in-person discussion, please email Richard Caldwell.

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• Some mail details about Orange Mauritius

  Being an internet service provider is not easy after all for a lot of companies. Luckily, there are quite some good international operators in this world. For example Orange Mauritius aka Mauritius Telecom aka Wanadoo(?) aka MyT here in Mauritius. The local circumstances give them a quasi-monopol position on fixed lines for telephony and therefore cable-based DSL internet connectivity. So far, not bad but as usual... the details. Just for the records, I am only using the services of Orange for mobile but friends and customers are bound, eh stuck, with other services of Orange Mauritius. And usually, being the IT guy, they get in touch with me to complain about problems or to ask questions on either their ADSL / MyT connection, mail services or whatever. Most of those issues are user-related and easily to solve by tweaking the configuration of their computer a little bit but sometimes it's getting weird. Using Orange ADSL... somewhere else Now, let's imagine we are an Orange ADSL customer for ages and we are using their mail services with our very own mail address like "[email protected]". We configured our mail client like Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook or Windows Mail as publicly described, and we are able to receive and send emails like a champion. No problems at all, the world is green. Did I mention that we have a laptop? Ok, let's take our movable piece of information technology and visit a friend here on the island. Not surprising, he is also customer of Orange, so we can read and answer emails. But Orange is not the online internet service provider and one day, we happen to hang out with someone that uses Emtel via WiMAX or UMTS.. And the fun starts... We can still receive and read emails from our Orange mail account and the IT world is still bright but try to send mails to someone outside the domain "@intnet.mu" or "@orange.mu". Your mail client will deny sending mail with SMTP message 5.1.0 "blah not allowed". First guess, there is problem with the mail client, maybe magically the configuration changed over-night. But no it is still working at home... So, there is for sure a problem with the guy's internet connection. At least, it is his fault not to have Orange internet services, so it can not work properly... The Orange Mail FAQ After some more frustation we finally checkout the Orange Mail FAQ to see whether this (obviously?) common problem has been described already. Sorry, but those FAQ entries are even more confusing as it is not really clear how to handle this scenario. Best of all is that most of the entries are still refering to use servers of the domain "intnet.mu". I mean Orange will disable those systems in favour of the domain "orange.mu" in the near future and does not amend their FAQs. Come on, guys! Ok, settings for POP3 are there. Hm, what about the secure version POP3S? No signs at all... Even changing your mail client to use password encryption with STARTTLS is not allowed at all. Use "bow.intnet.mu" for incoming mail... Ahhh, pretty obvious host name. I mean, at least something like pop.intnet.mu or pop3.intnet.mu would have been more accurate. Funny of all, the hostname "pop.orange.mu" is accessible to receive your mail account. Alright, checking SMTP options for authentication or other like POP-before-SMTP or whatever well-known and established mechanism to send emails are described. I guess that spotting a whale or shark in Mauritian waters would be easier. Trial and error on SMTP settings reveal that neither STARTTLS or any other connection / password encryption is available. Using SSL/TLS on SMTP only reveals that there is no service answering your request. Calling customer service So, we have to bite into the bitter apple and get in touch with Orange customer service and complain/explain them our case and ask for advice. After some hiccups, we finally manage to get hold of someone competent in mail services and we receive the golden spoon of mail configuration made by Orange Mauritius: SMTP hostname: smtpauth.intnet.mu And the world of IT is surprisingly green again. Customer satisfaction? Dear Orange Mauritius, what's the problem with this information? Are you scared of mail spammer? Why isn't there any case in your FAQs? Ok, talking about your FAQs - simply said: they are badly outdated! Configure your mail client to use server name based in the domain intnet.mu but specify your account username with orange.mu as domain part. Although, that there are servers available on the domain orange.mu after all. So, why don't you provide current information like this: POP3 server name: pop.orange.muSMTP server name: smtp.orange.muSMTP authenticated: smtpauth.orange.mu It's not difficult, is it? In my humble opinion not really and you would provide clean, consistent and up-to-date information for your customers. This would produce less frustation and so less traffic on your customer service lines. Which after all, would improve the total user experience and satisfaction level on both sides. Without knowing these facts. Now, imagine you would take your laptop abroad and have to use other internet service providers to be able to be online... Calling your customer service would be unnecessary expensive!

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• Writing an ASP.Net Web based TFS Client

  - by Glav

  So one of the things I needed to do was write an ASP.Net MVC based application for our senior execs to manage a set of arbitrary attributes against stories, bugs etc to be able to attribute whether the item was related to Research and Development, and if so, what kind. We are using TFS Azure and don’t have the option of custom templates. I have decided on using a string based field within the template that is not very visible and which we don’t use to write a small set of custom which will determine the research and development association. However, this string munging on the field is not very user friendly so we need a simple tool that can display attributes against items in a simple dropdown list or something similar. Enter a custom web app that accesses our TFS items in Azure (Note: We are also using Visual Studio 2012) Now TFS Azure uses your Live ID and it is not really possible to easily do this in a server based app where no interaction is available. Even if you capture the Live ID credentials yourself and try to submit them to TFS Azure, it wont work. Bottom line is that it is not straightforward nor obvious what you have to do. In fact, it is a real pain to find and there are some answers out there which don’t appear to be answers at all given they didn’t work in my scenario. So for anyone else who wants to do this, here is a simple breakdown on what you have to do: Go here and get the “TFS Service Credential Viewer”. Install it, run it and connect to your TFS instance in azure and create a service account. Note the username and password exactly as it presents it to you. This is the magic identity that will allow unattended, programmatic access. Without this step, don’t bother trying to do anything else. In your MVC app, reference the following assemblies from “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 11.0\Common7\IDE\ReferenceAssemblies\v2.0”: Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Common.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.VersionControl.Common.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.DataStoreLoader.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Client.dll Microsoft.TeamFoundation.WorkItemTracking.Common.dll If hosting this in Internet Information Server, for the application pool this app runs under, you will need to enable 32 Bit support. You also have to allow the TFS client assemblies to store a cache of files on your system. If you don’t do this, you will authenticate fine, but then get an exception saying that it is unable to access the cache at some directory path when you query work items. You can set this up by adding the following to your web.config, in the <appSettings> element as shown below: <appSettings> <!-- Add reference to TFS Client Cache --> <add key="WorkItemTrackingCacheRoot" value="C:\windows\temp" /> </appSettings> With all that in place, you can write the following code: var token = new Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.SimpleWebTokenCredential("{you-service-account-name", "{your-service-acct-password}"); var clientCreds = new Microsoft.TeamFoundation.Client.TfsClientCredentials(token); var currentCollection = new TfsTeamProjectCollection(new Uri(“https://{yourdomain}.visualstudio.com/defaultcollection”), clientCreds); TfsConfigurationServercurrentCollection.EnsureAuthenticated(); In the above code, not the URL contains the “defaultcollection” at the end of the URL. Obviously replace {yourdomain} with whatever is defined for your TFS in Azure instance. In addition, make sure the service user account and password that was generated in the first step is substituted in here. Note: If something is not right, the “EnsureAuthenticated()” call will throw an exception with the message being you are not authorised. If you forget the “defaultcollection” on the URL, it will still fail but with a message saying you are not authorised. That is, a similar but different exception message. And that is it. You can then query the collection using something like: var service = currentCollection.GetService<WorkItemStore>(); var proj = service.Projects[0]; var allQueries = proj.StoredQueries; for (int qcnt = 0; qcnt < allQueries.Count; qcnt++) {     var query = allQueries[qcnt];     var queryDesc = string.format(“Query found named: {0}”,query.Name); } You get the idea. If you search around, you will find references to the ServiceIdentityCredentialProvider which is referenced in this article. I had no luck with this method and it all looked too hard since it required an extra KB article and other magic sauce. So I hope that helps. This article certainly would have helped me save a boat load of time and frustration.

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• Detecting Duplicates Using Oracle Business Rules

  - by joeywong-Oracle

  Recently I was involved with a Business Process Management Proof of Concept (BPM PoC) where we wanted to show how customers could use Oracle Business Rules (OBR) to easily define some rules to detect certain conditions, such as duplicate account numbers, duplicate names, high transaction amounts, etc, in a set of transactions. Traditionally you would have to loop through the transactions and compare each transaction with each other to find matching conditions. This is not particularly nice as it relies on more traditional approaches (coding) and is not the most efficient way. OBR is a great place to house these types’ of rules as it allows users/developers to externalise the rules, in a simpler manner, externalising the rules from the message flows and allows users to change them when required. So I went ahead looking for some examples. After quite a bit of time spent Googling, I did not find much out in the blogosphere. In fact the best example was actually from...... wait for it...... Oracle Documentation! (http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E28271_01/user.1111/e10228/rules_start.htm#ASRUG228) However, if you followed the link there was not much explanation provided with the example. So the aim of this article is to provide a little more explanation to the example so that it can be better understood. Note: I won’t be covering the BPM parts in great detail. Use case: Payment instruction file is required to be processed. Before instruction file can be processed it needs to be approved by a business user. Before the approval process, it would be useful to run the payment instruction file through OBR to look for transactions of interest. The output of the OBR can then be used to flag the transactions for the approvers to investigate. Example BPM Process So let’s start defining the Business Rules Dictionary. For the input into our rules, we will be passing in an array of payments which contain some basic information for our demo purposes. Input to Business Rules And for our output we want to have an array of rule output messages. Note that the element I am using for the output is only for one rule message element and not an array. We will configure the Business Rules component later to return an array instead. Output from Business Rules Business Rule – Create Dictionary Fill in all the details and click OK. Open the Business Rules component and select Decision Functions from the side. Modify the Decision Function Configuration Select the decision function and click on the edit button (the pencil), don’t worry that JDeveloper indicates that there is an error with the decision function. Then click the Ouputs tab and make sure the checkbox under the List column is checked, this is to tell the Business Rules component that it should return an array of rule message elements. Updating the Decision Service Next we will define the actual rules. Click on Ruleset1 on the side and then the Create Rule in the IF/THEN Rule section. Creating new rule in ruleset Ok, this is where some detailed explanation is required. Remember that the input to this Business Rules dictionary is a list of payments, each of those payments were of the complex type PaymentType. Each of those payments in the Oracle Business Rules engine is treated as a fact in its working memory. Implemented rule So in the IF/THEN rule, the first task is to grab two PaymentType facts from the working memory and assign them to temporary variable names (payment1 and payment2 in our example). Matching facts Once we have them in the temporary variables, we can then start comparing them to each other. For our demonstration we want to find payments where the account numbers were the same but the account name was different. Suspicious payment instruction And to stop the rule from comparing the same facts to each other, over and over again, we have to include the last test. Stop rule from comparing endlessly And that’s it! No for loops, no need to keep track of what you have or have not compared, OBR handles all that for you because everything is done in its working memory. And once all the tests have been satisfied we need to assert a new fact for the output. Assert the output fact Save your Business Rules. Next step is to complete the data association in the BPM process. Pay extra care to use Copy List instead of the default Copy when doing data association at an array level. Input and output data association Deploy and test. Test data Rule matched Parting words: Ideally you would then use the output of the Business Rules component to then display/flag the transactions which triggered the rule so that the approver can investigate. Link: SOA Project Archive [Download]

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• Cookbook: SES and UCM setup

  - by George Maggessy

  The purpose of this post is to guide you setting up the integration between UCM and SES. On my next post I’ll show different approaches to integrate WebCenter Portal, UCM and SES based on some common scenarios. Let’s get started. WebCenter Content Configuration WebCenter Content has a component that adds functionality to the content server to allow it to be searched via the Oracle SES. To enable the component installation, go to Administration -&gt; Admin Server and select SESCrawlerExport. Click the update button and restart UCM_server1 managed server. Once the managed server is back, we’ll configure the component. In the menu, under Administration you should see SESCrawlerExport. Click on the link. You’ll see the window below. Click on Configure SESCrawlerExport. Configure the values below: Hostname: SES hostname. Feed Location: Directory where data feeds will be saved. Metadata List: List of metadata that will be searchable by SES. After updating the values click on the Update button. Come back to the SESCrawlerExport Administration UI and click on Take Snapshot button. It will create the data feeds in the specified Feed Location. To check if the correct configuration was done, please access the following URL http://&lt;ucm_server&gt;:&lt;port&gt;/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_DOWLOAD_CONFIG&amp;source=default. It should download config file in the format below: &lt;?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?&gt; &lt;rsscrawler xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/search/rsscrawlerconfig"&gt; &lt;feedLocation&gt;&lt;![CDATA[http://adc6160699.us.oracle.com:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_DOWNLOAD_CONTROL&amp;source=default]]&gt;&lt;/feedLocation&gt; &lt;errorFileLocation&gt;&lt;![CDATA[http://adc6160699.us.oracle.com:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_STATUS&amp;IsJava=1&amp;source=default&amp;StatusFeed=]]&gt;&lt;/errorFileLocation&gt; &lt;feedType&gt;controlFeed&lt;/feedType&gt; &lt;sourceName&gt;default&lt;/sourceName&gt; &lt;securityType&gt;attributeBased&lt;/securityType&gt; &lt;securityAttribute name="Account" grant="true"/&gt; &lt;securityAttribute name="DocSecurityGroup" grant="true"/&gt; &lt;securityAttribute name="Collab" grant="true"/&gt; &lt;/rsscrawler&gt; Make sure Account and DocSecurityGroup values are true. SES Configuration Let’s start by configuring the Identity Plug-ins in SES. Go to Global Settings -&gt; System -&gt; Identity Management Setup. Select Oracle Content Server and click the Activate button. We’ll populate the following values: HTTP endpoint for authentication: URL to WebCenter Content. Notice that /cs/idcplg was added at the end of the URL. Admin User: UCM Admin user. This user must have access to all CPOE content. Password: Password to Admin user. Authentication Type: NATIVE. Go back to the Home tab and click on Sources on the top left. Select Oracle Content Server on the right and click the Create button. Configuration URL: URL that point to the configuration file. Example: http://&lt;ucm_hostname&gt;:&lt;port&gt;/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_DOWNLOAD_CONFIG&amp;source=default. User ID: UCM Admin user. Password: Password to Admin user. Click on the Authorization tab and add the appropriate values to the fields below. Make sure you see the ACCOUNT and DOCSECURITYGROUP security attributes at the end of the page. HTTP endpoint for authorization: http://&lt;ucm_hostname&gt;:&lt;port&gt;/cs/idcplg. Display URL prefix: http://&lt;ucm_hostname&gt;:&lt;port&gt;/cs. Administrator user: UCM Admin user. Administrator password. On the Document Types tab, add the documents that should be indexed by SES. As our last step, we’ll configure the Federation Trusted Entities under Global Settings. Entity Name: The user must be present in both the identity management server configured for your WebCenter application and the identity management server configured for Oracle SES. For instance, I used weblogic in my sample. Password: Entity user password.\ Now you are ready to test the integration on the SES UI: http://&lt;ses hostname&gt;:&lt;port&gt;/search/query/.

