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Configuring UCM cache to check for external Content Server changes

- by Martin Deh

Recently, I was involved in a customer scenario where they were modifying the Content Server's contributor data files directly through Content Server. This operation of course is completely supported. However, since the contributor data file was modified through the "backdoor", a running WebCenter Spaces page, which also used the same data file, would not get the updates immediately. This was due to two reasons. The first reason is that the Spaces page was using Content Presenter to display the contents of the data file. The second reason is that the Spaces application was using the "cached" version of the data file. Fortunately, there is a way to configure cache so backdoor changes can be picked up more quickly and automatically. First a brief overview of Content Presenter. The Content Presenter task flow enables WebCenter Spaces users with Page-Edit permissions to precisely customize the selection and presentation of content in a WebCenter Spaces application. With Content Presenter, you can select a single item of content, contents under a folder, a list of items, or query for content, and then select a Content Presenter based template to render the content on a page in a Spaces application. In addition to displaying the folders and the files in a Content Server, Content Presenter integrates with Oracle Site Studio to allow you to create, access, edit, and display Site Studio contributor data files (Content Server Document) in either a Site Studio region template or in a custom Content Presenter display template. More information about creating Content Presenter Display Template can be found in the OFM Developers Guide for WebCenter Portal. The easiest way to configure the cache is to modify the WebCenter Spaces Content Server service connection setting through Enterprise Manager. From here, under the Cache Details, there is a section to set the Cache Invalidation Interval. Basically, this enables the cache to be monitored by the cache "sweeper" utility. The cache sweeper queries for changes in the Content Server, and then "marks" the object in cache as "dirty". This causes the application in turn to get a new copy of the document from the Content Server that replaces the cached version. By default the initial value for the Cache Invalidation Interval is set to 0 (minutes). This basically means that the sweeper is OFF. To turn the sweeper ON, just set a value (in minutes). The mininal value that can be set is 2 (minutes): Just a note. In some instances, once the value of the Cache Invalidation Interval has been set (and saved) in the Enterprise Manager UI, it becomes "sticky" and the interval value cannot be set back to 0. The good news is that this value can also be updated throught a WLST command. The WLST command to run is as follows: setJCRContentServerConnection(appName, name, [socketType, url, serverHost, serverPort, keystoreLocation, keystorePassword, privateKeyAlias, privateKeyPassword, webContextRoot, clientSecurityPolicy, cacheInvalidationInterval, binaryCacheMaxEntrySize, adminUsername, adminPassword, extAppId, timeout, isPrimary, server, applicationVersion]) One way to get the required information for executing the command is to use the listJCRContentServerConnections('webcenter',verbose=true) command. For example, this is the sample output from the execution: ------------------ UCM ------------------ Connection Name: UCM Connection Type: JCR External Appliction ID: Timeout: (not set) CIS Socket Type: socket CIS Server Hostname: webcenter.oracle.local CIS Server Port: 4444 CIS Keystore Location: CIS Private Key Alias: CIS Web URL: Web Server Context Root: /cs Client Security Policy: Admin User Name: sysadmin Cache Invalidation Interval: 2 Binary Cache Maximum Entry Size: 1024 The Documents primary connection is "UCM" From this information, the completed setJCRContentServerConnection would be: setJCRContentServerConnection(appName='webcenter',name='UCM', socketType='socket', serverHost='webcenter.oracle.local', serverPort='4444', webContextRoot='/cs', cacheInvalidationInterval='0', binaryCacheMaxEntrySize='1024',adminUsername='sysadmin',isPrimary=1) Note: The Spaces managed server must be restarted for the change to take effect. More information about using WLST for WebCenter can be found here. Once the sweeper is turned ON, only cache objects that have been changed will be invalidated. To test this out, I will go through a simple scenario. The first thing to do is configure the Content Server so it can monitor and report on events. Log into the Content Server console application, and under the Administration menu item, select System Audit Information. Note: If your console is using the left menu display option, the Administration link will be located there. Under the Tracing Sections Information, add in only "system" and "requestaudit" in the Active Sections. Check Full Verbose Tracing, check Save, then click the Update button. Once this is done, select the View Server Output menu option. This will change the browser view to display the log. This is all that is needed to configure the Content Server. For example, the following is the View Server Output with the cache invalidation interval set to 2(minutes) Note the time stamp: requestaudit/6 08.30 09:52:26.001 IdcServer-68 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.016933999955654144(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 09:52:26.010 IdcServer-69 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.006134999915957451(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 09:52:26.014 IdcServer-70 GET_DOCUMENT_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.004271999932825565(secs) ... other trace info ... requestaudit/6 08.30 09:54:26.002 IdcServer-71 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.020323999226093292(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 09:54:26.011 IdcServer-72 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.017928000539541245(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 09:54:26.017 IdcServer-73 GET_DOCUMENT_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.010185999795794487(secs) Now that the tracing logs are reporting correctly, the next step is set up the Spaces app to test the sweeper. I will use 2 different pages that will use Content Presenter task flows. Each task flow will use a different custom Content Presenter display template, and will be assign 2 different contributor data files (document that will be in the cache). The pages at run time appear as follows: Initially, when the Space pages containing the content is loaded in the browser for the first time, you can see the tracing information in the Content Server output viewer. requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:12.030 IdcServer-129 CLEAR_SERVER_OUTPUT [dUser=weblogic] 0.029171999543905258(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:12.101 IdcServer-130 GET_SERVER_OUTPUT [dUser=weblogic] 0.025721000507473946(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:26.592 IdcServer-131 VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME [dID=919][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased][IsJava=1] 0.21525299549102783(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.117 IdcServer-132 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPES [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.5059549808502197(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.146 IdcServer-133 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.03360399976372719(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.169 IdcServer-134 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.008806000463664532(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.204 IdcServer-135 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.013265999965369701(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.384 IdcServer-136 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.18119299411773682(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.533 IdcServer-137 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.1519480049610138(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.634 IdcServer-138 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.10827399790287018(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:27.687 IdcServer-139 VCR_GET_CONTENT_TYPE [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.059702999889850616(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:28.271 IdcServer-140 GET_USER_PERMISSIONS [dUser=weblogic][IsJava=1] 0.006703000050038099(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:28.285 IdcServer-141 GET_ENVIRONMENT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.010893999598920345(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:30.433 IdcServer-142 GET_SERVER_OUTPUT [dUser=weblogic] 0.017318999394774437(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:41.837 IdcServer-143 VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME [dID=508][dDocName=113_ES][dDocTitle=Landing Home][dUser=weblogic][RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased][IsJava=1] 0.15937699377536774(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:51:42.781 IdcServer-144 GET_FILE [dID=326][dDocName=WEBCENTERORACL000315][dDocTitle=Duke][dUser=anonymous][RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased][dSecurityGroup=Public][xCollectionID=0] 0.16288499534130096(secs) The highlighted sections show where the 2 data files DF_UCMCACHETESTER (P1 page) and 113_ES (P2 page) were called by the (Spaces) VCR connection to the Content Server. The most important line to notice is the VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME invocation. On subsequent refreshes of these 2 pages, you will notice (after you refresh the Content Server's View Server Output) that there are no further traces of the same VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME invocations. This is because the pages are getting the documents from the cache. The next step is to go through the "backdoor" and change one of the documents through the Content Server console. This operation can be done by first locating the data file document, and from the Content Information page, select Edit Data File menu option. This invokes the Site Studio Contributor, where the modifications can be made. Refreshing the Content Server View Server Output, the tracing displays the operations perform on the document. requestaudit/6 08.30 11:56:59.972 IdcServer-255 SS_CHECKOUT_BY_NAME [dID=922][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dUser=weblogic][dSecurityGroup=Public] 0.05558200180530548(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:00.065 IdcServer-256 SS_GET_CONTRIBUTOR_CONFIG [dID=922][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][dSecurityGroup=Public][xCollectionID=0] 0.08632399886846542(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:00.470 IdcServer-259 DOC_INFO_BY_NAME [dID=922][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][dSecurityGroup=Public][xCollectionID=0] 0.02268899977207184(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:10.177 IdcServer-264 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.007652000058442354(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:10.181 IdcServer-263 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.01868399977684021(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:10.187 IdcServer-265 GET_DOCUMENT_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.009367000311613083(secs) (internal)/6 08.30 11:57:26.118 IdcServer-266 File to be removed: /oracle/app/admin/domains/webcenter/ucm/cs/vault/~temp/703253295.xml (internal)/6 08.30 11:57:26.121 IdcServer-266 File to be removed: /oracle/app/admin/domains/webcenter/ucm/cs/vault/~temp/703253295.xml requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:26.122 IdcServer-266 SS_SET_ELEMENT_DATA [dID=923][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][dSecurityGroup=Public][xCollectionID=0][StatusCode=0][StatusMessage=Successfully checked in content item 'DF_UCMCACHETESTER'.] 0.3765290081501007(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:30.710 IdcServer-267 DOC_INFO_BY_NAME [dID=923][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][dSecurityGroup=Public][xCollectionID=0] 0.07942699640989304(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:57:30.733 IdcServer-268 SS_GET_CONTRIBUTOR_STRINGS [dUser=weblogic] 0.0044570001773536205(secs) After a few moments and refreshing the P1 page, the updates has been applied. Note: The refresh time may very, since the Cache Invalidation Interval (set to 2 minutes) is not determined by when changes happened. The sweeper just runs every 2 minutes. Refreshing the Content Server View Server Output, the tracing displays the important information. requestaudit/6 08.30 11:59:10.171 IdcServer-270 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.00952600035816431(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:59:10.179 IdcServer-271 GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.011118999682366848(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:59:10.182 IdcServer-272 GET_DOCUMENT_HISTORY_REPORT [dUser=sysadmin][IsJava=1] 0.007447000127285719(secs) requestaudit/6 08.30 11:59:16.885 IdcServer-273 VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME [dID=923][dDocName=DF_UCMCACHETESTER][dDocTitle=DF_UCMCacheTester][dUser=weblogic][RevisionSelectionMethod=LatestReleased][IsJava=1] 0.0786449983716011(secs) After the specifed interval time the sweeper is invoked, which is noted by the GET_ ... calls. Since the history has noted the change, the next call is to the VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME to retrieve the new version of the (modifed) data file. Navigating back to the P2 page, and viewing the server output, there are no further VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME to retrieve the data file. This simply means that this data file was just retrieved from the cache. Upon further review of the server output, we can see that there was only 1 request for the VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME: requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor Request Audit Report over the last 120 Seconds for server webcenteroraclelocal16200**** requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor -Num Requests 8 Errors 0 Reqs/sec. 0.06666944175958633 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.02762500010430813 Max Thread Count 2 requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor 1 Service VCR_GET_DOCUMENT_BY_NAME Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.09200000017881393 Num requests 1 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.09200000017881393 requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor 2 Service GET_PERSONALIZED_JAVASCRIPT Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.054999999701976776 Num requests 1 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.054999999701976776 requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor 3 Service GET_FOLDER_HISTORY_REPORT Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.028999999165534973 Num requests 2 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.014499999582767487 requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor 4 Service GET_SERVER_OUTPUT Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.017999999225139618 Num requests 1 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.017999999225139618 requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor 5 Service GET_FILE Total Elapsed Time (secs) 0.013000000268220901 Num requests 1 Num errors 0 Avg. Latency (secs) 0.013000000268220901 requestaudit/6 08.30 12:08:00.021 Audit Request Monitor ****End Audit Report*****