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• Rebuilding CoasterBuzz, Part IV: Dependency injection, it's what's for breakfast

  - by Jeff

  (Repost from my personal blog.) This is another post in a series about rebuilding one of my Web sites, which has been around for 12 years. I hope to relaunch soon. More: Part I: Evolution, and death to WCF Part II: Hot data objects Part III: The architecture using the "Web stack of love" If anything generally good for the craft has come out of the rise of ASP.NET MVC, it's that people are more likely to use dependency injection, and loosely couple the pieces parts of their applications. A lot of the emphasis on coding this way has been to facilitate unit testing, and that's awesome. Unit testing makes me feel a lot less like a hack, and a lot more confident in what I'm doing. Dependency injection is pretty straight forward. It says, "Given an instance of this class, I need instances of other classes, defined not by their concrete implementations, but their interfaces." Probably the first place a developer exercises this in when having a class talk to some kind of data repository. For a very simple example, pretend the FooService has to get some Foo. It looks like this: public class FooService {    public FooService(IFooRepository fooRepo)    {       _fooRepo = fooRepo;    }    private readonly IFooRepository _fooRepo;    public Foo GetMeFoo()    {       return _fooRepo.FooFromDatabase();    } } When we need the FooService, we ask the dependency container to get it for us. It says, "You'll need an IFooRepository in that, so let me see what that's mapped to, and put it in there for you." Why is this good for you? It's good because your FooService doesn't know or care about how you get some foo. You can stub out what the methods and properties on a fake IFooRepository might return, and test just the FooService. I don't want to get too far into unit testing, but it's the most commonly cited reason to use DI containers in MVC. What I wanted to mention is how there's another benefit in a project like mine, where I have to glue together a bunch of stuff. For example, when I have someone sign up for a new account on CoasterBuzz, I'm actually using POP Forums' new account mailer, which composes a bunch of text that includes a link to verify your account. The thing is, I want to use custom text and some other logic that's specific to CoasterBuzz. To accomplish this, I make a new class that inherits from the forum's NewAccountMailer, and override some stuff. Easy enough. Then I use Ninject, the DI container I'm using, to unbind the forum's implementation, and substitute my own. Ninject uses something called a NinjectModule to bind interfaces to concrete implementations. The forum has its own module, and then the CoasterBuzz module is loaded second. The CB module has two lines of code to swap out the mailer implementation: Unbind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>(); Bind<PopForums.Email.INewAccountMailer>().To<CbNewAccountMailer>(); Piece of cake! Now, when code asks the DI container for an INewAccountMailer, it gets my custom implementation instead. This is a lot easier to deal with than some of the alternatives. I could do some copy-paste, but then I'm not using well-tested code from the forum. I could write stuff from scratch, but then I'm throwing away a bunch of logic I've already written (in this case, stuff around e-mail, e-mail settings, mail delivery failures). There are other places where the DI container comes in handy. For example, CoasterBuzz does a number of custom things with user profiles, and special content for paid members. It uses the forum as the core piece to managing users, so I can ask the container to get me instances of classes that do user lookups, for example, and have zero care about how the forum handles database calls, configuration, etc. What a great world to live in, compared to ten years ago. Sure, the primary interest in DI is around the "separation of concerns" and facilitating unit testing, but as your library grows and you use more open source, it starts to be the glue that pulls everything together.

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• How do you test an ICF based connector using Connector Facade Standalone?

  - by Shashidhar Malyala

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The following code helps in writing a standalone java program to test an ICF based connector. The sample code in this example takes into account an ICF based flatfile connector. It is possible to test various operations like create, update, delete, search etc... It is also possible to set values to the connector configuration parameters, add/remove attributes and their values. public class FlatFile { private static final java.lang.String BUNDLE_NAME = "<PACKAGE_NAME>"; //Ex: org.info.icf.flatfile private static final java.lang.String BUNDLE_VERSION = "1.0.0"; private static final java.lang.String CONNECTOR_NAME = "org.info.icf.flatfile.FlatFileConnector"; // Name of connector class i.e. the class implemting the connector SPI operations public ConnectorFacade getFacade() throws IOException { ConnectorInfoManagerFactory fact = ConnectorInfoManagerFactory .getInstance(); File bundleDirectory = new File("<BUNDLE_LOCATION>"); //Ex: /usr/oracle/connector_bundles/ URL url = IOUtil.makeURL(bundleDirectory, "org.info.icf.flatfile-1.0.0.jar"); ConnectorInfoManager manager = fact.getLocalManager(url); ConnectorKey key = new ConnectorKey(BUNDLE_NAME, BUNDLE_VERSION, CONNECTOR_NAME); ConnectorInfo info = manager.findConnectorInfo(key); // From the ConnectorInfo object, create the default APIConfiguration. APIConfiguration apiConfig = info.createDefaultAPIConfiguration(); // From the default APIConfiguration, retrieve the // ConfigurationProperties. ConfigurationProperties properties = apiConfig .getConfigurationProperties(); // Print out what the properties are (not necessary) List propertyNames = properties.getPropertyNames(); for (String propName : propertyNames) { ConfigurationProperty prop = properties.getProperty(propName); System.out.println("Property Name: " + prop.getName() + "\tProperty Type: " + prop.getType()); } properties .setPropertyValue("fileLocation", "/usr/oracle/accounts.csv"); // Set all of the ConfigurationProperties needed by the connector. // properties.setPropertyValue("host", FOOBAR_HOST); // properties.setPropertyValue("adminName", FOOBAR_ADMIN); // properties.setPropertyValue("adminPassword", FOOBAR_PASSWORD); // properties.setPropertyValue("useSSL", false); // Use the ConnectorFacadeFactory's newInstance() method to get a new // connector. ConnectorFacade connFacade = ConnectorFacadeFactory.getInstance() .newInstance(apiConfig); // Make sure we have set up the Configuration properly connFacade.validate(); return connFacade; } public static void main(String[] args) throws IOException { FlatFile file = new FlatFile(); ConnectorFacade cfac = file.getFacade(); Set attrSet = new HashSet(); attrSet.add(AttributeBuilder.build(Name.NAME, "Test01")); attrSet.add(AttributeBuilder.build("FIRST_NAME", "Test_First")); attrSet.add(AttributeBuilder.build("LAST_NAME", "Test_Last")); //Create Uid uid = cfac.create(ObjectClass.ACCOUNT, attrSet, null); //Delete Uid uidP = new Uid("Test01"); cfac.delete(ObjectClass.ACCOUNT, uidP, null); } }

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• jQuery Templates, Data Link

  - by Renso

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Query Templates, Data Link, and Globalization I am sure you must have read Scott Guthrie’s blog post about jQuery support and officially supporting jQuery's templating, data linking and globalization, if not here it is: jQuery Templating Since we are an open source shop and use jQuery and jQuery plugins extensively to say the least, decided to look into the templating a bit and see what data linking is all about. For those not familiar with those terms here is the summary, plenty of material out there on what it is, but here is what in my experience it means: jQuery Templating: A templating engine that allows you to specify a client-side template where you indicate which properties/tags you want dynamically updated. You in a sense specify which parts of the html is dynamic and since it is pluggable you are able to use tools data jQuery data linking and others to let it sync up your template with data. What makes it more powerful is that you can easily work with rows of data, adding and removing rows. Once the template has been generated, which you do dynamically on a client-side event, you then append/inject the resulting template somewhere in your DOM, like for example you would get a JSON object from the database, map it to your template, it populates the template with your data in the indicated places, and then let’s say for example append it to a row in a table. I have not found it that useful for lets say a single record of data since you could easily just get a partial view from the server via an html type ajax call. It really shines when you dynamically add/remove rows from a list in the DOM. I have not found an alternative that meets the functionality of the jQuery template and helps of course that Microsoft officially supports it. In future versions of the jQuery plug-in it may even ship as part of the standard jQuery library and with future versions of Visual Studio. jQuery Data Linking: In short I was fascinated by it initially by how with one line of code I can sync up my JSON object with my form elements. That's where my enthusiasm stopped. It was one-line to let is deal with syncing up your form with your JSON object, but it is not bidirectional as they state and I tried all the work arounds they suggested and none of them work. The problem is that when you update your JSON object it DOES NOT sync it up with your form. In an example, accounts are being edited client side by selecting the account from a list by clicking on the row, it then fetches the entire account JSON object via ajax json-type call and then refreshes the form with the account’s details from the new JSON object. What is the use of syncing up my JSON with the form if I still have to programmatically sync up my new JSON object with each DOM property?! So you may ask: “what is the alternative”? Good question and the same one I was pondering, maybe I can just use it for keeping my from n sync with my JSON object so I can post that JSON object back to the server and update my database. That’s when I discovered Knockout: Knockout It addresses the issues mentioned above and also supports event handling through the observer pattern. Not wanting to go into detail here, Steve Sanderson, the creator of Knockout, has already done a terrific job of that, thanks Steve for a great plug-in! Best of all it integrates perfectly with the jQuery Templating engine as well. I have not found an alternative to this plugin that supports the depth and width of functionality and would recommend it to anyone. The only drawback is the embedded html attributes (data-bind=””) tags that you have to add to the HTML, in my opinion tying your behavior to your HTML, where I like to separate behavior from HTML as well as CSS, so the HTML is purely to define content, not styling or behavior. But there are plusses to this as well and also a nifty work around to this that I will just shortly mention here with an example. Instead of data binding an html tag with knockout event handling like so:  <%=Html.TextBox("PrepayDiscount", String.Empty, new { @class = "number" })%>   Do: <%=Html.DataBoundTextBox("PrepayDiscount", String.Empty, new { @class = "number" })%>   The html extension above then takes care of the internals and you could then swap Knockout for something else if you want to inside the extension and keep the HTML plugin agnostic. Here is what the extension looks like, you can easily build a whole library to support all kinds of data binding options from this:      public static class HtmlExtensions       {         public static MvcHtmlString DataBoundTextBox(this HtmlHelper helper, string name, object value, object htmlAttributes)         {             var dic = new RouteValueDictionary(htmlAttributes);             dic.Add("data-bind", String.Format("value: {0}", name));             return helper.TextBox(name, value, dic);         }       }   Hope this helps in making a decision when and where to consider jQuery templating, data linking and Knockout.