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CSS import or multiple CSS files

- by David H

I originally wanted to include a .css in my HTML doc that loads multiple other .css files in order to divide up some chunks of code for development purposes. I have created a test page: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"> <head> <title>The Recipe Site</title> <link rel='stylesheet' href='/css/main.css'> <link rel='stylesheet' href='/css/site_header.css'>  <script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.1/jquery.min.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/main.js"></script> </head> <body> <div id="site_container"> <div id="site_header"><?php include_once($r->base_dir . "inc/site_header.inc.php"); ?></div> <div id="site_content"> Some main content. </div> <div id="site_footer"><?php include_once($r->base_dir . "inc/site_footer.inc.php"); ?></div> </div> </body> </html> File: /css/main.css /* Reset Default Padding & Margin */ * { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; } /* Set Our Float Classes */ .clear { clear: both; } .right { float: right; } .left { float: left; } /* Setup the main body/site container */ body { background: url(/images/wallpaper.png) repeat; color: #000000; text-align: center; font: 62.5%/1.5 "Lucida Grande", "Lucida Sans", Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif; } site_container { background-color: #FFFFFF; height: 100%; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: left; width: 100%; } /* Some style sheet includes / / @import "/css/site_header.css"; */ /* Default Font Sizes */ h1 { font-size: 2.2em; } h2 { font-size: 2.0em; } h3 { font-size: 1.8em; } h4 { font-size: 1.6em; } h5 { font-size: 1.4em; } p { font-size: 1.2em; } /* Default Form Layout */ input.text { padding: 3px; border: 1px solid #999999; } /* Default Table Reset */ table { border-spacing: 0; border-collapse: collapse; } td{ text-align: left; font-weight: normal; } /* Cause not all browsers know what HTML5 is... */ header { display:block;} footer { display:block;} and now the file: /css/site_header.css: site_header { background-color: #c0c0c0; height: 100px; position: absolute; top: 100px; width: 100%; } Problem: When I use the above code, the site_header div does not have any formatting/background. When I remove the link line from the HTML doc for site_header.css and instead use an @import url("/css/site_header.css"); in my main.css file, the same results -- nothing gets rendered for for the same div. Now when I take the CSS markup from site_header.css and add it to main.css, the div gets rendered fine... So I am wondering if having multiple css files is somehow not working... or maybe having that css markup at the end of my previous css is somehow conflicting, though I cannot find a reason why it would.

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Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Server configuration

- by Simon Thorpe

Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index Welcome to the second article in this quick quide to Oracle IRM 11g. Hopefully you've just finished the first article which takes you through deploying the software onto a Linux server. This article walks you through the configuration of this new service and contains a subset of information from the official documentation and is focused on installing the server on Oracle Enterprise Linux. If you are planning to deploy on a non-Linux platform, you will need to reference the documentation for platform specific information. Contents Introduction Create IRM WebLogic Domain Starting the Admin Server and initial configuration Introduction In the previous article the database was prepared, the WebLogic Application Server installed and the files required for an IRM server installed. But we don't actually have a configured system yet. We need to now create a WebLogic Domain in which the IRM server will run, then configure some of the settings and crypography so that we can create a context and be ready to seal some content and test it all works. This article doesn't cover the configuration of SSL communication from client to server. This is quite a big topic and a separate article has been dedicated for this area. In these articles I also use the hostname, irm.company.internal to reference the IRM server and later on use the hostname irm.company.com in reference to the public facing service. Create IRM WebLogic Domain First step is creating the WebLogic domain, in a console switch to the newly created IRM installation folder as shown below and we will run the domain configuration wizard. [oracle@irm /]$ cd /oracle/middleware/Oracle_IRM/common/bin [oracle@irm bin]$ ./config.sh First thing the wizard will ask is if you wish to create a new or extend an existing domain. This guide is creating a standalone system so you should select to create a new domain. Next step is to choose what technologies from the Oracle ECM Suite you wish this domain to host. You are only interested in selecting the option "Oracle Information Rights Management". When you select this check box you will notice that it also selects "Oracle Enterprise Manager" and "Oracle JRF" as these are dependencies of the IRM server. You then need to specify where you wish to place the domain files. I usually just change the domain name from base_domain or irm_domain and leave the others with their defaults. Now the domain will have a single user initially and by default this user is called "weblogic". I usually change this account name to "sysadmin" or "administrator", but in this guide lets just accept the default. With respects to the next dialog, again for eval or dev reasons, leave the server startup mode as development. The JDK should also be automatically detected. We now need to provide details of the database. This guide is using the Oracle 11gR2 database and the settings I used can be seen in the image to the right. There is a lot of configuration that can now be done for the admin server, any managed servers and where the deployments reside. In this guide I am leaving all of these to their defaults so do not check any of the boxes. However I will on this blog be detailing later how you can go back and setup things such as automated startup of an IRM server which require changes to these default settings. But for now, lets leave it all alone and just click next. Now we are ready to install. Note that from this dialog you can scroll the left window and see there are going to be two servers created from the defaults. The AdminServer which is where you modify settings for the WebLogic Server and also hosts the Oracle Enterprise Manager for IRM which allows to monitor the IRM service performance and also make service related settings (which we shortly do below) and the IRM_server1 which hosts the actual IRM services themselves. So go right ahead and hit create, the process is pretty quick and usually under 10 minutes. When the domain creation ends, it will give you the URL to the admin server. It's worth noting this down and the URL is usually; http://irm.company.internal:7001 Starting the Admin Server and initial configuration First thing to do is to start the WebLogic Admin server and review the initial IRM server settings. In this guide we are going to run the Admin server and IRM server in console windows, in another article I will discuss running these as background services. So for now, start a console and run the Admin server by doing the following. cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/ ./startWebLogic.sh Wait for the server to start, you are looking for the following line to be reported in the console window. <BEA-00360><Server started in RUNNING mode> First step is configuring the IRM service via Enterprise Manager. Now that the Admin server is running you can point a browser at http://irm.company.internal:7001/em. Login with the username and password you supplied when you created the domain. In Enterprise Manager the IRM service administrator is able to make server wide configuration. However finding where to access the pages with these settings can be a bit of a challenge. After logging in on the left you'll see a tree containing elements of the Enterprise Manager farm Farm_irm_domain. Open up Content Management, then Information Rights Management and finally select the IRM node. On the right then select the IRM menu item, navigate to the Administration section and now we have four options, for now, we are just going to look at General Settings. The image on the right proves that a picture is worth a thousand words (or 113 in this case). The General Settings page allows you to set the cryptographic algorithms used for protecting sealed content. Unless you have a burning need to increase the key lengths or you need to comply to a regulation or government mandate, AES192 is a good start. You can change this later on without worry. The most important setting here we need to make is the Server URL. In this blog article I go over why this URL is so important, basically every single piece of content you protect with Oracle IRM is going to have this URL embedded in it, so if it's wrong or unresolvable, then nobody can open the secured documents. Note that in our environment we have yet to do any SSL configuration of the service. If you intend to build a server without SSL, then use http as the protocol instead of https. But I would recommend using SSL and setting this up is described in the next article. I would also probably up the device count from 1 to 3. This means that any user can retrieve rights to access content onto 3 computers at any one time. The default of 1 doesn't really make sense in development, evaluation nor even production environments and my experience is that 3 is a better number. Next step is to create the keystore for the IRM server. When a classification (called a context) is created, Oracle IRM generates a unique set of symmetric keys which are used to secure the content itself. These keys are then encrypted with a set of "wrapper" asymmetric cryptography keys which are stored externally to the server either in a Java Key Store or a HSM. These keys need to be generated and the following shows my commands and the resulting output. I have greyed out the responses from the commands so you can see the input a little easier. [oracle@irmsrv ~]$ cd /oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin/ [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ ./setWLSEnv.sh CLASSPATH=/oracle/middleware/patch_wls1033/profiles/default/sys_manifest_classpath/weblogic_patch.jar:/oracle/middleware/patch_ocp353/profiles/default/sys_manifest_classpath/weblogic_patch.jar:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/lib/tools.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/weblogic_sp.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/weblogic.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/features/weblogic.server.modules_10.3.3.0.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/webservices.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/lib/ant-all.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/net.sf.antcontrib_1.1.0.0_1-0b2/lib/ant-contrib.jar: PATH=/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin:/oracle/middleware/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/bin:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/bin:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/home/oracle/bin Your environment has been set. [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/ [oracle@irmsrv fmwconfig]$ keytool -genkeypair -alias oracle.irm.wrap -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -keystore irm.jks Enter keystore password: Re-enter new password: What is your first and last name? [Unknown]: Simon Thorpe What is the name of your organizational unit? [Unknown]: Oracle What is the name of your organization? [Unknown]: Oracle What is the name of your City or Locality? [Unknown]: San Francisco What is the name of your State or Province? [Unknown]: CA What is the two-letter country code for this unit? [Unknown]: US Is CN=Simon Thorpe, OU=Oracle, O=Oracle, L=San Francisco, ST=CA, C=US correct? [no]: yes Enter key password for (RETURN if same as keystore password): At this point we now have an irm.jks in the directory /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig. The reason we store it here is this folder would be backed up as part of a domain backup. As with any cryptographic technology, DO NOT LOSE THESE KEYS OR THIS KEY STORE. Once you've sealed content against a context, the keys will be wrapped with these keys, lose these keys, and you can't get access to any secured content, pretty important. Now we've got the keys created, we need to go back to the IRM Enterprise Manager and set the location of the key store. Going back to the General Settings page in Enterprise Manager scroll down to Keystore Settings. Leave the type as JKS but change the location to; /oracle/Middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/irm.jks and hit Apply. The final step with regards to the key store is we need to tell the server what the password is for the Java Key Store so that it can be opened and the keys accessed. Once more fire up a console window and run these commands (again i've greyed out the clutter to see the commands easier). You will see dummy passed into the commands, this is because the command asks for a username, but in this instance we don't use one, hence the value dummy is passed and it isn't used. [oracle@irmsrv fmwconfig]$ cd /oracle/middleware/Oracle_IRM/common/bin/ [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ ./wlst.sh ... lots of settings fly by... Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell Type help() for help on available commands wls:/offline>connect('weblogic','password','t3://irmsrv.us.oracle.com:7001') Connecting to t3://irmsrv.us.oracle.com:7001 with userid weblogic ... Successfully connected to Admin Server 'AdminServer' that belongs to domain 'irm_domain'. Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the server. To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or Admin port should be used instead. wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig>createCred("IRM","keystore:irm.jks","dummy","password") Location changed to domainRuntime tree. This is a read-only tree with DomainMBean as the root. For more help, use help(domainRuntime)wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig>createCred("IRM","key:irm.jks:oracle.irm.wrap","dummy","password") Already in Domain Runtime Tree wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig> At last we are now ready to fire up the IRM server itself. The domain creation created a managed server called IRM_server1 and we need to start this, use the following commands in a new console window. cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/bin/ ./startManagedWebLogic.sh IRM_server1 This will start up the server in the console, unlike the Admin server, you need to provide the username and password for the service to start. Enter in your weblogic username and password when prompted. You can change this behavior by putting the password into a boot.properties file, read more about this in the WebLogic Server documentation. Once running, wait until you see the line; <Notice><WebLogicServer><BEA-000360><Server started in RUNNING mode> At this point we can now login to the Oracle IRM Management Website at the URL. http://irm.company.internal:1600/irm_rights/ The server is just configured for HTTP at the moment, no SSL involved. Just want to ensure we can get a working system up and running. You should now see a login like the image on the right and you can now login using your weblogic username and password. The next article in this guide goes over adding SSL and now testing your server by actually adding a few users, sealing some content and opening this content as a user.