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• Trouble with Samba Domain

  - by Arkevius

  I'm having a bit of trouble setting up this Samba domain correctly. I'm getting an Access Denied error when trying to add a Windows XP machine to the domain. I'll go through my scenario in detail, but for those of you wanting a TLDR summary it'll be at the bottom of this post. I have HP Proliant server with Ubuntu 12.04 LTS installed. For this particular environment, I need this server to act as a PDC, file server, and print server. I began by updating and upgrading the packages (of course). Then went to install samba, gnome-desktop, wine, and cpanm. Samba was, of course, for the PDC and file/print services. The GUI was needed because a certain software has to be installed on there that needs a GUI. Wine was needed because the software is Windows-native. And cpanm was for a perl script I have running. For Samba, I went into the smb.conf file and enabled domain logons, changed the workgroup/domain name, the logon script for a per-group basis (netlogon/%g), enabled the netlogon and profiles share, and setup a couple of custom shares for the file service. The printer was added later, and seems to be working just fine. I then restarted the services, and used the net groupmap command to ensure my unix groups were mapped correctly to the Windows groups. After this, I went to a Windows box, and was able to successfully join the domain without a problem. After some fidgeting with the software to get it running on the win boxes from the server (it's a records management system program, which stores it's database files on the server), I went to add another computer to the domain. But now it's saying Access Denied. Before when I had this trouble it was because I forgot to add the group "machines" so Samba could create machine accounts. Thinking this was the case, I manually created the machine account to test this theory. However, it would still give me an Access Denied error. That must mean it has something to do with permissions now, correct? I've been fighting with this server for the past two weeks. If it's not one thing that;s wrong, then it's something else completely different. This would be the third time I've actually reinstalled everything to start over. I'll post snippets of my system settings below. If anything else is needed, just say the word and I'll gather up the info. The unix group 'domadmin' is the Domain Admins group. Samba Administrator account administrator:x:1000:1000:Administrator,,,:/home/administrator:/bin/bash Adminstrator's groups administrator adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare domadmin crimestar Samba's Configuration FIle (a snippet anyways) [global] workgroup = CITYPD server string = BPDServer dns proxy = no log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m max log size = 1000 syslog = 0 panic action = /usr/share/samba/panic-action %d security = user encrypt passwords = true passdb backend = tdbsam obey pam restrictions = yes unix password sync = yes passwd program = /usr/bin/passwd %u passwd chat = *Enter\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *Retype\snew\s*\spassword:* %n\n *password\supdated\ssuccessfully* . pam password change = yes map to guest = bad user domain logons = yes logon path = \\%L\srv\samba\profiles\%U logon script = logon.bat add machine script = /usr/sbin/useradd -g machines -c "%u machine account" -d /var/lib/samba -s /bin/false %u domain master = yes usershare allow guests = yes [netlogon] comment = Network Logon Service path = /srv/samba/netlogon/%g guest ok = yes read only = yes browseable = no [profiles] comment = All Printers browseable = no path = /var/spool/samba printable = yes guest ok = no read only = yes create mask = 0700 [print$] comment = Printer Drivers path = /var/lib/samba/printers browseable = yes read only = yes guest ok = no write list = root, @lpadmin [crimestar] comment = "Crimestar DB" path = /srv/crimestar/db valid users = @domadmin, @crimestar admin users = administrator writeable = yes guest ok = no browseable = no create mask = 0666 directory mask = 0777 [crimestarfiles] path = /home/administrator/.wine/drive_c/crimestar admin users = administrator browseable = yes ls -la on /srv/samba/profiles drwxrwxrwx 2 root machines 4096 Nov 21 15:27 . drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:28 .. ls -la on /srv/samba/netlogon drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:30 . drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:28 .. drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:30 crimestar drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 21 18:13 domadmin drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:30 guests drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Nov 21 15:29 users GrouMap list Domain Users (S-1-5-21-2978508755-2341913247-928297747-513) -> users Domain Admins (S-1-5-21-2978508755-2341913247-928297747-512) -> domadmin Domain Guests (S-1-5-21-2978508755-2341913247-928297747-514) -> nogroup TLDR I'm getting an Access Denied error message while trying to join a windows box to a samba domain, even after I successfully joined another computer without a problem. System settings / files are quoted above. Anyone have any ideas or suggestions?

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• Are IE9 really good ?

  - by anirudha

  IE9 started a campaign for kill IE6 from the core because they know that IE6 is a big trouble or  problem for them for promote 9 version of IE. so they started a campaign for killing IE6. next time they kill IE 7 , 8,9 whenever they found this old version have a big problem for them to promote next version of IE.   Why they not make a update system who automatically update the browser and tell user to restart and update goes installed in the user system. well IE9 should learn from all other that they have very well design auto-update system who never give user in trouble that your browser goes old. Chrome and Firefox both update themselves and say user restart to enjoy another good version. in IE6 a big problem is that updates. no one sure that they installed new version of IE6 without any hassles and update goes install without any problem because they really know or care about “you need this to install this and this for this” so they thing “why I update IE whenever I am unsure that my browser goes update and I have no problem again” so they do nothing because their work done with no problem because common person used high profile application who work even in IE6. so they do nothing.    IE6 countdown website have designed a banner for warn or force user to upgrade to next version of IE. well there is no good reason for put the banner on website some of reason are:-   Windows 7 comes with pre-installed IE8 and Vista comes with upgrade version them IE6 so that is sure that you force a user who have Windows XP [luna] and if they want to upgrade IE then they can get IE8 not version 9 because IE9 is design for Windows 7 or Vista Service pack 2. so What is the use of update when user still have a outdate version too because IE8 is old version and not have any capability of HTML5 so forcing user by using the banner have no sense. I am not know why they all listed on website put the banner on their own website. it’s good that you offer user what they want instead of giving them a outdate version of IE again. My means to give a user list of browser they can try to enhance their browser experience instead of only IE.   IE9 build upon WPF and they spent more time on using WPF in IE instead of making user experience browser.  many thing is designed wrongly in IE first thing is tabs. the tabs in chrome are bigger and easily to move and same in Firefox even not have smooth tabbing. IE have same tabbing as chrome have but leak a point that it’s too small. if you really  want to move then sometime they create a problem that they going elsewhere from the current instance of IE.   Chrome have a big buttons, tabs and menu to enhance browser experience and Firefox have a good feature that you can make them bigger or small. you can put the icon for add-ons on the toolbar for easily use but IE have no relation with customization so we never can thinking about that.   When chrome provide lot’s of extensions and a  webstore for browser application and same feature in Firefox can be seen then there is no plugin in IE. really you can see their IE addons Website where no plugin listed for web development. even in the category or tag. as a response from many blog there is new for developer that new version of IE9 developer tool. well IE9 have three new tabs a blogger tell on their blog. when I trying them I found many thing but I still unable to edit the Css from the HTML tab and no plugin I found I can get to enhance IE9 web development. something more other provide never IE9 give me like personas , customization , browser extension or any other they used to tell a small thing customization  .   IE9 still have some problem with JavaScript that when I use Firefox and chrome and logout in both then my cookie is deleted but in IE it’s not done. it’s show me that IE9 still have different from other not for good thing even some bad thing too. When I trying to read a article that is written in Hindi using Unicode font I found that they show many thing misspelled. there is three Sha in Hindi but they all goes wrong in IE. the misprint thing is not that the writing  for the articles goes wrong. it’s problem or browser to rendering a font. the Firefox and chrome not give me this problem even opera render the font in italic style by decrease the font-size but all those work perfect.   in Pwn2Own the apple’s safari  and IE9 both are hacked. this is a awesome news for whose who thing that  open-source is lose in  Security and close-source is highly-secured software. well this is not a good parameter for talking about software. it’s should depend how much application tested and used. because more testing and more use of application make them better.   I  appreciate IE to making their new version 9 and good luck for them. there is a another matter that I personally found nothing on them.

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• Jolicloud is a Nifty New OS for Your Netbook

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to breathe new life into your netbook?  Here’s a quick look at Jolicloud, a unique new Linux based OS that lets you use your netbook in a whole new way. Netbooks have been an interesting category of computers.  When they were first released, most netbooks came with a stripped down Linux based operating system designed to let you easily access the internet first and foremost.  Consumers wanted more from their netbooks, so full OSes such as Windows XP and Ubuntu became the standard on netbooks.  Microsoft worked hard to get Windows 7 working great on netbooks, and today most netbooks run Windows 7 great.  But the Linux community hasn’t stood still either, and Jolicloud is proof of that.  Jolicloud is a unique OS designed to bring the best of both webapps and standard programs to your netbook.   Keep reading to see if this is the perfect netbook OS for you. Getting Started Installing Jolicloud on your netbook is easy thanks to a the Jolicloud Express installer for Windows.  Since many netbooks run Windows by default, this makes it easy to install Jolicloud.  Plus, your Windows install is left untouched, so you can still easily access all your Windows files and programs. Download and run the roughly 700Mb installer (link below) just as a normal installer in Windows. This will first extract the needed files. Click Get started to install Jolicloud on your netbook. Enter a username, password, and nickname for your computer.  Please note that the username must be all lowercase, and the nickname should not contain spaces or special characters.   Now you can review the default installation settings.  By default it will take up 39Gb and install on your C:\ drive in English.  If you wish to change this, click Change. We chose to install it on the D: drive on this netbook, as its harddrive was already partitioned into two parts.  Click Save when your settings are all correct, and then click Next in the previous window. Jolicloud will prepare for the installation.  This took about 5 minutes in our test.  Click Next when this is finished. Click Restart now to install and run Jolicloud. When your netbook reboots, it will initialize the Jolicloud setup. It will then automatically finish the installation.  Just sit back and wait; there’s nothing for you to do right now.  The installation took about 20 minutes in our test. Jolicloud will automatically reboot when the setup is finished. Once it’s rebooted, you’re ready to go!  Enter the username, then the password, that you chose earlier when you were installing Jolicloud from Windows. Welcome to your Jolicloud desktop! Hardware Support We installed Jolicloud on a Samsung N150 netbook with an Atom N450 processor, 1Gb Ram, 250Gb harddrive, and WiFi b/g/n with Bluetooth.  Amazingly, once Jolicloud was installed, everything was ready to use.  No drivers to install, no settings to hassle with, it was all installed and set up perfectly.  Power settings worked great, and closing the netbook put it to sleep just like in Windows. WiFi drivers have typically been difficult to find and install on Linux, but Jolicloud had our netbook’s wifi working immediately.  To get online, simply click the Wireless icon on the top right, and select the wireless network you want to connect to. Jolicloud will let you know when it is signed on. Wired Lan networking was also seamless; simply connect your cable and you’re ready to go.  The webcam and touchpad also worked perfectly directly.  The only thing missing was multitouch; this touchpad has two finger scroll, pinch zoom, and other nice multitouch features in Windows, but in Julicloud it only functioned as a standard touchpad.  It did have tap to click activated by default, as well as right-side scrolling, which is nice. Jolicloud also supported our video card without any extra work.  The native resolution was already selected, and the only problem we had with the screen was that there was no apparent way to change the brightness.  This is not a major problem, but would be nice to have.  The Samsung N150 has Intel GMA3150 integrated graphics, and Jolicloud promises 1080p HD video on it.  It did playback 720p H.264 video flawlessly without installing anything extra, but it stuttered on full 1080p HD (which is the exact same as this netbook’s video playback in Windows 7 – 720p works great, but it stutters on 1080p).  We would be excited to see full HD on this netbook, but 720p is definitely fine for most stuff.   Jolicloud supports a wide range of netbooks, and based on our experience we would expect it to work as good on any supported hardware.  Check out the list of supported netbooks to see if your netbook is supported; if not, it still may work but you may have to install special drivers. Jolicloud’s performance was very similar to Windows 7 on our netbook.  It boots in about 30 seconds, and apps load fairly quickly.  In general, we couldn’t tell much difference in performance between Jolicloud and Windows 7, though this isn’t a problem since Windows 7 runs great on the current generation of netbooks. Using Jolicloud Ready to start putting Jolicloud to use?  Your fresh Jolicloud install you can run several built-in apps, such as Firefox, a calculator, and the chat client Pidgin.  It also has a media player and file viewer installed, so you can play MP3s or MPG videos, or read PDF ebooks without installing anything extra.  It also has Flash player installed so you can watch videos online easily. You can also directly access all of your files from the right side of your home screen.  You can even access your Windows files; in our test, the 116.9 GB Media was C: from Windows.  Select it to browse and open any file you had saved in Windows. You may need to enter your password to access it. Once you’re authenticated it, you’ll see all of your Windows files and folders.  Your User files (Documents, Music, Videos, etc.) will be in the Users folder. And, you can easily add files from removable media such as USB flash drives and memory cards.  Jolicloud recognized a flash drive we tested with no trouble at all. Add new apps But, the best part about Jolicloud is that it makes it very easy to install new apps.  Click the Get Started button on your homescreen. You’ll first need to create an account.  You can then use this same account on another netbook if you wish, and your settings will automatically be synced between the two. You can either signup using your Facebook account, …or you can sign up the traditional way with your email address, name, and password.  If you sign up this way, you will need to confirm your email address before your account will be finished. Now, choose your netbook model from the list, and enter a name for your computer. And that’s it!  You’ll now see the Jolicloud dashboard, which will show you updates and notifications from friends who also use Jolicloud. Click the App directory to find new apps for your netbook.  Here you will find a variety of webapps, such as Gmail, along with native applications, such as Skype, that you can install on your netbook.  Simply click the Install button on the right to add the app to your netbook. You will be prompted to enter your system password, and then the app will install without any further input.   Once an app is installed, a check mark will appear beside its name.  You can remove it by clicking the Remove button, and it will uninstall seamlessly. Webapps, such as Gmail, actually run in in a Chrome-powered window that lets the webapp run full screen.  This gives the webapps a native feel, but actually they’re just running the same as they would in a standard web browser.   The Jolicloud Interface Most apps run maximized, and there is no way to run them smaller.  This in general works good, since with small screens most apps need to run full-screen anyhow. Smaller apps, such as a calculator or the Pidgin chat client, run in a window just like they do on other operating systems. You can switch to another app that’s running by selecting it’s icon on the top left, or you can go back to the home screen by clicking the home screen.  If you’re finished with an program, simply click the red X button on the top right of the window when you’re running it. Or, you can switch between programs using standard keyboard shortcuts such as Alt-tab. The default page on the home screen is the favorites page, and all of your other programs are orginized in their own sections on the left hand side.  But, if you want to add one of these to your favorites page, simply right-click on it and select Add to Favorites. When you’re done for the day, you can simply close your netbook to put it to sleep.  Or, if you want to shut down, just press the Quit button on the bottom right of the home screen and then select Shut Down. Booting Jolicloud When you install Jolicloud, it will set itself as the default operating system.  Now, when you boot your netbook, it will show you a list of installed operating systems.  You can select either Windows or Jolicloud, but if you don’t make a selection it will boot into Jolicloud after waiting 10 seconds. If you’d perfer to boot into Windows by default, you can easily change this.  First, boot your netbook in to Windows.  Open the start menu, right-click on the Computer button, and select Properties.   Click the “Advanced system settings” link on the left side. Click the Settings button in the Startup and Recovery section. Now, select Windows as the default operating system, and click Ok.  Your netbook will now boot into Windows by default, but will give you 10 seconds to choose to boot into Jolicloud when you start your computer. Or, if you decided you don’t want Jolicloud, you can easily uninstall it from within Windows. Please note that this will also remove any files you may have saved in Jolicloud, so be sure to copy them to your Windows drive before uninstalling. To uninstall Jolicloud from within Windows, open Control Panel, and select Uninstall a Program. Scroll down to select Jolicloud, and click Uninstall/Change. Click Yes to confirm that you want to uninstall Jolicloud. After a few moments, it will let you know that Jolicloud has been uninstalled.  You’re netbook is now back the same as it was before you installed Jolicloud, with only Windows installed. Closing Whether you’re wanting to replace your current OS on your netbook or would simply like to try out a fresh new Linux version on your netbook, Jolicloud is a great option for you.  We were very impressed by it’s solid hardware support and the ease of installing new apps in Jolicloud.  Rather than simply giving us a standard OS, Jolicloud offers a unique way to use your netbook with native programs and webapps.  And whether you’re an IT pro or are a new computer user, Jolicloud was easy enough to use that anyone can do it.  Give it a try, and let us know what your favorite netbook OS is! Link Download Jolicloud for your netbook Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Change XSplash Themes in Ubuntu 9.10Verify the Integrity of Windows Vista System FilesMonitor Multiple Logs in a Single Shell with MultiTail for LinuxHide Some or All of the GUI Bars in FirefoxAsk the Readers: Do You Use a Laptop, Desktop, or Both? TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Stop In The Name Of Love (Firefox addon) Chitika iPad Labs Gives Live iPad Sale Stats Heaven & Hell Finder Icon Using TrueCrypt to Secure Your Data Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically

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• Ops Center 12c - Provisioning Solaris Using a Card-Based NIC

  - by scottdickson

  It's been a long time since last I added something here, but having some conversations this last week, I got inspired to update things. I've been spending a lot of time with Ops Center for managing and installing systems these days.  So, I suspect a number of my upcoming posts will be in that area. Today, I want to look at how to provision Solaris using Ops Center when your network is not connected to one of the built-in NICs.  We'll talk about how this can work for both Solaris 10 and Solaris 11, since they are pretty similar.  In both cases, WANboot is a key piece of the story. Here's what I want to do:  I have a Sun Fire T2000 server with a Quad-GbE nxge card installed.  The only network is connected to port 2 on that card rather than the built-in network interfaces.  I want to install Solaris on it across the network, either Solaris 10 or Solaris 11.  I have met with a lot of customers lately who have a similar architecture.  Usually, they have T4-4 servers with the network connected via 10GbE connections. Add to this mix the fact that I use Ops Center to manage the systems in my lab, so I really would like to add this to Ops Center.  If possible, I would like this to be completely hands free.  I can't quite do that yet. Close, but not quite. WANBoot or Old-Style NetBoot? When a system is installed from the network, it needs some help getting the process rolling.  It has to figure out what its network configuration (IP address, gateway, etc.) ought to be.  It needs to figure out what server is going to help it boot and install, and it needs the instructions for the installation.  There are two different ways to bootstrap an installation of Solaris on SPARC across the network.   The old way uses a broadcast of RARP or more recently DHCP to obtain the IP configuration and the rest of the information needed.  The second is to explicitly configure this information in the OBP and use WANBoot for installation WANBoot has a number of benefits over broadcast-based installation: it is not restricted to a single subnet; it does not require special DHCP configuration or DHCP helpers; it uses standard HTTP and HTTPS protocols which traverse firewalls much more easily than NFS-based package installation.  But, WANBoot is not available on really old hardware and WANBoot requires the use o Flash Archives in Solaris 10.  Still, for many people, this is a great approach. As it turns out, WANBoot is necessary if you plan to install using a NIC on a card rather than a built-in NIC. Identifying Which Network Interface to Use One of the trickiest aspects to this process, and the one that actually requires manual intervention to set up, is identifying how the OBP and Solaris refer to the NIC that we want to use to boot.  The OBP already has device aliases configured for the built-in NICs called net, net0, net1, net2, net3.  The device alias net typically points to net0 so that when you issue the command  "boot net -v install", it uses net0 for the boot.  Our task is to figure out the network instance for the NIC we want to use.  We will need to get to the OBP console of the system we want to install in order to figure out what the network should be called.  I will presume you know how to get to the ok prompt.  Once there, we have to see what networks the OBP sees and identify which one is associated with our NIC using the OBP command show-nets. SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.0 64-bit Copyright (c) 1983, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. {4} ok banner Sun Fire T200, No Keyboard Copyright (c) 1998, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.30.4.b, 32640 MB memory available, Serial #69057548. Ethernet address 0:14:4f:1d:bc:c, Host ID: 841dbc0c. {4} ok show-nets a) /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0,1 b) /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0 c) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,3 d) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 e) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,1 f) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0 g) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0,1 h) /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 q) NO SELECTION Enter Selection, q to quit: d /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 has been selected. Type ^Y ( Control-Y ) to insert it in the command line. e.g. ok nvalias mydev ^Y for creating devalias mydev for /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok devalias ... net3 /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0,1 net2 /pci@7c0/pci@0/pci@2/network@0 net1 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0,1 net0 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0 ... name aliases By looking at the devalias and the show-nets output, we can see that our Quad-GbE card must be the device nodes starting with  /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0.  The cable for our network is plugged into the 3rd slot, so the device address for our network must be /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2. With that, we can create a device alias for our network interface.  Naming the device alias may take a little bit of trial and error, especially in Solaris 11 where the device alias seems to matter more with the new virtualized network stack. So far in my testing, since this is the "next" network interface to be used, I have found success in naming it net4, even though it's a NIC in the middle of a card that might, by rights, be called net6 (assuming the 0th interface on the card is the next interface identified by Solaris and this is the 3rd interface on the card).  So, we will call it net4.  We need to assign a device alias to it: {4} ok nvalias net4 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok devalias net4 /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 ... We also may need to have the MAC for this particular interface, so let's get it, too.  To do this, we go to the device and interrogate its properties. {4} ok cd /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 {4} ok .properties assigned-addresses 82060210 00000000 03000000 00000000 01000000 82060218 00000000 00320000 00000000 00008000 82060220 00000000 00328000 00000000 00008000 82060230 00000000 00600000 00000000 00100000 local-mac-address 00 21 28 20 42 92 phy-type mif ... From this, we can see that the MAC for this interface is  00:21:28:20:42:92.  We will need this later. This is all we need to do at the OBP.  Now, we can configure Ops Center to use this interface. Network Boot in Solaris 10 Solaris 10 turns out to be a little simpler than Solaris 11 for this sort of a network boot.  Since WANBoot in Solaris 10 fetches a specified In order to install the system using Ops Center, it is necessary to create a OS Provisioning profile and its corresponding plan.  I am going to presume that you already know how to do this within Ops Center 12c and I will just cover the differences between a regular profile and a profile that can use an alternate interface. Create a OS Provisioning profile for Solaris 10 as usual.  However, when you specify the network resources for the primary network, click on the name of the NIC, probably GB_0, and rename it to GB_N/netN, where N is the instance number you used previously in creating the device alias.  This is where the trial and error may come into play.  You may need to try a few instance numbers before you, the OBP, and Solaris all agree on the instance number.  Mark this as the boot network. For Solaris 10, you ought to be able to then apply the OS Provisioning profile to the server and it should install using that interface.  And if you put your cards in the same slots and plug the networks into the same NICs, this profile is reusable across multiple servers. Why This Works If you watch the console as Solaris boots during the OSP process, Ops Center is going to look for the device alias netN.  Since WANBoot requires a device alias called just net, Ops Center uses the value of your netN device alias and assigns that device to the net alias.  That means that boot net will automatically use this device.  Very cool!  Here's a trace from the console as Ops Center provisions a server: Sun Sun Fire T200, No KeyboardCopyright (c) 1998, 2010, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.OpenBoot 4.30.4.b, 32640 MB memory available, Serial #69057548.Ethernet address 0:14:4f:1d:bc:c, Host ID: 841dbc0c.auto-boot? =            false{0} ok  {0} ok printenv network-boot-argumentsnetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok devalias net net                      /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0{0} ok devalias net4 net4                     /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok devalias net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok setenv network-boot-arguments host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:8004/cgi-bin/wanboot-cginetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=0100144F1DBC0C,file=http://10.140.204.22:8004/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok boot net - installBoot device: /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2  File and args: - install/pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2: 1000 Mbps link up<time unavailable> wanboot info: WAN boot messages->console<time unavailable> wanboot info: configuring /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2 See what happened?  Ops Center looked for the network device alias called net4 that we specified in the profile, took the value from it, and made it the net device alias for the boot.  Pretty cool! WANBoot and Solaris 11 Solaris 11 requires an additional step since the Automated Installer in Solaris 11 uses the MAC address of the network to figure out which manifest to use for system installation.  In order to make sure this is available, we have to take an extra step to associate the MAC of the NIC on the card with the host.  So, in addition to creating the device alias like we did above, we also have to declare to Ops Center that the host has this new MAC. Declaring the NIC Start out by discovering the hardware as usual.  Once you have discovered it, take a look under the Connectivity tab to see what networks it has discovered.  In the case of this system, it shows the 4 built-in networks, but not the networks on the additional cards.  These are not directly visible to the system controller.  In order to add the additional network interface to the hardware asset, it is necessary to Declare it.  We will declare that we have a server with this additional NIC, but we will also  specify the existing GB_0 network so that Ops Center can associate the right resources together.  The GB_0 acts as sort of a key to tie our new declaration to the old system already discovered.  Go to the Assets tab, select All Assets, and then in the Actions tab, select Add Asset.  Rather than going through a discovery this time, we will manually declare a new asset. When we declare it, we will give the hostname, IP address, system model that match those that have already been discovered.  Then, we will declare both GB_0 with its existing MAC and the new GB_4 with its MAC.  Remember that we collected the MAC for GB_4 when we created its device alias. After you declare the asset, you will see the new NIC in the connectivity tab for the asset.  You will notice that only the NICs you listed when you declared it are seen now.  If you want Ops Center to see all of the existing NICs as well as the additional one, declare them as well.  Add the other GB_1, GB_2, GB_3 links and their MACs just as you did GB_0 and GB_4.  Installing the OS  Once you have declared the asset, you can create an OS Provisioning profile for Solaris 11 in the same way that you did for Solaris 10.  The only difference from any other provisioning profile you might have created already is the network to use for installation.  Again, use GB_N/netN where N is the interface number you used for your device alias and in your declaration.  And away you go.  When the system boots from the network, the automated installer (AI) is able to see which system manifest to use, based on the new MAC that was associated, and the system gets installed. {0} ok {0} ok printenv network-boot-argumentsnetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok devalias net net                      /pci@780/pci@0/pci@1/network@0{0} ok devalias net4 net4                     /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok devalias net /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2{0} ok setenv network-boot-arguments host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cginetwork-boot-arguments =  host-ip=10.140.204.234,router-ip=10.140.204.1,subnet-mask=255.255.254.0,hostname=atl-sewr-52,client-id=01002128204292,file=http://10.140.204.22:5555/cgi-bin/wanboot-cgi{0} ok {0} ok boot net - installBoot device: /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2  File and args: - install/pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2: 1000 Mbps link up<time unavailable> wanboot info: WAN boot messages->console<time unavailable> wanboot info: configuring /pci@780/pci@0/pci@8/network@0,2...SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.0 64-bitCopyright (c) 1983, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.Remounting root read/writeProbing for device nodes ...Preparing network image for useDownloading solaris.zlib--2012-02-17 15:10:17--  http://10.140.204.22:5555/var/js/AI/sparc//solaris.zlibConnecting to 10.140.204.22:5555... connected.HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OKLength: 126752256 (121M) [text/plain]Saving to: `/tmp/solaris.zlib'100%[======================================>] 126,752,256 28.6M/s   in 4.4s    2012-02-17 15:10:21 (27.3 MB/s) - `/tmp/solaris.zlib' saved [126752256/126752256] Conclusion So, why go to all of this trouble?  More and more, I find that customers are wiring their data center to only use higher speed networks - 10GbE only to the hosts.  Some customers are moving aggressively toward consolidated networks combining storage and network on CNA NICs.  All of this means that network-based provisioning cannot rely exclusively on the built-in network interfaces.  So, it's important to be able to provision a system using other than the built-in networks.  Turns out, that this is pretty straight-forward for both Solaris 10 and Solaris 11 and fits into the Ops Center deployment process quite nicely. Hopefully, you will be able to use this as you build out your own private cloud solutions with Ops Center.