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Implementing History Support using jQuery for AJAX websites built on asp.net AJAX

- by anil.kasalanati

Problem Statement: Most modern day website use AJAX for page navigation and gone are the days of complete HTTP redirection so it is imperative that we support back and forward buttons on the browser so that end users navigation is not broken. In this article we discuss about solutions which are already available and problems with them. Microsoft History Support: Post .Net 3.5 sp1 Microsoft’s Script manager supports history for websites using Update panels. This is achieved by enabling the ENABLE HISTORY property for the script manager and then the event “Page_Browser_Navigate” needs to be handled. So whenever the browser buttons are clicked the event is fired and the application can write code to do the navigation. The following articles provide good tutorials on how to do that http://www.asp.net/aspnet-in-net-35-sp1/videos/introduction-to-aspnet-ajax-history http://www.codeproject.com/KB/aspnet/ajaxhistorymanagement.aspx And Microsoft api internally creates an IFrame and changes the bookmark of the url. Unfortunately this has a bug and it does not work in Ie6 and 7 which are the major browsers but it works in ie8 and Firefox. And Microsoft has apparently fixed this bug in .Net 4.0. Following is the blog http://weblogs.asp.net/joshclose/archive/2008/11/11/asp-net-ajax-addhistorypoint-bug.aspx For solutions which are still running on .net 3.5 sp1 there is no solution which Microsoft offers so there is are two way to solve this o Disable the back button. o Develop custom solution. Disable back button Even though this might look like a very simple thing to do there are issues around doing this because there is no event which can be manipulated from the javascript. The browser does not provide an api to do this. So most of the technical solution on internet offer work arounds like doing a history.forward(1) so that even if the user clicks a back button the destination page redirects the user to the original page. This is not a good customer experience and does not work for asp.net website where there are different views in the same page. There are other ways around detecting the window unload events and writing code there. So there are 2 events onbeforeUnload and onUnload and we can write code to show a confirmation message to the user. If we write code in onUnLoad then we can only show a message but it is too late to stop the navigation. And if we write on onBeforeUnLoad we can stop the navigation if the user clicks cancel but this event would be triggered for all AJAX calls and hyperlinks where the href is anything other than #. We can do this but the website has to be checked properly to ensure there are no links where href is not # otherwise the user would see a popup message saying “you are leaving the website”. Believe me after doing a lot of research on the back button disable I found it easier to support it rather than disabling the button. So I am going to discuss a solution which work using jQuery with some tweaking. Custom Solution JQuery already provides an api to manage the history of a AJAX website - http://plugins.jquery.com/project/history We need to integrate this with Microsoft Page request manager so that both of them work in tandem. The page state is maintained in the cookie so that it can be passed to the server and I used jQuery cookie plug in for that – http://plugins.jquery.com/node/1386/release Firstly when the page loads there is a need to hook up all the events on the page which needs to cause browser history and following is the code to that. jQuery(document).ready(function() { // Initialize history plugin. // The callback is called at once by present location.hash. jQuery.history.init(pageload); // set onlick event for buttons jQuery("a[@rel='history']").click(function() { // var hash = this.page; hash = hash.replace(/^.*#/, ''); isAsyncPostBack = true; // moves to a new page. // pageload is called at once. jQuery.history.load(hash); return true; }); }); The above scripts basically gets all the DOM objects which have the attribute rel=”history” and add the event. In our test page we have the link button which has the attribute rel set to history. <asp:LinkButton ID="Previous" rel="history" runat="server" onclick="PreviousOnClick">Previous</asp:LinkButton> <asp:LinkButton ID="AsyncPostBack" rel="history" runat="server" onclick="NextOnClick">Next</asp:LinkButton> <asp:LinkButton ID="HistoryLinkButton" runat="server" style="display:none" onclick="HistoryOnClick"></asp:LinkButton> And you can see that there is an hidden HistoryLinkButton which used to send a sever side postback in case of browser back or previous buttons. And note that we need to use display:none and not visible= false because asp.net AJAX would disallow any post backs if visible=false. And in general the pageload event get executed on the client side when a back or forward is pressed and the function is shown below function pageload(hash) { if (hash) { if (!isAsyncPostBack) { jQuery.cookie("page", hash); __doPostBack("HistoryLinkButton", ""); } isAsyncPostBack = false; } else { // start page jQuery("#load").empty(); } } As you can see in case there is an hash in the url we are basically do an asp.net AJAX post back using the following statement __doPostBack("HistoryLinkButton", ""); So whenever the user clicks back or forward the post back happens using the event statement we provide and Previous event code is invoked in the code behind. We need to have the code to use the pageId present in the url to change the page content. And there is an important thing to note – because the hash is worked out using the pageId’s there is a need to recalculate the hash after every AJAX post back so following code is plugged in function ReWorkHash() { jQuery("a[@rel='history']").unbind("click"); jQuery("a[@rel='history']").click(function() { // var hash = jQuery(this).attr("page"); hash = hash.replace(/^.*#/, ''); jQuery.cookie("page", hash); isAsyncPostBack = true; // moves to a new page. // pageload is called at once. jQuery.history.load(hash); return true; }); } This code is executed from the code behind using ScriptManager RegisterClientScriptBlock as shown below – ScriptManager.RegisterClientScriptBlock(this, typeof(_Default), "Recalculater", "ReWorkHash();", true); A sample application is available to be downloaded at the following location – http://techconsulting.vpscustomer.com/Source/HistoryTest.zip And a working sample is available at – http://techconsulting.vpscustomer.com/Samples/Default.aspx

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Adding Unobtrusive Validation To MVCContrib Fluent Html

- by srkirkland

ASP.NET MVC 3 includes a new unobtrusive validation strategy that utilizes HTML5 data-* attributes to decorate form elements. Using a combination of jQuery validation and an unobtrusive validation adapter script that comes with MVC 3, those attributes are then turned into client side validation rules. A Quick Introduction to Unobtrusive Validation To quickly show how this works in practice, assume you have the following Order.cs class (think Northwind) [If you are familiar with unobtrusive validation in MVC 3 you can skip to the next section]: public class Order : DomainObject { [DataType(DataType.Date)] public virtual DateTime OrderDate { get; set; } [Required] [StringLength(12)] public virtual string ShipAddress { get; set; } [Required] public virtual Customer OrderedBy { get; set; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Note the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations attributes, which provide the validation and metadata information used by ASP.NET MVC 3 to determine how to render out these properties. Now let’s assume we have a form which can edit this Order class, specifically let’s look at the ShipAddress property: @Html.LabelFor(x => x.Order.ShipAddress) @Html.EditorFor(x => x.Order.ShipAddress) @Html.ValidationMessageFor(x => x.Order.ShipAddress) .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now the Html.EditorFor() method is smart enough to look at the ShipAddress attributes and write out the necessary unobtrusive validation html attributes. Note we could have used Html.TextBoxFor() or even Html.TextBox() and still retained the same results. If we view source on the input box generated by the Html.EditorFor() call, we get the following: <input type="text" value="Rua do Paço, 67" name="Order.ShipAddress" id="Order_ShipAddress" data-val-required="The ShipAddress field is required." data-val-length-max="12" data-val-length="The field ShipAddress must be a string with a maximum length of 12." data-val="true" class="text-box single-line input-validation-error"> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } As you can see, we have data-val-* attributes for both required and length, along with the proper error messages and additional data as necessary (in this case, we have the length-max=”12”). And of course, if we try to submit the form with an invalid value, we get an error on the client: Working with MvcContrib’s Fluent Html The MvcContrib project offers a fluent interface for creating Html elements which I find very expressive and useful, especially when it comes to creating select lists. Let’s look at a few quick examples: @this.TextBox(x => x.FirstName).Class("required").Label("First Name:") @this.MultiSelect(x => x.UserId).Options(ViewModel.Users) @this.CheckBox("enabled").LabelAfter("Enabled").Title("Click to enable.").Styles(vertical_align => "middle") @(this.Select("Order.OrderedBy").Options(Model.Customers, x => x.Id, x => x.CompanyName) .Selected(Model.Order.OrderedBy != null ? Model.Order.OrderedBy.Id : "") .FirstOption(null, "--Select A Company--") .HideFirstOptionWhen(Model.Order.OrderedBy != null) .Label("Ordered By:")) .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } These fluent html helpers create the normal html you would expect, and I think they make life a lot easier and more readable when dealing with complex markup or select list data models (look ma: no anonymous objects for creating class names!). Of course, the problem we have now is that MvcContrib’s fluent html helpers don’t know about ASP.NET MVC 3’s unobtrusive validation attributes and thus don’t take part in client validation on your page. This is not ideal, so I wrote a quick helper method to extend fluent html with the knowledge of what unobtrusive validation attributes to include when they are rendered. Extending MvcContrib’s Fluent Html Before posting the code, there are just a few things you need to know. The first is that all Fluent Html elements implement the IElement interface (MvcContrib.FluentHtml.Elements.IElement), and the second is that the base System.Web.Mvc.HtmlHelper has been extended with a method called GetUnobtrusiveValidationAttributes which we can use to determine the necessary attributes to include. With this knowledge we can make quick work of extending fluent html: public static class FluentHtmlExtensions { public static T IncludeUnobtrusiveValidationAttributes<T>(this T element, HtmlHelper htmlHelper) where T : MvcContrib.FluentHtml.Elements.IElement { IDictionary<string, object> validationAttributes = htmlHelper .GetUnobtrusiveValidationAttributes(element.GetAttr("name")); foreach (var validationAttribute in validationAttributes) { element.SetAttr(validationAttribute.Key, validationAttribute.Value); } return element; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The code is pretty straight forward – basically we use a passed HtmlHelper to get a list of validation attributes for the current element and then add each of the returned attributes to the element to be rendered. The Extension In Action Now let’s get back to the earlier ShipAddress example and see what we’ve accomplished. First we will use a fluent html helper to render out the ship address text input (this is the ‘before’ case): @this.TextBox("Order.ShipAddress").Label("Ship Address:").Class("class-name") .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } And the resulting HTML: <label id="Order_ShipAddress_Label" for="Order_ShipAddress">Ship Address:</label> <input type="text" value="Rua do Paço, 67" name="Order.ShipAddress" id="Order_ShipAddress" class="class-name"> Now let’s do the same thing except here we’ll use the newly written extension method: @this.TextBox("Order.ShipAddress").Label("Ship Address:") .Class("class-name").IncludeUnobtrusiveValidationAttributes(Html) .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } And the resulting HTML: <label id="Order_ShipAddress_Label" for="Order_ShipAddress">Ship Address:</label> <input type="text" value="Rua do Paço, 67" name="Order.ShipAddress" id="Order_ShipAddress" data-val-required="The ShipAddress field is required." data-val-length-max="12" data-val-length="The field ShipAddress must be a string with a maximum length of 12." data-val="true" class="class-name"> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Excellent! Now we can continue to use unobtrusive validation and have the flexibility to use ASP.NET MVC’s Html helpers or MvcContrib’s fluent html helpers interchangeably, and every element will participate in client side validation. Wrap Up Overall I’m happy with this solution, although in the best case scenario MvcContrib would know about unobtrusive validation attributes and include them automatically (of course if it is enabled in the web.config file). I know that MvcContrib allows you to author global behaviors, but that requires changing the base class of your views, which I am not willing to do. Enjoy!

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The Execute SQL Task

In this article we are going to take you through the Execute SQL Task in SQL Server Integration Services for SQL Server 2005 (although it appies just as well to SQL Server 2008). We will be covering all the essentials that you will need to know to effectively use this task and make it as flexible as possible. The things we will be looking at are as follows: A tour of the Task. The properties of the Task. After looking at these introductory topics we will then get into some examples. The examples will show different types of usage for the task: Returning a single value from a SQL query with two input parameters. Returning a rowset from a SQL query. Executing a stored procedure and retrieveing a rowset, a return value, an output parameter value and passing in an input parameter. Passing in the SQL Statement from a variable. Passing in the SQL Statement from a file. Tour Of The Task Before we can start to use the Execute SQL Task in our packages we are going to need to locate it in the toolbox. Let's do that now. Whilst in the Control Flow section of the package expand your toolbox and locate the Execute SQL Task. Below is how we found ours. Now drag the task onto the designer. As you can see from the following image we have a validation error appear telling us that no connection manager has been assigned to the task. This can be easily remedied by creating a connection manager. There are certain types of connection manager that are compatable with this task so we cannot just create any connection manager and these are detailed in a few graphics time. Double click on the task itself to take a look at the custom user interface provided to us for this task. The task will open on the general tab as shown below. Take a bit of time to have a look around here as throughout this article we will be revisting this page many times. Whilst on the general tab, drop down the combobox next to the ConnectionType property. In here you will see the types of connection manager which this task will accept. As with SQL Server 2000 DTS, SSIS allows you to output values from this task in a number of formats. Have a look at the combobox next to the Resultset property. The major difference here is the ability to output into XML. If you drop down the combobox next to the SQLSourceType property you will see the ways in which you can pass a SQL Statement into the task itself. We will have examples of each of these later on but certainly when we saw these for the first time we were very excited. Next to the SQLStatement property if you click in the empty box next to it you will see ellipses appear. Click on them and you will see the very basic query editor that becomes available to you. Alternatively after you have specified a connection manager for the task you can click on the Build Query button to bring up a completely different query editor. This is slightly inconsistent. Once you've finished looking around the general tab, move on to the next tab which is the parameter mapping tab. We shall, again, be visiting this tab throughout the article but to give you an initial heads up this is where you define the input, output and return values from your task. Note this is not where you specify the resultset. If however you now move on to the ResultSet tab this is where you define what variable will receive the output from your SQL Statement in whatever form that is. Property Expressions are one of the most amazing things to happen in SSIS and they will not be covered here as they deserve a whole article to themselves. Watch out for this as their usefulness will astound you. For a more detailed discussion of what should be the parameter markers in the SQL Statements on the General tab and how to map them to variables on the Parameter Mapping tab see Working with Parameters and Return Codes in the Execute SQL Task. Task Properties There are two places where you can specify the properties for your task. One is in the task UI itself and the other is in the property pane which will appear if you right click on your task and select Properties from the context menu. We will be doing plenty of property setting in the UI later so let's take a moment to have a look at the property pane. Below is a graphic showing our properties pane. Now we shall take you through all the properties and tell you exactly what they mean. A lot of these properties you will see across all tasks as well as the package because of everything's base structure The Container. BypassPrepare Should the statement be prepared before sending to the connection manager destination (True/False) Connection This is simply the name of the connection manager that the task will use. We can get this from the connection manager tray at the bottom of the package. DelayValidation Really interesting property and it tells the task to not validate until it actually executes. A usage for this may be that you are operating on table yet to be created but at runtime you know the table will be there. Description Very simply the description of your Task. Disable Should the task be enabled or not? You can also set this through a context menu by right clicking on the task itself. DisableEventHandlers As a result of events that happen in the task, should the event handlers for the container fire? ExecValueVariable The variable assigned here will get or set the execution value of the task. Expressions Expressions as we mentioned earlier are a really powerful tool in SSIS and this graphic below shows us a small peek of what you can do. We select a property on the left and assign an expression to the value of that property on the right causing the value to be dynamically changed at runtime. One of the most obvious uses of this is that the property value can be built dynamically from within the package allowing you a great deal of flexibility FailPackageOnFailure If this task fails does the package? FailParentOnFailure If this task fails does the parent container? A task can he hosted inside another container i.e. the For Each Loop Container and this would then be the parent. ForcedExecutionValue This property allows you to hard code an execution value for the task. ForcedExecutionValueType What is the datatype of the ForcedExecutionValue? ForceExecutionResult Force the task to return a certain execution result. This could then be used by the workflow constraints. Possible values are None, Success, Failure and Completion. ForceExecutionValue Should we force the execution result? IsolationLevel This is the transaction isolation level of the task. IsStoredProcedure Certain optimisations are made by the task if it knows that the query is a Stored Procedure invocation. The docs say this will always be false unless the connection is an ADO connection. LocaleID Gets or sets the LocaleID of the container. LoggingMode Should we log for this container and what settings should we use? The value choices are UseParentSetting, Enabled and Disabled. MaximumErrorCount How many times can the task fail before we call it a day? Name Very simply the name of the task. ResultSetType How do you want the results of your query returned? The choices are ResultSetType_None, ResultSetType_SingleRow, ResultSetType_Rowset and ResultSetType_XML. SqlStatementSource Your Query/SQL Statement. SqlStatementSourceType The method of specifying the query. Your choices here are DirectInput, FileConnection and Variables TimeOut How long should the task wait to receive results? TransactionOption How should the task handle being asked to join a transaction? Usage Examples As we move through the examples we will only cover in them what we think you must know and what we think you should see. This means that some of the more elementary steps like setting up variables will be covered in the early examples but skipped and simply referred to in later ones. All these examples used the AventureWorks database that comes with SQL Server 2005. Returning a Single Value, Passing in Two Input Parameters So the first thing we are going to do is add some variables to our package. The graphic below shows us those variables having been defined. Here the CountOfEmployees variable will be used as the output from the query and EndDate and StartDate will be used as input parameters. As you can see all these variables have been scoped to the package. Scoping allows us to have domains for variables. Each container has a scope and remember a package is a container as well. Variable values of the parent container can be seen in child containers but cannot be passed back up to the parent from a child. Our following graphic has had a number of changes made. The first of those changes is that we have created and assigned an OLEDB connection manager to this Task ExecuteSQL Task Connection. The next thing is we have made sure that the SQLSourceType property is set to Direct Input as we will be writing in our statement ourselves. We have also specified that only a single row will be returned from this query. The expressions we typed in was: SELECT COUNT(*) AS CountOfEmployees FROM HumanResources.Employee WHERE (HireDate BETWEEN ? AND ?) Moving on now to the Parameter Mapping tab this is where we are going to tell the task about our input paramaters. We Add them to the window specifying their direction and datatype. A quick word here about the structure of the variable name. As you can see SSIS has preceeded the variable with the word user. This is a default namespace for variables but you can create your own. When defining your variables if you look at the variables window title bar you will see some icons. If you hover over the last one on the right you will see it says "Choose Variable Columns". If you click the button you will see a list of checkbox options and one of them is namespace. after checking this you will see now where you can define your own namespace. The next tab, result set, is where we need to get back the value(s) returned from our statement and assign to a variable which in our case is CountOfEmployees so we can use it later perhaps. Because we are only returning a single value then if you remember from earlier we are allowed to assign a name to the resultset but it must be the name of the column (or alias) from the query. A really cool feature of Business Intelligence Studio being hosted by Visual Studio is that we get breakpoint support for free. In our package we set a Breakpoint so we can break the package and have a look in a watch window at the variable values as they appear to our task and what the variable value of our resultset is after the task has done the assignment. Here's that window now. As you can see the count of employess that matched the data range was 2. Returning a Rowset In this example we are going to return a resultset back to a variable after the task has executed not just a single row single value. There are no input parameters required so the variables window is nice and straight forward. One variable of type object. Here is the statement that will form the soure for our Resultset. select p.ProductNumber, p.name, pc.Name as ProductCategoryNameFROM Production.ProductCategory pcJOIN Production.ProductSubCategory pscON pc.ProductCategoryID = psc.ProductCategoryIDJOIN Production.Product pON psc.ProductSubCategoryID = p.ProductSubCategoryID We need to make sure that we have selected Full result set as the ResultSet as shown below on the task's General tab. Because there are no input parameters we can skip the parameter mapping tab and move straight to the Result Set tab. Here we need to Add our variable defined earlier and map it to the result name of 0 (remember we covered this earlier) Once we run the task we can again set a breakpoint and have a look at the values coming back from the task. In the following graphic you can see the result set returned to us as a COM object. We can do some pretty interesting things with this COM object and in later articles that is exactly what we shall be doing. Return Values, Input/Output Parameters and Returning a Rowset from a Stored Procedure This example is pretty much going to give us a taste of everything. We have already covered in the previous example how to specify the ResultSet to be a Full result set so we will not cover it again here. For this example we are going to need 4 variables. One for the return value, one for the input parameter, one for the output parameter and one for the result set. Here is the statement we want to execute. Note how much cleaner it is than if you wanted to do it using the current version of DTS. In the Parameter Mapping tab we are going to Add our variables and specify their direction and datatypes. In the Result Set tab we can now map our final variable to the rowset returned from the stored procedure. It really is as simple as that and we were amazed at how much easier it is than in DTS 2000. Passing in the SQL Statement from a Variable SSIS as we have mentioned is hugely more flexible than its predecessor and one of the things you will notice when moving around the tasks and the adapters is that a lot of them accept a variable as an input for something they need. The ExecuteSQL task is no different. It will allow us to pass in a string variable as the SQL Statement. This variable value could have been set earlier on from inside the package or it could have been populated from outside using a configuration. The ResultSet property is set to single row and we'll show you why in a second when we look at the variables. Note also the SQLSourceType property. Here's the General Tab again. Looking at the variable we have in this package you can see we have only two. One for the return value from the statement and one which is obviously for the statement itself. Again we need to map the Result name to our variable and this can be a named Result Name (The column name or alias returned by the query) and not 0. The expected result into our variable should be the amount of rows in the Person.Contact table and if we look in the watch window we see that it is. Passing in the SQL Statement from a File The final example we are going to show is a really interesting one. We are going to pass in the SQL statement to the task by using a file connection manager. The file itself contains the statement to run. The first thing we are going to need to do is create our file connection mananger to point to our file. Click in the connections tray at the bottom of the designer, right click and choose "New File Connection" As you can see in the graphic below we have chosen to use an existing file and have passed in the name as well. Have a look around at the other "Usage Type" values available whilst you are here. Having set that up we can now see in the connection manager tray our file connection manager sitting alongside our OLE-DB connection we have been using for the rest of these examples. Now we can go back to the familiar General Tab to set up how the task will accept our file connection as the source. All the other properties in this task are set up exactly as we have been doing for other examples depending on the options chosen so we will not cover them again here. We hope you will agree that the Execute SQL Task has changed considerably in this release from its DTS predecessor. It has a lot of options available but once you have configured it a few times you get to learn what needs to go where. We hope you have found this article useful.