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• Announcing the release of the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 for .NET

  - by ScottGu

  Today we released the v2.1 update of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET.  This is a major refresh of the Windows Azure SDK and it includes some great new features and enhancements. These new capabilities include: Visual Studio 2013 Preview Support: The Windows Azure SDK now supports using the new VS 2013 Preview Visual Studio 2013 VM Image: Windows Azure now has a built-in VM image that you can use to host and develop with VS 2013 in the cloud Visual Studio Server Explorer Enhancements: Redesigned with improved filtering and auto-loading of subscription resources Virtual Machines: Start and Stop VM’s w/suspend billing directly from within Visual Studio Cloud Services: New Emulator Express option with reduced footprint and Run as Normal User support Service Bus: New high availability options, Notification Hub support, Improved VS tooling PowerShell Automation: Lots of new PowerShell commands for automating Web Sites, Cloud Services, VMs and more All of these SDK enhancements are now available to start using immediately and you can download the SDK from the Windows Azure .NET Developer Center.  Visual Studio’s Team Foundation Service (http://tfs.visualstudio.com/) has also been updated to support today’s SDK 2.1 release, and the SDK 2.1 features can now be used with it (including with automated builds + tests). Below are more details on the new features and capabilities released today: Visual Studio 2013 Preview Support Today’s Window Azure SDK 2.1 release adds support for the recent Visual Studio 2013 Preview. The 2.1 SDK also works with Visual Studio 2010 and Visual Studio 2012, and works side by side with the previous Windows Azure SDK 1.8 and 2.0 releases. To install the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 on your local computer, choose the “install the sdk” link from the Windows Azure .NET Developer Center. Then, chose which version of Visual Studio you want to use it with.  Clicking the third link will install the SDK with the latest VS 2013 Preview: If you don’t already have the Visual Studio 2013 Preview installed on your machine, this will also install Visual Studio Express 2013 Preview for Web. Visual Studio 2013 VM Image Hosted in the Cloud One of the requests we’ve heard from several customers has been to have the ability to host Visual Studio within the cloud (avoiding the need to install anything locally on your computer). With today’s SDK update we’ve added a new VM image to the Windows Azure VM Gallery that has Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview, SharePoint 2013, SQL Server 2012 Express and the Windows Azure 2.1 SDK already installed on it.  This provides a really easy way to create a development environment in the cloud with the latest tools. With the recent shutdown and suspend billing feature we shipped on Windows Azure last month, you can spin up the image only when you want to do active development, and then shut down the virtual machine and not have to worry about usage charges while the virtual machine is not in use. You can create your own VS image in the cloud by using the New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery menu within the Windows Azure Management Portal, and then by selecting the “Visual Studio Ultimate 2013 Preview” template: Visual Studio Server Explorer: Improved Filtering/Management of Subscription Resources With the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release you’ll notice significant improvements in the Visual Studio Server Explorer. The explorer has been redesigned so that all Windows Azure services are now contained under a single Windows Azure node.  From the top level node you can now manage your Windows Azure credentials, import a subscription file or filter Server Explorer to only show services from particular subscriptions or regions. Note: The Web Sites and Mobile Services nodes will appear outside the Windows Azure Node until the final release of VS 2013. If you have installed the ASP.NET and Web Tools Preview Refresh, though, the Web Sites node will appear inside the Windows Azure node even with the VS 2013 Preview. Once your subscription information is added, Windows Azure services from all your subscriptions are automatically enumerated in the Server Explorer. You no longer need to manually add services to Server Explorer individually. This provides a convenient way of viewing all of your cloud services, storage accounts, service bus namespaces, virtual machines, and web sites from one location: Subscription and Region Filtering Support Using the Windows Azure node in Server Explorer, you can also now filter your Windows Azure services in the Server Explorer by the subscription or region they are in.  If you have multiple subscriptions but need to focus your attention to just a few subscription for some period of time, this a handy way to hide the services from other subscriptions view until they become relevant. You can do the same sort of filtering by region. To enable this, just select “Filter Services” from the context menu on the Windows Azure node: Then choose the subscriptions and/or regions you want to filter by. In the below example, I’ve decided to show services from my pay-as-you-go subscription within the East US region: Visual Studio will then automatically filter the items that show up in the Server Explorer appropriately: With storage accounts and service bus namespaces, you sometimes need to work with services outside your subscription. To accommodate that scenario, those services allow you to attach an external account (from the context menu). You’ll notice that external accounts have a slightly different icon in server explorer to indicate they are from outside your subscription. Other Improvements We’ve also improved the Server Explorer by adding additional properties and actions to the service exposed. You now have access to most of the properties on a cloud service, deployment slot, role or role instance as well as the properties on storage accounts, virtual machines and web sites. Just select the object of interest in Server Explorer and view the properties in the property pane. We also now have full support for creating/deleting/update storage tables, blobs and queues from directly within Server Explorer.  Simply right-click on the appropriate storage account node and you can create them directly within Visual Studio: Virtual Machines: Start/Stop within Visual Studio Virtual Machines now have context menu actions that allow you start, shutdown, restart and delete a Virtual Machine directly within the Visual Studio Server Explorer. The shutdown action enables you to shut down the virtual machine and suspend billing when the VM is not is use, and easily restart it when you need it: This is especially useful in Dev/Test scenarios where you can start a VM – such as a SQL Server – during your development session and then shut it down / suspend billing when you are not developing (and no longer be billed for it). You can also now directly remote desktop into VMs using the “Connect using Remote Desktop” context menu command in VS Server Explorer.  Cloud Services: Emulator Express with Run as Normal User Support You can now launch Visual Studio and run your cloud services locally as a Normal User (without having to elevate to an administrator account) using a new Emulator Express option included as a preview feature with this SDK release.  Emulator Express is a version of the Windows Azure Compute Emulator that runs a restricted mode – one instance per role – and it doesn’t require administrative permissions and uses 40% less resources than the full Windows Azure Emulator. Emulator Express supports both web and worker roles. To run your application locally using the Emulator Express option, simply change the following settings in the Windows Azure project. On the shortcut menu for the Windows Azure project, choose Properties, and then choose the Web tab. Check the setting for IIS (Internet Information Services). Make sure that the option is set to IIS Express, not the full version of IIS. Emulator Express is not compatible with full IIS. On the Web tab, choose the option for Emulator Express. Service Bus: Notification Hubs With the Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release we are adding support for Windows Azure Notification Hubs as part of our official Windows Azure SDK, inside of Microsoft.ServiceBus.dll (previously the Notification Hub functionality was in a preview assembly). You are now able to create, update and delete Notification Hubs programmatically, manage your device registrations, and send push notifications to all your mobile clients across all platforms (Windows Store, Windows Phone 8, iOS, and Android). Learn more about Notification Hubs on MSDN here, or watch the Notification Hubs //BUILD/ presentation here. Service Bus: Paired Namespaces One of the new features included with today’s Windows Azure SDK 2.1 release is support for Service Bus “Paired Namespaces”.  Paired Namespaces enable you to better handle situations where a Service Bus service namespace becomes unavailable (for example: due to connectivity issues or an outage) and you are unable to send or receive messages to the namespace hosting the queue, topic, or subscription. Previously,to handle this scenario you had to manually setup separate namespaces that can act as a backup, then implement manual failover and retry logic which was sometimes tricky to get right. Service Bus now supports Paired Namespaces, which enables you to connect two namespaces together. When you activate the secondary namespace, messages are stored in the secondary queue for delivery to the primary queue at a later time. If the primary container (namespace) becomes unavailable for some reason, automatic failover enables the messages in the secondary queue. For detailed information about paired namespaces and high availability, see the new topic Asynchronous Messaging Patterns and High Availability. Service Bus: Tooling Improvements In this release, the Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio contain several enhancements and changes to the management of Service Bus messaging entities using Visual Studio’s Server Explorer. The most noticeable change is that the Service Bus node is now integrated into the Windows Azure node, and supports integrated subscription management. Additionally, there has been a change to the code generated by the Windows Azure Worker Role with Service Bus Queue project template. This code now uses an event-driven “message pump” programming model using the QueueClient.OnMessage method. PowerShell: Tons of New Automation Commands Since my last blog post on the previous Windows Azure SDK 2.0 release, we’ve updated Windows Azure PowerShell (which is a separate download) five times. You can find the full change log here. We’ve added new cmdlets in the following areas: China instance and Windows Azure Pack support Environment Configuration VMs Cloud Services Web Sites Storage SQL Azure Service Bus China Instance and Windows Azure Pack We now support the following cmdlets for the China instance and Windows Azure Pack, respectively: China Instance: Web Sites, Service Bus, Storage, Cloud Service, VMs, Network Windows Azure Pack: Web Sites, Service Bus We will have full cmdlet support for these two Windows Azure environments in PowerShell in the near future. Virtual Machines: Stop/Start Virtual Machines Similar to the Start/Stop VM capability in VS Server Explorer, you can now stop your VM and suspend billing: If you want to keep the original behavior of keeping your stopped VM provisioned, you can pass in the -StayProvisioned switch parameter. Virtual Machines: VM endpoint ACLs We’ve added and updated a bunch of cmdlets for you to configure fine-grained network ACL on your VM endpoints. You can use the following cmdlets to create ACL config and apply them to a VM endpoint: New-AzureAclConfig Get-AzureAclConfig Set-AzureAclConfig Remove-AzureAclConfig Add-AzureEndpoint -ACL Set-AzureEndpoint –ACL The following example shows how to add an ACL rule to an existing endpoint of a VM. Other improvements for Virtual Machine management includes Added -NoWinRMEndpoint parameter to New-AzureQuickVM and Add-AzureProvisioningConfig to disable Windows Remote Management Added -DirectServerReturn parameter to Add-AzureEndpoint and Set-AzureEndpoint to enable/disable direct server return Added Set-AzureLoadBalancedEndpoint cmdlet to modify load balanced endpoints Cloud Services: Remote Desktop and Diagnostics Remote Desktop and Diagnostics are popular debugging options for Cloud Services. We’ve introduced cmdlets to help you configure these two Cloud Service extensions from Windows Azure PowerShell. Windows Azure Cloud Services Remote Desktop extension: New-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtensionConfig Get-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Set-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Remove-AzureServiceRemoteDesktopExtension Windows Azure Cloud Services Diagnostics extension New-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtensionConfig Get-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension Set-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension Remove-AzureServiceDiagnosticsExtension The following example shows how to enable Remote Desktop for a Cloud Service. Web Sites: Diagnostics With our last SDK update, we introduced the Get-AzureWebsiteLog –Tail cmdlet to get the log streaming of your Web Sites. Recently, we’ve also added cmdlets to configure Web Site application diagnostics: Enable-AzureWebsiteApplicationDiagnostic Disable-AzureWebsiteApplicationDiagnostic The following 2 examples show how to enable application diagnostics to the file system and a Windows Azure Storage Table: SQL Database Previously, you had to know the SQL Database server admin username and password if you want to manage the database in that SQL Database server. Recently, we’ve made the experience much easier by not requiring the admin credential if the database server is in your subscription. So you can simply specify the -ServerName parameter to tell Windows Azure PowerShell which server you want to use for the following cmdlets. Get-AzureSqlDatabase New-AzureSqlDatabase Remove-AzureSqlDatabase Set-AzureSqlDatabase We’ve also added a -AllowAllAzureServices parameter to New-AzureSqlDatabaseServerFirewallRule so that you can easily add a firewall rule to whitelist all Windows Azure IP addresses. Besides the above experience improvements, we’ve also added cmdlets get the database server quota and set the database service objective. Check out the following cmdlets for details. Get-AzureSqlDatabaseServerQuota Get-AzureSqlDatabaseServiceObjective Set-AzureSqlDatabase –ServiceObjective Storage and Service Bus Other new cmdlets include Storage: CRUD cmdlets for Azure Tables and Queues Service Bus: Cmdlets for managing authorization rules on your Service Bus Namespace, Queue, Topic, Relay and NotificationHub Summary Today’s release includes a bunch of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions.  All the above features/enhancements are shipped and available to use immediately as part of the 2.1 release of the Windows Azure SDK for .NET. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Designing for the future