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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 Entity Framework Code-First (CTP5 release)

- by ScottGu

This week the data team released the CTP5 build of the new Entity Framework Code-First library. EF Code-First enables a pretty sweet code-centric development workflow for working with data. It enables you to: Develop without ever having to open a designer or define an XML mapping file Define model objects by simply writing “plain old classes” with no base classes required Use a “convention over configuration” approach that enables database persistence without explicitly configuring anything Optionally override the convention-based persistence and use a fluent code API to fully customize the persistence mapping I’m a big fan of the EF Code-First approach, and wrote several blog posts about it this summer: Code-First Development with Entity Framework 4 (July 16th) EF Code-First: Custom Database Schema Mapping (July 23rd) Using EF Code-First with an Existing Database (August 3rd) Today’s new CTP5 release delivers several nice improvements over the CTP4 build, and will be the last preview build of Code First before the final release of it. We will ship the final EF Code First release in the first quarter of next year (Q1 of 2011). It works with all .NET application types (including both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC projects). Installing EF Code First You can install and use EF Code First CTP5 using one of two ways: Approach 1) By downloading and running a setup program. Once installed you can reference the EntityFramework.dll assembly it provides within your projects. or: Approach 2) By using the NuGet Package Manager within Visual Studio to download and install EF Code First within a project. To do this, simply bring up the NuGet Package Manager Console within Visual Studio (View->Other Windows->Package Manager Console) and type “Install-Package EFCodeFirst”: Typing “Install-Package EFCodeFirst” within the Package Manager Console will cause NuGet to download the EF Code First package, and add it to your current project: Doing this will automatically add a reference to the EntityFramework.dll assembly to your project: NuGet enables you to have EF Code First setup and ready to use within seconds. When the final release of EF Code First ships you’ll also be able to just type “Update-Package EFCodeFirst” to update your existing projects to use the final release. EF Code First Assembly and Namespace The CTP5 release of EF Code First has an updated assembly name, and new .NET namespace: Assembly Name: EntityFramework.dll Namespace: System.Data.Entity These names match what we plan to use for the final release of the library. Nice New CTP5 Improvements The new CTP5 release of EF Code First contains a bunch of nice improvements and refinements. Some of the highlights include: Better support for Existing Databases Built-in Model-Level Validation and DataAnnotation Support Fluent API Improvements Pluggable Conventions Support New Change Tracking API Improved Concurrency Conflict Resolution Raw SQL Query/Command Support The rest of this blog post contains some more details about a few of the above changes. Better Support for Existing Databases EF Code First makes it really easy to create model layers that work against existing databases. CTP5 includes some refinements that further streamline the developer workflow for this scenario. Below are the steps to use EF Code First to create a model layer for the Northwind sample database: Step 1: Create Model Classes and a DbContext class Below is all of the code necessary to implement a simple model layer using EF Code First that goes against the Northwind database: EF Code First enables you to use “POCO” – Plain Old CLR Objects – to represent entities within a database. This means that you do not need to derive model classes from a base class, nor implement any interfaces or data persistence attributes on them. This enables the model classes to be kept clean, easily testable, and “persistence ignorant”. The Product and Category classes above are examples of POCO model classes. EF Code First enables you to easily connect your POCO model classes to a database by creating a “DbContext” class that exposes public properties that map to the tables within a database. The Northwind class above illustrates how this can be done. It is mapping our Product and Category classes to the “Products” and “Categories” tables within the database. The properties within the Product and Category classes in turn map to the columns within the Products and Categories tables – and each instance of a Product/Category object maps to a row within the tables. The above code is all of the code required to create our model and data access layer! Previous CTPs of EF Code First required an additional step to work against existing databases (a call to Database.Initializer<Northwind>(null) to tell EF Code First to not create the database) – this step is no longer required with the CTP5 release. Step 2: Configure the Database Connection String We’ve written all of the code we need to write to define our model layer. Our last step before we use it will be to setup a connection-string that connects it with our database. To do this we’ll add a “Northwind” connection-string to our web.config file (or App.Config for client apps) like so: <connectionStrings> <add name="Northwind" connectionString="data source=.\SQLEXPRESS;Integrated Security=SSPI;AttachDBFilename=|DataDirectory|\northwind.mdf;User Instance=true" providerName="System.Data.SqlClient" /> </connectionStrings> EF “code first” uses a convention where DbContext classes by default look for a connection-string that has the same name as the context class. Because our DbContext class is called “Northwind” it by default looks for a “Northwind” connection-string to use. Above our Northwind connection-string is configured to use a local SQL Express database (stored within the \App_Data directory of our project). You can alternatively point it at a remote SQL Server. Step 3: Using our Northwind Model Layer We can now easily query and update our database using the strongly-typed model layer we just built with EF Code First. The code example below demonstrates how to use LINQ to query for products within a specific product category. This query returns back a sequence of strongly-typed Product objects that match the search criteria: The code example below demonstrates how we can retrieve a specific Product object, update two of its properties, and then save the changes back to the database: EF Code First handles all of the change-tracking and data persistence work for us, and allows us to focus on our application and business logic as opposed to having to worry about data access plumbing. Built-in Model Validation EF Code First allows you to use any validation approach you want when implementing business rules with your model layer. This enables a great deal of flexibility and power. Starting with this week’s CTP5 release, EF Code First also now includes built-in support for both the DataAnnotation and IValidatorObject validation support built-into .NET 4. This enables you to easily implement validation rules on your models, and have these rules automatically be enforced by EF Code First whenever you save your model layer. It provides a very convenient “out of the box” way to enable validation within your applications. Applying DataAnnotations to our Northwind Model The code example below demonstrates how we could add some declarative validation rules to two of the properties of our “Product” model: We are using the [Required] and [Range] attributes above. These validation attributes live within the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace that is built-into .NET 4, and can be used independently of EF. The error messages specified on them can either be explicitly defined (like above) – or retrieved from resource files (which makes localizing applications easy). Validation Enforcement on SaveChanges() EF Code-First (starting with CTP5) now automatically applies and enforces DataAnnotation rules when a model object is updated or saved. You do not need to write any code to enforce this – this support is now enabled by default. This new support means that the below code – which violates our above rules – will automatically throw an exception when we call the “SaveChanges()” method on our Northwind DbContext: The DbEntityValidationException that is raised when the SaveChanges() method is invoked contains a “EntityValidationErrors” property that you can use to retrieve the list of all validation errors that occurred when the model was trying to save. This enables you to easily guide the user on how to fix them. Note that EF Code-First will abort the entire transaction of changes if a validation rule is violated – ensuring that our database is always kept in a valid, consistent state. EF Code First’s validation enforcement works both for the built-in .NET DataAnnotation attributes (like Required, Range, RegularExpression, StringLength, etc), as well as for any custom validation rule you create by sub-classing the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.ValidationAttribute base class. UI Validation Support A lot of our UI frameworks in .NET also provide support for DataAnnotation-based validation rules. For example, ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, and Silverlight (via WCF RIA Services) all provide support for displaying client-side validation UI that honor the DataAnnotation rules applied to model objects. The screen-shot below demonstrates how using the default “Add-View” scaffold template within an ASP.NET MVC 3 application will cause appropriate validation error messages to be displayed if appropriate values are not provided: ASP.NET MVC 3 supports both client-side and server-side enforcement of these validation rules. The error messages displayed are automatically picked up from the declarative validation attributes – eliminating the need for you to write any custom code to display them. Keeping things DRY The “DRY Principle” stands for “Do Not Repeat Yourself”, and is a best practice that recommends that you avoid duplicating logic/configuration/code in multiple places across your application, and instead specify it only once and have it apply everywhere. EF Code First CTP5 now enables you to apply declarative DataAnnotation validations on your model classes (and specify them only once) and then have the validation logic be enforced (and corresponding error messages displayed) across all applications scenarios – including within controllers, views, client-side scripts, and for any custom code that updates and manipulates model classes. This makes it much easier to build good applications with clean code, and to build applications that can rapidly iterate and evolve. Other EF Code First Improvements New to CTP5 EF Code First CTP5 includes a bunch of other improvements as well. Below are a few short descriptions of some of them: Fluent API Improvements EF Code First allows you to override an “OnModelCreating()” method on the DbContext class to further refine/override the schema mapping rules used to map model classes to underlying database schema. CTP5 includes some refinements to the ModelBuilder class that is passed to this method which can make defining mapping rules cleaner and more concise. The ADO.NET Team blogged some samples of how to do this here. Pluggable Conventions Support EF Code First CTP5 provides new support that allows you to override the “default conventions” that EF Code First honors, and optionally replace them with your own set of conventions. New Change Tracking API EF Code First CTP5 exposes a new set of change tracking information that enables you to access Original, Current & Stored values, and State (e.g. Added, Unchanged, Modified, Deleted). This support is useful in a variety of scenarios. Improved Concurrency Conflict Resolution EF Code First CTP5 provides better exception messages that allow access to the affected object instance and the ability to resolve conflicts using current, original and database values. Raw SQL Query/Command Support EF Code First CTP5 now allows raw SQL queries and commands (including SPROCs) to be executed via the SqlQuery and SqlCommand methods exposed off of the DbContext.Database property. The results of these method calls can be materialized into object instances that can be optionally change-tracked by the DbContext. This is useful for a variety of advanced scenarios. Full Data Annotations Support EF Code First CTP5 now supports all standard DataAnnotations within .NET, and can use them both to perform validation as well as to automatically create the appropriate database schema when EF Code First is used in a database creation scenario. Summary EF Code First provides an elegant and powerful way to work with data. I really like it because it is extremely clean and supports best practices, while also enabling solutions to be implemented very, very rapidly. The code-only approach of the library means that model layers end up being flexible and easy to customize. This week’s CTP5 release further refines EF Code First and helps ensure that it will be really sweet when it ships early next year. I recommend using NuGet to install and give it a try today. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how awesome it is. Hope this helps, Scott

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Continuous Integration for SQL Server Part II – Integration Testing