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  User interfaces and user experience design is a fast moving field. It’s something that changes pretty quick: what feels fresh today will look outdated tomorrow. I remember the day I first got a beta version of Windows 95 and I felt swept away by the user interface of the OS. It felt so modern! If I look back now, it feels old. Well, it should: the design is 17 years old which is an eternity in our field. Of course, this is not limited to UI. Same goes for many industries. I want you to think back of the cars that amazed you when you were in your teens (if you are in your teens then this may not apply to you). Didn’t they feel like part of the future? Didn’t you think that this was the ultimate in designs? And aren’t those designs hopelessly outdated today (again, depending on your age, it may just be me)? Let’s review the Win95 design: And let’s compare that to Windows 7: There are so many differences here, I wouldn’t even know where to start explaining them. The general feeling however is one of more usability: studies have shown Windows 7 is much easier to understand for new users than the older versions of Windows did. Of course, experienced Windows users didn’t like it: people are usually afraid of changes and like to stick to what they know. But for new users this was a huge improvement. And that is what UX design is all about: make a product easier to use, with less training required and make users feel more productive. Still, there are areas where this doesn’t hold up. There are plenty examples of designs from the past that are still fresh today. But if you look closely at them, you’ll notice some subtle differences. This differences are what keep the designs fresh. A good example is the signs you’ll find on the road. They haven’t changed much over the years (otherwise people wouldn’t recognize them anymore) but they have been changing gradually to reflect changes in traffic. The same goes for computer interfaces. With each new product or version of a product, the UI and UX is changed gradually. Every now and then however, a bigger change is needed. Just think about the introduction of the Ribbon in Microsoft Office 2007: the whole UI was redesigned. A lot of old users (not in age, but in times of using older versions) didn’t like it a bit, but new users or casual users seem to be more efficient using the product. Which, of course, is exactly the reason behind the changes. I believe that a big engine behind the changes in User Experience design has been the web. In the old days (i.e. before the explosion of the internet) user interface design in Windows applications was limited to choosing the margins between your battleship gray buttons. When the web came along, and especially the web 2.0 where the browsers started to act more and more as application platforms, designers stepped in and made a huge impact. In the browser, they could do whatever they wanted. In the beginning this was limited to the darn blink tag but gradually people really started to think about UX. Even more so: the design of the UI and the whole experience was taken away from the developers and put into the hands of people who knew what they were doing: UX designers. This caused some problems. Everyone who has done a web project in the early 2000’s must have had the same experience: the designers give you a set of Photoshop files and tell you to translate it to HTML. Which, of course, is very hard to do. However, with new tooling and new standards this became much easier. The latest version of HTML and CSS has taken the responsibility for the design away from the developers and placed them in the capable hands of the designers. And that’s where that responsibility belongs, after all, I don’t want a designer to muck around in my c# code just as much as he or she doesn’t want me to poke in the sites style definitions. This change in responsibilities resulted in good looking but more important: better thought out user interfaces in websites. And when websites became more and more interactive, people started to expect the same sort of look and feel from their desktop applications. But that didn’t really happen. Most business applications still have that battleship gray look and feel. Ok, they may use a different color but we’re not talking colors here but usability. Now, you may not be able to read the Dutch captions, but even if you did you wouldn’t understand what was going on. At least, not when you first see it. You have to scan the screen, read all the labels, see how they are related to the other elements on the screen and then figure out what they do. If you’re an experienced user of this application however, this might be a good thing: you know what to do and you get all the information you need in one single screen. But for most applications this isn’t the case. A lot of people only use their computer for a limited time a day (a weird concept for me, but it happens) and need it to get something done and then get on with their lives. For them, a user interface experience like the above isn’t working. (disclaimer: I just picked a screenshot, I am not saying this is bad software but it is an example of about 95% of the Windows applications out there). For the knowledge worker, this isn’t a problem. They use one or two systems and they know exactly what they need to do to achieve their goal. They don’t want any clutter on their screen that distracts them from their task, they just want to be as efficient as possible. When they know the systems they are very productive. The point is, how long does it take to become productive? And: could they be even more productive if the UX was better? Are there things missing that they don’t know about? Are there better ways to achieve what they want to achieve? Also: could a system be designed in such a way that it is not only much more easy to work with but also less tiring? in the example above you need to switch between the keyboard and mouse a lot, something that we now know can be very tiring. The goal of most applications (being client apps or websites on any kind of device) is to provide information. Information is data that when given to the right people, on the right time, in the right place and when it is correct adds value for that person (please, remember that definition: I still hear the statement “the information was wrong” which doesn’t make sense: data can be wrong, information cannot be). So if a system provides data, how can we make sure the chances of becoming information is as high as possible? A good example of a well thought-out system that attempts this is the Zune client. It is a very good application, and I think the UX is much better than it’s main competitor iTunes. Have a look at both: On the left you see the iTunes screenshot, on the right the Zune. As you notice, the Zune screen has more images but less chrome (chrome being visuals not part of the data you want to show, i.e. edges around buttons). The whole thing is text oriented or image oriented, where that text or image is part of the information you need. What is important is big, what’s less important is smaller. Yet, everything you need to know at that point is present and your attention is drawn immediately to what you’re trying to achieve: information about music. You can easily switch between the content on your machine and content on your Zune player but clicking on the image of the player. But if you didn’t know that, you’d find out soon enough: the whole UX is designed in such a way that it invites you to play around. So sooner or later (probably sooner) you’d click on that image and you would see what it does. In the iTunes version it’s harder to find: the discoverability is a lot lower. For inexperienced people the Zune player feels much more natural than the iTunes player, and they get up to speed a lot faster. How does this all work? Why is this UX better? The answer lies in a project from Microsoft with the codename (it seems to be becoming the official name though) “Metro”. Metro is a design language, based on certain principles. When they thought about UX they took a good long look around them and went out in search of metaphors. And they found them. The team noticed that signage in streets, airports, roads, buildings and so on are usually very clear and very precise. These signs give you the information you need and nothing more. It’s simple, clearly understood and fast to understand. A good example are airport signs. Airports can be intimidating places, especially for the non-experienced traveler. In the early 1990’s Amsterdam Airport Schiphol decided to redesign all the signage to make the traveller feel less disoriented. They developed a set of guidelines for signs and implemented those. Soon, most airports around the world adopted these ideas and you see variations of the Dutch signs everywhere on the globe. The signs are text-oriented. Yes, there are icons explaining what it all means for the people who can’t read or don’t understand the language, but the basic sign language is text. It’s clear, it’s high-contrast and it’s easy to understand. One look at the sign and you know where to go. The only thing I don’t like is the green sign pointing to the emergency exit, but since this is the default style for emergency exits I understand why they did this. If you look at the Zune UI again, you’ll notice the similarities. Text oriented, little or no icons, clear usage of fonts and all the information you need. This design language has a set of principles: Clean, light, open and fast Content, not chrome Soulful and alive These are just a couple of the principles, you can read the whole philosophy behind Metro for Windows Phone 7 here. These ideas seem to work. I love my Windows Phone 7. It’s easy to use, it’s clear, there’s no clutter that I do not need. It works for me. And I noticed it works for a lot of other people as well, especially people who aren’t as proficient with computers as I am. You see these ideas in a lot other places. Corning, a manufacturer of glass, has made a video of possible usages of their products. It’s their glimpse into the future. You’ll notice that a lot of the UI in the screens look a lot like what Microsoft is doing with Metro (not coincidentally Corning is the supplier for the Gorilla glass display surface on the new SUR40 device (or Surface v2.0 as a lot of people call it)). The idea behind this vision is that data should be available everywhere where you it. Systems should be available at all times and data is presented in a clear and light manner so that you can turn that data into information. You don’t need a lot of fancy animations that only distract from the data. You want the data and you want it fast. Have a look at this truly inspiring video that made: This is what I believe the future will look like. Of course, not everything is possible, or even desirable. But it is a nice way to think about the future . I feel very strongly about designing applications in such a way that they add value to the user. Designing applications that turn data into information. Applications that make the user feel happy to use them. So… when are you going to drop the battleship-gray designs? Tags van Technorati: surface,design,windows phone 7,wp7,metro

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• Sell good Dumps, track 1&2, CVV, Paypal, WU TRANSFER Service

  - by gOOD dUMPS cvv

  my products for sale: Sell CVV; Dumps, track1&2; Bank logins; Paypal Accounts;Ebay Accounts Mailpass; SMTP;RDP;VPS;CCN;SSN; Sell Amazon gift card & itunes gift card; Game Cards, ATM Card; MSR, ATM SKIMMERS. Do WU Transfers and Bank Transfers I am here to sell, supply good and quality CVV for shipping;booking airline ticket;shopping online;ordering Laptop,Iphone;... In last 5 years my Job Is This. PRESTIGE is my first motto. Not easy to build the good PRESTIGE. My motto is Always make customers satisfied & happy ! I have unlocked many softwares make good money, example: -Software to make the bug and crack MTCN of the Western Union. Version : 2.0.1.1 ( new update ) -Software to open balance in PayPal and Bank Login -Software hacking credit card, debit card Version 1.0 **I only sell it for my good customers, and my familiarity ***I update more than 200 CC + CVV everyday. 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Mail: [email protected]] [Sell CVV, Dumps,track1&2; Bank logins; Paypal Accounts;Ebay Accounts; Mailpass; SMTP;RDP;VPS;CCN;SSN; Sell Amazon gift card & itunes gift card; Game Card, ATM Card, MSR, ATM SKIMMERS. Do WU Transfer and Bank Transfers....Contact via Y!H: goodcvv_dumps or ICQ: 667686221. Mail: [email protected]] [Sell CVV, Dumps,track1&2; Bank logins; Paypal Accounts;Ebay Accounts; Mailpass; SMTP;RDP;VPS;CCN;SSN; Sell Amazon gift card & itunes gift card; Game Card, ATM Card, MSR, ATM SKIMMERS. Do WU Transfer and Bank Transfers....Contact via Y!H: goodcvv_dumps or ICQ: 667686221. Mail: [email protected]] [Sell CVV, Dumps,track1&2; Bank logins; Paypal Accounts;Ebay Accounts; Mailpass; SMTP;RDP;VPS;CCN;SSN; Sell Amazon gift card & itunes gift card; Game Card, ATM Card, MSR, ATM SKIMMERS. Do WU Transfer and Bank Transfers....Contact via Y!H: goodcvv_dumps or ICQ: 667686221. Mail: [email protected]]

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• Sell good CVV, Dumps track 1&2, Paypal, WU TRANSFER

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• Testing Entity Framework applications, pt. 3: NDbUnit

  - by Thomas Weller

  This is the third of a three part series that deals with the issue of faking test data in the context of a legacy app that was built with Microsoft's Entity Framework (EF) on top of an MS SQL Server database – a scenario that can be found very often. Please read the first part for a description of the sample application, a discussion of some general aspects of unit testing in a database context, and of some more specific aspects of the here discussed EF/MSSQL combination. Lately, I wondered how you would ‘mock’ the data layer of a legacy application, when this data layer is made up of an MS Entity Framework (EF) model in combination with a MS SQL Server database. Originally, this question came up in the context of how you could enable higher-level integration tests (automated UI tests, to be exact) for a legacy application that uses this EF/MSSQL combo as its data store mechanism – a not so uncommon scenario. The question sparked my interest, and I decided to dive into it somewhat deeper. What I've found out is, in short, that it's not very easy and straightforward to do it – but it can be done. The two strategies that are best suited to fit the bill involve using either the (commercial) Typemock Isolator tool or the (free) NDbUnit framework. The use of Typemock was discussed in the previous post, this post now will present the NDbUnit approach... NDbUnit is an Apache 2.0-licensed open-source project, and like so many other Nxxx tools and frameworks, it is basically a C#/.NET port of the corresponding Java version (DbUnit namely). In short, it helps you in flexibly managing the state of a database in that it lets you easily perform basic operations (like e.g. Insert, Delete, Refresh, DeleteAll)  against your database and, most notably, lets you feed it with data from external xml files. Let's have a look at how things can be done with the help of this framework. Preparing the test data Compared to Typemock, using NDbUnit implies a totally different approach to meet our testing needs.  So the here described testing scenario requires an instance of an SQL Server database in operation, and it also means that the Entity Framework model that sits on top of this database is completely unaffected. First things first: For its interactions with the database, NDbUnit relies on a .NET Dataset xsd file. See Step 1 of their Quick Start Guide for a description of how to create one. With this prerequisite in place then, the test fixture's setup code could look something like this: [TestFixture, TestsOn(typeof(PersonRepository))] [Metadata("NDbUnit Quickstart URL",           "http://code.google.com/p/ndbunit/wiki/QuickStartGuide")] [Description("Uses the NDbUnit library to provide test data to a local database.")] public class PersonRepositoryFixture {     #region Constants     private const string XmlSchema = @"..\..\TestData\School.xsd";     #endregion // Constants     #region Fields     private SchoolEntities _schoolContext;     private PersonRepository _personRepository;     private INDbUnitTest _database;     #endregion // Fields     #region Setup/TearDown     [FixtureSetUp]     public void FixtureSetUp()     {         var connectionString = ConfigurationManager.ConnectionStrings["School_Test"].ConnectionString;         _database = new SqlDbUnitTest(connectionString);         _database.ReadXmlSchema(XmlSchema);         var entityConnectionStringBuilder = new EntityConnectionStringBuilder         {             Metadata = "res://*/School.csdl|res://*/School.ssdl|res://*/School.msl",             Provider = "System.Data.SqlClient",             ProviderConnectionString = connectionString         };         _schoolContext = new SchoolEntities(entityConnectionStringBuilder.ConnectionString);         _personRepository = new PersonRepository(this._schoolContext);     }     [FixtureTearDown]     public void FixtureTearDown()     {         _database.PerformDbOperation(DbOperationFlag.DeleteAll);         _schoolContext.Dispose();     }     ...  As you can see, there is slightly more fixture setup code involved if your tests are using NDbUnit to provide the test data: Because we're dealing with a physical database instance here, we first need to pick up the test-specific connection string from the test assemblies' App.config, then initialize an NDbUnit helper object with this connection along with the provided xsd file, and also set up the SchoolEntities and the PersonRepository instances accordingly. The _database field (an instance of the INdUnitTest interface) will be our single access point to the underlying database: We use it to perform all the required operations against the data store. To have a flexible mechanism to easily insert data into the database, we can write a helper method like this: private void InsertTestData(params string[] dataFileNames) {     _database.PerformDbOperation(DbOperationFlag.DeleteAll);     if (dataFileNames == null)     {         return;     }     try     {         foreach (string fileName in dataFileNames)         {             if (!File.Exists(fileName))             {                 throw new FileNotFoundException(Path.GetFullPath(fileName));             }             _database.ReadXml(fileName);             _database.PerformDbOperation(DbOperationFlag.InsertIdentity);         }     }     catch     {         _database.PerformDbOperation(DbOperationFlag.DeleteAll);         throw;     } } This lets us easily insert test data from xml files, in any number and in a  controlled order (which is important because we eventually must fulfill referential constraints, or we must account for some other stuff that imposes a specific ordering on data insertion). Again, as with Typemock, I won't go into API details here. - Unfortunately, there isn't too much documentation for NDbUnit anyway, other than the already mentioned Quick Start Guide (and the source code itself, of course) - a not so uncommon problem with smaller Open Source Projects. Last not least, we need to provide the required test data in xml form. A snippet for data from the People table might look like this, for example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> <School xmlns="http://tempuri.org/School.xsd">   <Person>     <PersonID>1</PersonID>     <LastName>Abercrombie</LastName>     <FirstName>Kim</FirstName>     <HireDate>1995-03-11T00:00:00</HireDate>   </Person>   <Person>     <PersonID>2</PersonID>     <LastName>Barzdukas</LastName>     <FirstName>Gytis</FirstName>     <EnrollmentDate>2005-09-01T00:00:00</EnrollmentDate>   </Person>   <Person>     ... You can also have data from various tables in one single xml file, if that's appropriate for you (but beware of the already mentioned ordering issues). It's true that your test assembly may end up with dozens of such xml files, each containing quite a big amount of text data. But because the files are of very low complexity, and with the help of a little bit of Copy/Paste and Excel magic, this appears to be well manageable. Executing some basic tests Here are some of the possible tests that can be written with the above preparations in place: private const string People = @"..\..\TestData\School.People.xml"; ... [Test, MultipleAsserts, TestsOn("PersonRepository.GetNameList")] public void GetNameList_ListOrdering_ReturnsTheExpectedFullNames() {     InsertTestData(People);     List<string> names =         _personRepository.GetNameList(NameOrdering.List);     Assert.Count(34, names);     Assert.AreEqual("Abercrombie, Kim", names.First());     Assert.AreEqual("Zheng, Roger", names.Last()); } [Test, MultipleAsserts, TestsOn("PersonRepository.GetNameList")] [DependsOn("RemovePerson_CalledOnce_DecreasesCountByOne")] public void GetNameList_NormalOrdering_ReturnsTheExpectedFullNames() {     InsertTestData(People);     List<string> names =         _personRepository.GetNameList(NameOrdering.Normal);     Assert.Count(34, names);     Assert.AreEqual("Alexandra Walker", names.First());     Assert.AreEqual("Yan Li", names.Last()); } [Test, TestsOn("PersonRepository.AddPerson")] public void AddPerson_CalledOnce_IncreasesCountByOne() {     InsertTestData(People);     int count = _personRepository.Count;     _personRepository.AddPerson(new Person { FirstName = "Thomas", LastName = "Weller" });     Assert.AreEqual(count + 1, _personRepository.Count); } [Test, TestsOn("PersonRepository.RemovePerson")] public void RemovePerson_CalledOnce_DecreasesCountByOne() {     InsertTestData(People);     int count = _personRepository.Count;     _personRepository.RemovePerson(new Person { PersonID = 33 });     Assert.AreEqual(count - 1, _personRepository.Count); } Not much difference here compared to the corresponding Typemock versions, except that we had to do a bit more preparational work (and also it was harder to get the required knowledge). But this picture changes quite dramatically if we look at some more demanding test cases: Ok, and what if things are becoming somewhat more complex? Tests like the above ones represent the 'easy' scenarios. They may account for the biggest portion of real-world use cases of the application, and they are important to make sure that it is generally sound. But usually, all these nasty little bugs originate from the more complex parts of our code, or they occur when something goes wrong. So, for a testing strategy to be of real practical use, it is especially important to see how easy or difficult it is to mimick a scenario which represents a more complex or exceptional case. The following test, for example, deals with the case that there is some sort of invalid input from the caller: [Test, MultipleAsserts, TestsOn("PersonRepository.GetCourseMembers")] [Row(null, typeof(ArgumentNullException))] [Row("", typeof(ArgumentException))] [Row("NotExistingCourse", typeof(ArgumentException))] public void GetCourseMembers_WithGivenVariousInvalidValues_Throws(string courseTitle, Type expectedInnerExceptionType) {     var exception = Assert.Throws<RepositoryException>(() =>                                 _personRepository.GetCourseMembers(courseTitle));     Assert.IsInstanceOfType(expectedInnerExceptionType, exception.InnerException); } Apparently, this test doesn't need an 'Arrange' part at all (see here for the same test with the Typemock tool). It acts just like any other client code, and all the required business logic comes from the database itself. This doesn't always necessarily mean that there is less complexity, but only that the complexity happens in a different part of your test resources (in the xml files namely, where you sometimes have to spend a lot of effort for carefully preparing the required test data). Another example, which relies on an underlying 1-n relationship, might be this: [Test, MultipleAsserts, TestsOn("PersonRepository.GetCourseMembers")] public void GetCourseMembers_WhenGivenAnExistingCourse_ReturnsListOfStudents() {     InsertTestData(People, Course, Department, StudentGrade);     List<Person> persons = _personRepository.GetCourseMembers("Macroeconomics");     Assert.Count(4, persons);     Assert.ForAll(         persons,         @p => new[] { 10, 11, 12, 14 }.Contains(@p.PersonID),         "Person has none of the expected IDs."); } If you compare this test to its corresponding Typemock version, you immediately see that the test itself is much simpler, easier to read, and thus much more intention-revealing. The complexity here lies hidden behind the call to the InsertTestData() helper method and the content of the used xml files with the test data. And also note that you might have to provide additional data which are not even directly relevant to your test, but are required only to fulfill some integrity needs of the underlying database. Conclusion The first thing to notice when comparing the NDbUnit approach to its Typemock counterpart obviously deals with performance: Of course, NDbUnit is much slower than Typemock. Technically,  it doesn't even make sense to compare the two tools. But practically, it may well play a role and could or could not be an issue, depending on how much tests you have of this kind, how often you run them, and what role they play in your development cycle. Also, because the dataset from the required xsd file must fully match the database schema (even in parts that otherwise wouldn't be relevant to you), it can be quite cumbersome to be in a team where different people are working with the database in parallel. My personal experience is – as already said in the first part – that Typemock gives you a better development experience in a 'dynamic' scenario (when you're working in some kind of TDD-style, you're oftentimes executing the tests from your dev box, and your database schema changes frequently), whereas the NDbUnit approach is a good and solid solution in more 'static' development scenarios (when you need to execute the tests less frequently or only on a separate build server, and/or the underlying database schema can be kept relatively stable), for example some variations of higher-level integration or User-Acceptance tests. But in any case, opening Entity Framework based applications for testing requires a fair amount of resources, planning, and preparational work – it's definitely not the kind of stuff that you would call 'easy to test'. Hopefully, future versions of EF will take testing concerns into account. Otherwise, I don't see too much of a future for the framework in the long run, even though it's quite popular at the moment... The sample solution A sample solution (VS 2010) with the code from this article series is available via my Bitbucket account from here (Bitbucket is a hosting site for Mercurial repositories. The repositories may also be accessed with the Git and Subversion SCMs - consult the documentation for details. In addition, it is possible to download the solution simply as a zipped archive – via the 'get source' button on the very right.). The solution contains some more tests against the PersonRepository class, which are not shown here. Also, it contains database scripts to create and fill the School sample database. To compile and run, the solution expects the Gallio/MbUnit framework to be installed (which is free and can be downloaded from here), the NDbUnit framework (which is also free and can be downloaded from here), and the Typemock Isolator tool (a fully functional 30day-trial is available here). Moreover, you will need an instance of the Microsoft SQL Server DBMS, and you will have to adapt the connection strings in the test projects App.config files accordingly.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, July 31, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, July 31, 2013Popular ReleasesSharePoint 2010 Export User Information to Text file, SQL server: Full Source code of the project: Please change SharePoint server address. I have used my sharepoint server -> http://sneakpreviewWINJS CTK (Control Toolkit): Initial Release: Initial release supports the following. Expander NumericBoxXMLPreprocess: 2.0.18: What's new in this release For XML Spreadsheet 2003 format, used the frozen row at the top of the worksheet to indicate the beginning of the values. This prevents you from having to start your values at row 7. This can be overridden with the /firstValueRow (or /vr) argument. Issues Fixed Fix for Issue 13006 : Corrected default treatment of the value "false" Beginning with this version, the FixFalse behavior that has caused confusion to so many, has hopefully been addressed in a way that st...MVVM.EventToCommand: Tommy.MVVM.EventToCommand: Tommy.MVVM.EventToCommand is a free, open source developer focused event2command via WinRT for MVVM Pattern.MVC Generator: MVC Generator Visual Studio Addin: This is the latest build, this includes the MVCGenerator.dll, and Visual Studio Addin file. See the home page of this project for installation instructions.Project Nonnon: 2013_07_30: ----------==========----------==========----------==========---------- "No news is good news." ----------==========----------==========----------==========---------- Change Log 2013/07/30 BUGFIX game/sound/directsound.c n_directsound_loop() OLD : crash when DirectSound is not supported NEW : fixed game/sound/waveout.c when included OLD : compile error NEW : fixed game/chara.c when included OLD : compile error NEW : fixed game/direct2d.c when included ...Dynamics CRM 2011 EasyPlugins: EasyPlugins-1.2.3.1-managed: V1.2.3.1 - Bug Fix : Condition expression is not saved on action creation - Bug Fix : Request Param with single attribute result - Some style changes v1.2.3.0 - Bug Fix : Twice plugins execution. - New Abort action - Depth Plugin Execution management on each action - Turn On/Off EasyPlugins feature (can be useful in some cases of imports) v1.2.0.0 Associate / Disassociate actions are now available Import / Export features Better management of Lookups Trigger NamingXmlObjectMapper: XOM Alpha 1.0: first Alpha Version of XOM: read and write xml nodes and attributes mapping to IList or Interfaces simple property attribute mapping creates new xml nodes at run time IList changes (add, remove) implemented in the next releasenopCommerce. Open source shopping cart (ASP.NET MVC): nopCommerce 3.10: Highlight features & improvements: • Performance optimization. • New more user-friendly product/product-variant logic. Now we'll have only products (simple and grouped). • Bundle products support added. • Allow a store owner to associate product image for product variant attribute values. To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).ExtJS based ASP.NET Controls: FineUI v3.3.1: ??FineUI ?? ExtJS ??? ASP.NET ???。 FineUI??? ?? No JavaScript，No CSS，No UpdatePanel，No ViewState，No WebServices ???????。 ?????? IE 7.0、Firefox 3.6、Chrome 3.0、Opera 10.5、Safari 3.0+ ???? Apache License v2.0 ?：ExtJS ?? GPL v3 ?????(http://www.sencha.com/license)。 ???? ??：http://fineui.com/bbs/ ??：http://fineui.com/demo/ ??：http://fineui.com/doc/ ??：http://fineui.codeplex.com/ FineUI ???? ExtJS ????????，???? ExtJS ?，???????????ExtJS?： 1. ????? FineUI ? ExtJS ?：http://fineui.com/bbs/fo...AutoNLayered - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.5: AutoNLayered v1.0.5: - Fix Dtos. Abstract collections replaced by concrete (correct serialization WCF). - OrderBy in navigation properties. - Unit Test with Fakes. - Map of entities/dto moved to application services. - Libraries updated. Warning using Fakes: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/782031/visual-studio-2012-add-fakes-assembly-does-not-add-all-needed-referencesPath Copy Copy: 11.1: Minor release with two new features: Submenu's contextual menu item now has an icon next to it Added reference to JavaScript regular expression format in Settings application Since this release does not have any glaring bug fixes, it is more of an optional update for existing users. It depends on whether you want to be able to spot the Path Copy Copy submenu more easily. I recommend you install it to see if the icon makes sense. As always, please don't hesitate to leave feedback via Discus...CMake Tools for Visual Studio: CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.0 RC3: This is the third release candidate of CMake Tools for Visual Studio 1.0, which contains the following bug fixes: Opening a CMake file from Windows Explorer while Visual Studio is already open will no start a new instance of Visual Studio. Typing a symbol while the IntelliSense list box is visible and the text typed so far does not match any item in the list will dismiss the list box and insert the symbol typed.R.NET: R.NET 1.5: The major changes in v1.5 are: Initialize method must be called before using R. Settings should be passed to the method. EagerEvaluate method renamed to Evaluate (use Defer method when you want old version of Evaluate).Media Companion: Media Companion MC3.574b: Some good bug fixes been going on with the new XBMC-Link function. Thanks to all who were able to do testing and gave feedback. New:* Added some adhoc extra General movie filters, one of which is Plot = Outline (see fixes above). To see the filters, add the following line to your config.xml: <ShowExtraMovieFilters>True</ShowExtraMovieFilters>. The others are: Imdb in folder name, Imdb in not folder name & Imdb not in folder name & year mismatch. * Movie - display <tag> list on browser tab ...OfflineBrowser: Preview Release with Search: I've added search to this release.VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: VG-Ripper 2.9.46: changes FIXED LoginMath.NET Numerics: Math.NET Numerics v2.6.0: What's New in Math.NET Numerics 2.6 - Announcement, Explanations and Sample Code. New: Linear Curve Fitting Linear least-squares fitting (regression) to lines, polynomials and linear combinations of arbitrary functions. Multi-dimensional fitting. Also works well in F# with the F# extensions. New: Root Finding Brent's method. ~Candy Chiu, Alexander Täschner Bisection method. ~Scott Stephens, Alexander Täschner Broyden's method, for multi-dimensional functions. ~Alexander Täschner ...AJAX Control Toolkit: July 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - July 2013 Release Version 7.0725July 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...MJP's DirectX 11 Samples: Specular Antialiasing Sample: Sample code to complement my presentation that's part of the Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice course at SIGGRAPH 2013, entitled "Crafting a Next-Gen Material Pipeline for The Order: 1886". Demonstrates various methods of preventing aliasing from specular BRDF's when using high-frequency normal maps. The zip file contains source code as well as a pre-compiled x64 binary.New ProjectsA Simple Java Encryption program: This is my very first Java project. It's a file encryptor. It's purpose is to codify a file to make it look like it contain random information.AA??: aa??，????。Browser Chooser 2: Browser Chooser 2 is an updated fork of the original. It's primary goal is to simplify using multiple browser.campuscloud-mobile: Dieses Projekt enthält die mobilen Apps zur Campuscloud App.campuscloud-owncloudplugins: Dieses Projekt enthält die ownCloud-Plugins zu den CampuCloud-Apps, die ownCloud-Server um weitere Funktionalitäten ergänzen.campuscloud-windowsphone8: Diese Projekt enthält die Windows Phone 8 App zur Campuscloud App.Chronos .Net Performance Profiler: Free .Net Performance ProfilerConvertServer: a pet project i works onDevelopment Tools for Solid Edge: Development tools for Solid Edge.DocAssist: The project is to facilitate user's day-to-day management of her files in a customisable way on Windows System equipped with .NET framework.epe: epeETP 3: prueba de asp mvc para desarrollar conjuntamente en un repositorio tfsHello World in MVC4: Application to testInvoke-MsTest PowerShell Module: A PowerShell module that makes unit testing Visual Studio projects fast and easy. Uses MsTest.exe to launch all test associated with your project or solution.MarathonTP: MarathonTP (TP stands for Transport Protocol) is a lightweight communication protocol specificaly developped for machine to machine communication.Multicopter Simulator: A simulation environment for multicopter built with Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio 4.MVC Rags: A bunch of ASP.NET MVC4 helpersMVVM.EventToCommand: Tommy.MVVM.EventToCommand is a free, open source developer focused event2command via WinRT for MVVM Pattern.RNT.Common: rnt.commonStorageOrizer: Software to manage disk space, e.g. move Programs without damaging function. Subset Sum Problem Solver: SubsetThirdPartyLogin: ?????twitterBootstrapAspNetMVCControls: Asp.net MVC Controls based on twiiter Boostrap( a beautiful html & css framework published by Twitter).Unify: Unify is an automatic IoC Container Configurator, based on layers approach via annotations.V32 Assembler: The assembler for my assembly language for my 32-bit virtual machine with a home-made instruction set.

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• Tips for XNA WP7 Developers

  - by Michael B. McLaughlin

  There are several things any XNA developer should know/consider when coming to the Windows Phone 7 platform. This post assumes you are familiar with the XNA Framework and with the changes between XNA 3.1 and XNA 4.0. It’s not exhaustive; it’s simply a list of things I’ve gathered over time. I may come back and add to it over time, and I’m happy to add anything anyone else has experienced or learned as well. Display · The screen is either 800x480 or 480x800. · But you aren’t required to use only those resolutions. · The hardware scaler on the phone will scale up from 240x240. · One dimension will be capped at 800 and the other at 480; which depends on your code, but you cannot have, e.g., an 800x600 back buffer – that will be created as 800x480. · The hardware scaler will not normally change aspect ratio, though, so no unintended stretching. · Any dimension (width, height, or both) below 240 will be adjusted to 240 (without any aspect ratio adjustment such that, e.g. 200x240 will be treated as 240x240). · Dimensions below 240 will be honored in terms of calculating whether to use portrait or landscape. · If dimensions are exactly equal or if height is greater than width then game will be in portrait. · If width is greater than height, the game will be in landscape. · Landscape games will automatically flip if the user turns the phone 180°; no code required. · Default landscape is top = left. In other words a user holding a phone who starts a landscape game will see the first image presented so that the “top” of the screen is along the right edge of his/her phone, such that the natural behavior would be to turn the phone 90° so that the top of the phone will be held in the user’s left hand and the bottom would be held in the user’s right hand. · The status bar (where the clock, battery power, etc., are found) is hidden when the Game-derived class sets GraphicsDeviceManager.IsFullScreen = true. It is shown when IsFullScreen = false. The default value is false (i.e. the status bar is shown). · You should have a good reason for hiding the status bar. Users find it helpful to know what time it is, how much charge their battery has left, and whether or not their phone is in service range. This is especially true for casual games that you expect someone to play for a few minutes at a time, e.g. while waiting for some event to start, for a phone call to come in, or for a train, bus, or subway to arrive. · In portrait mode, the status bar occupies 32 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 480x800 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 461x768 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 480x768 (or some resolution with the same 0.625 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. · In landscape mode, the status bar occupies 72 pixels of space. This means that a game with a back buffer of 800x480 will be scaled down to occupy approximately 728x437 screen pixels. Setting the back buffer to 728x480 (or some resolution with the same 1.51666667 aspect ratio) will avoid this scaling. Input · Touch input is scaled with screen size. · So if your back buffer is 600x360, a tap in the bottom right corner will come in as (599,359). You don’t need to do anything special to get this automatic scaling of touch behavior. · If you do not use full area of the screen, any touch input outside the area you use will still register as a touch input. For example, if you set a portrait resolution of 240x240, it would be scaled up to occupy a 480x480 area, centered in the screen. If you touch anywhere above this area, you will get a touch input of (X,0) where X is a number from 0 to 239 (in accordance with your 240 pixel wide back buffer). Any touch below this area will give a touch input of (X,239). · If you keep the status bar visible, touches within its area will not be passed to your game. · In general, a screen measurement is the diagonal. So a 3.5” screen is 3.5” long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6 (480/800 = 0.6), this means that a phone with a 3.5” screen is only approximately 1.8” wide by 3” tall. So there are approximately 267 pixels in an inch on a 3.5” screen. · Again, this time in metric! 3.5 inches is approximately 8.89 cm. So an 8.89 cm screen is 8.89 cm long from the bottom right corner to the top left corner. With an aspect ratio of 0.6, this means that a phone with an 8.89 cm screen is only approximately 4.57 cm wide by 7.62 cm tall. So there are approximately 105 pixels in a centimeter on an 8.89 cm screen. · Think about the size of your finger tip. If you do not have large hands, think about the size of the fingertip of someone with large hands. Consider that when you are sizing your touch input. Especially consider that when you are spacing two touch targets near one another. You need to judge it for yourself, but items that are next to each other and are each 100x100 should be fine when it comes to selecting items individually. Smaller targets than that are ok provided that you leave space between them. · You want your users to have a pleasant experience. Making touch controls too small or too close to one another will make them nervous about whether they will touch the right target. Take this into account when you plan out your game initially. If possible, do some quick size mockups on an actual phone using colored rectangles that you position and size where you plan to have your game controls. Adjust as necessary. · People do not have transparent hands! Nor are their hands the size of a mouse pointer icon. Consider leaving a dedicated space for input rather than forcing the user to cover up to one-third of the screen with a finger just to play the game. · Another benefit of designing your controls to use a dedicated area is that you’re less likely to have players moving their finger(s) so frantically that they accidentally hit the back button, start button, or search button (many phones have one or more of these on the screen itself – it’s easy to hit one by accident and really annoying if you hit, e.g., the search button and then quickly tap back only to find out that the game didn’t save your progress such that you just wasted all the time you spent playing). · People do not like doing somersaults in order to move something forward with accelerometer-based controls. Test your accelerometer-based controls extensively and get a lot of feedback. Very well-known games from noted publishers have created really bad accelerometer controls and been virtually unplayable as a result. Also be wary of exceptions and other possible failures that the documentation warns about. · When done properly, the accelerometer can add a nice touch to your game (see, e.g. ilomilo where the accelerometer was used to move the background; it added a nice touch without frustrating the user; I also think CarniVale does direct accelerometer controls very well). However, if done poorly, it will make your game an abomination unto the Marketplace. Days, weeks, perhaps even months of development time that you will never get back. I won’t name names; you can search the marketplace for games with terrible reviews and you’ll find them. Graphics · The maximum frame rate is 30 frames per second. This was set as a compromise between battery life and quality. · At least one model of phone is known to have a screen refresh rate that is between 59 and 60 hertz. Because of this, using a fixed time step with a target frame rate of 30 will cause a slight internal delay to build up as the framework is forced to wait slightly for the next refresh. Eventually the delay will get to the point where a draw is skipped in order to recover from the delay. (See Nick's comment below for clarification.) · To deal with that delay, you can either stay with a fixed time step and set the frame rate slightly lower or else you can go to a variable time step and make sure to adjust all of your update data (e.g. player movement distance) to take into account the elapsed time from the last update. A variable time step makes your update logic slightly more complicated but will avoid frame skips entirely. · Currently there are no custom shaders. This might change in the future (there is no hardware limitation preventing it; it simply wasn’t a feature that could be implemented in the time available before launch). · There are five built-in shaders. You can create a lot of nice effects with the built-in shaders. · There is more power on the CPU than there is on the GPU so things you might typically off-load to the GPU will instead make sense to do on the CPU side. · This is a phone. It is not a PC. It is not an Xbox 360. The emulator runs on a PC and uses the full power of your PC. It is very good for testing your code for bugs and doing early prototyping and layout. You should not use it to measure performance. Use actual phone hardware instead. · There are many phone models, each of which has slightly different performance levels for I/O, screen blitting, CPU performance, etc. Do not take your game right to the performance limit on your phone since for some other phones you might be crossing their limits and leaving players with a bad experience. Leave a cushion to account for hardware differences. · Smaller screened phones will have slightly more dots per inch (dpi). Larger screened phones will have slightly less. Either way, the dpi will be much higher than the typical 96 found on most computer screens. Make sure that whoever is doing art for your game takes this into account. · Screens are only required to have 16 bit color (65,536 colors). This is common among smart phones. Using gradients on a 16 bit display can produce an ugly artifact known as banding. Banding is when, rather than a smooth transition from one color to another, you instead see distinct lines. Be careful to avoid this when possible. Banding can be avoided through careful art creation. Its effects can be minimized and even unnoticeable when the texture in question is always moving. You should be careful not to rely on “looks good on my phone” since some phones do have 32-bit displays and thus you’ll find yourself wondering why you’re getting bad reviews that complain about the graphics. Avoid gradients; if you can’t, make sure they are 16-bit safe. Audio · Never rely on sounds as your sole signal to the player that something is happening in the game. They might have the sound off. They might be playing somewhere loud. Etc. · You have to provide controls to disable sound & music. These should be separate. · On at least one model of phone, the volume control API currently has no effect. Players can adjust sound with their hardware volume buttons, but in game selectors simply won’t work. As such, it may not be worth the effort of providing anything beyond on/off switches for sound and music. · MediaPlayer.GameHasControl will return true when a game is hooked up to a PC running Zune. When Zune is running, any attempts to do anything (beyond check GameHasControl) with MediaPlayer will cause an exception to be thrown. If this exception is thrown, catch it and disable music. Exceptions take time to propagate; you don’t want one popping up in every single run of your game’s Update method. · Remember that players can already be listening to music or using the FM radio. In this case GameHasControl will be false and you should handle this appropriately. You can, alternately, ask the player for permission to stop their current music and play your music instead, but the (current) requirement that you restore their music when done is very hard (if not impossible) to deal with. · You can still play sound effects even when the game doesn’t have control of the music, but don’t think this is a backdoor to playing music. Your game will fail certification if your “sound effect” seems to be more like music in scope and length.

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• How to get HandleUnauthorizedRequest to return correct url?

  - by Jova

  I'm writing a custom AuthorizeAttribute which should redirect unauthorized users to the login page. My HandleUnauthorizedRequest method looks like this, protected override void HandleUnauthorizedRequest(AuthorizationContext filterContext) { RouteValueDictionary returnRoute = new RouteValueDictionary(); returnRoute["controller"] = "Account"; returnRoute["action"] = "Login"; returnRoute["returnUrl"] = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.Url.AbsolutePath; filterContext.Result = new RedirectToRouteResult(returnRoute); } Unfortunately it's not working properly as the returning url looks like this, www.mydomain.com/?controller=Account&action=Login&returnUrl=%2FUser%2FEditProfile%2FUsername What is the reason for this and how do I correct it?

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• jquery Setting cursor position in contenteditable div

  - by Mark

  The old version of the question is below, after researching more, I decided to rephrase the question. The problem as before is, I need to focus a contenteditable div without highlighting the text, doing straight up focus highlights the text in Chrome. I realize that people solved this problems in textareas by resetting the caret position in the textarea. How can I do that with a contenteditable element? All the plugins I've tried only works with textareas. Thanks. Old Phrasing of the question: I have a contenteditable element that I want to focus, but only insofar as to place the cursor at the front of the element, rather selecting everything. elem.trigger('focus'); with jquery selects all the text in the entire element in chrome. Firefox behaves correctly, setting the caret at the front of the text. How can I get Chrome to behave the way I want, or is focus perhaps not what I'm looking for. Thanks

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