- by Ben Rees

My previous post, on setting up Continuous Integration for SQL Server databases using GitHub, Bamboo and Red Gate’s tools, covered the first two parts of a simple Database Continuous Delivery process: Putting your database in to a source control system, and, Running a continuous integration process, each time changes are checked in. However there is, of course, a lot more to to Continuous Delivery than that. Specifically, in addition to the above: Putting some actual integration tests in to the CI process (otherwise, they don’t really do much, do they!?), Deploying the database changes with a managed, automated approach, Monitoring what you’ve just put live, to make sure you haven’t broken anything. This post will detail how to set up a very simple pipeline for implementing the first of these (continuous integration testing). NB: A lot of the setup in this post is built on top of the configuration from before, so it might be difficult to implement this post without running through part I first. There’ll then be a third post on automated database deployment followed by a final post dealing with the last item – monitoring changes on the live system. In the previous post, I used a mixture of Red Gate products and other 3rd party software – GitHub and Atlassian Bamboo specifically. This was partly because I believe most people work in an heterogeneous environment, using software from different vendors to suit their purposes and I wanted to show how this could work for this process. For example, you could easily substitute Atlassian’s BitBucket or Stash for GitHub, depending on your needs, or use an alternative CI server such as TeamCity, TFS or Jenkins. However, in this, post, I’ll be mostly using Red Gate products only (other than tSQLt). I would do this, firstly because I work for Red Gate. However, I also think that in the area of Database Delivery processes, nobody else has the offerings to implement this process fully – so I didn’t have any choice! Background on Continuous Delivery For me, a great source of information on what makes a proper Continuous Delivery process is the Jez Humble and David Farley classic: Continuous Delivery – Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation This book is not of course, primarily about databases, and the process I outline here and in the previous article is a gross simplification of what Jez and David describe (not least because it’s that much harder for databases!). However, a lot of the principles that they describe can be equally applied to database development and, I would argue, should be. As I say however, what I describe here is a very simple version of what would be required for a full production process. A couple of useful resources on handling some of these complexities can be found in the following two references: Refactoring Databases – Evolutionary Database Design, by Scott J Ambler and Pramod J. Sadalage Versioning Databases – Branching and Merging, by Scott Allen In particular, I don’t deal at all with the issues of multiple branches and merging of those branches, an issue made particularly acute by the use of GitHub. The other point worth making is that, in the words of Martin Fowler: Continuous Delivery is about keeping your application in a state where it is always able to deploy into production. I.e. we are not talking about continuously delivery updates to the production database every time someone checks in an amendment to a stored procedure. That is possible (and what Martin calls Continuous Deployment). However, again, that’s more than I describe in this article. And I doubt I need to remind DBAs or Developers to Proceed with Caution! Integration Testing Back to something practical. The next stage, building on our set up from the previous article, is to add in some integration tests to the process. As I say, the CI process, though interesting, isn’t enormously useful without some sort of test process running. For this we’ll use the tSQLt framework, an open source framework designed specifically for running SQL Server tests. tSQLt is part of Red Gate’s SQL Test found on http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ or can be downloaded separately from www.tsqlt.org - though I’ll provide a step-by-step guide below for setting this up. Getting tSQLt set up via SQL Test Click on the link http://www.red-gate.com/products/sql-development/sql-test/ and click on the blue Download button to download the Red Gate SQL Test product, if not already installed. Follow the install process for SQL Test to install the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) plugin on to your machine, if not already installed. Open SSMS. You should now see SQL Test under the Tools menu: Clicking this link will give you the basic SQL Test dialogue: As yet, though we’ve installed the SQL Test product we haven’t yet installed the tSQLt test framework on to any particular database. To do this, we need to add our RedGateApp database using this dialogue, by clicking on the + Add Database to SQL Test… link, selecting the RedGateApp database and clicking the Add Database link: In the next screen, SQL Test describes what will be installed on the database for the tSQLt framework. Also in this dialogue, uncheck the “Add SQL Cop tests” option (shown below). SQL Cop is a great set of pre-defined tests that work within the tSQLt framework to check the general health of your SQL Server database. However, we won’t be using them in this particular simple example: Once you’ve clicked on the OK button, the changes described in the dialogue will be made to your database. Some of these are shown in the left-hand-side below: We’ve now installed the framework. However, we haven’t actually created any tests, so this will be the next step. But, before we proceed, we’ve made an update to our database so should, again check this in to source control, adding comments as required: Also worth a quick check that your build still runs with the new additions!: (And a quick check of the RedGateAppCI database shows that the changes have been made). Creating and Testing a Unit Test There are, of course, a lot of very interesting unit tests that you could and should set up for a database. The great thing about the tSQLt framework is that you can write these in SQL. The example I’m going to use here is pretty Mickey Mouse – our database table is going to include some email addresses as reference data and I want to check whether these are all in a correct email format. Nothing clever but it illustrates the process and hopefully shows the method by which more interesting tests could be set up. Adding Reference Data to our Database To start, I want to add some reference data to my database, and have this source controlled (as well as the schema). First of all I need to add some data in to my solitary table – this can be done a number of ways, but I’ll do this in SSMS for simplicity: I then add some reference data to my table: Currently this reference data just exists in the database. For proper integration testing, this needs to form part of the source-controlled version of the database – and so needs to be added to the Git repository. This can be done via SQL Source Control, though first a Primary Key needs to be added to the table. Right click the table, select Design, then right-click on the first “id” row. Then click on “Set Primary Key”: NB: once this change is made, click Save to save the change to the table. Then, to source control this reference data, right click on the table (dbo.Email) and selecting the following option: In the next screen, link the data in the Email table, by selecting it from the list and clicking “save and close”: We should at this point re-commit the changes (both the addition of the Primary Key, and the data) to the Git repo. NB: From here on, I won’t show screenshots for the GitHub side of things – it’s the same each time: whenever a change is made in SQL Source Control and committed to your local folder, you then need to sync this in the GitHub Windows client (as this is where the build server, Bamboo is taking it from). An interesting point to note here, when these changes are committed in SQL Source Control (right-click database and select “Commit Changes to Source Control..”): The display gives a warning about possibly needing a migration script for the “Add Primary Key” step of the changes. This isn’t actually necessary in this case, but this mechanism would allow you to create override scripts to replace the default change scripts created by the SQL Compare engine (which runs underneath SQL Source Control). Ignoring this message (!), we add a comment and commit the changes to Git. I then sync these, run a build (or the build gets run automatically), and check that the data is being deployed over to the target RedGateAppCI database: Creating and Running the Test As I mention, the test I’m going to use here is a very simple one - are the email addresses in my reference table valid? This isn’t of course, a full test of email validation (I expect the email addresses I’ve chosen here aren’t really the those of the Fab Four) – but just a very basic check of format used. I’ve taken the relevant SQL from this Stack Overflow article. In SSMS select “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click on + New Test: In the next screen, give your new test a name, and also enter a name in the Test Class box (test classes are schemas that help you keep things organised). Also check that the database in which the test is going to be created is correct – RedGateApp in this example: Click “Create Test”. After closing a couple of subsequent dialogues, you’ll see a dummy script for the test, that needs filling in: We now need to define the SQL for our test. As mentioned before, tSQLt allows you to write your unit tests in T-SQL, and the code I’m going to use here is as below. This needs to be copied and pasted in to the query window, to replace the default given by tSQLt: – Basic email check test ALTER PROCEDURE [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] AS BEGIN SET NOCOUNT ON Declare @Output VarChar(max) Set @Output = ” SELECT @Output = @Output + Email +Char(13) + Char(10) FROM dbo.Email WHERE email NOT LIKE ‘%_@__%.__%’ If @Output > ” Begin Set @Output = Char(13) + Char(10) + @Output EXEC tSQLt.Fail@Output End END; Once this script is entered, hit execute to add the Stored Procedure to the database. Before committing the test to source control, it’s worth just checking that it works! For a positive test, click on “SQL Test” from the Tools menu, then click Run Tests. You should see output like the following: - a green tick to indicate success! But of course, what we also need to do is test that this is actually doing something by showing a failed test. Edit one of the email addresses in your table to an incorrect format: Now, re-run the same SQL Test as before and you’ll see the following: Great – we now know that our test is really doing something! You’ll also see a useful error message at the bottom of SSMS: (leave the email address as invalid for now, for the next steps). The next stage is to check this new test in to source control again, by right-clicking on the database and checking in the changes with a commit message (and not forgetting to sync in the GitHub client): Checking that the Tests are Running as Integration Tests After the changes above are made, and after a build has run on Bamboo (manual or automatic), looking at the Stored Procedures for the RedGateAppCI, the SPROC for the new test has been moved over to the database. However this is not exactly what we were after. We didn’t want to just copy objects from one database to another, but actually run the tests as part of the build/integration test process. I.e. we’re continuously checking any changes we make (in this case, to the reference data emails), to ensure we’re not breaking a test that we’ve set up. The behaviour we want to see is that, if we check in static data that is incorrect (as we did in step 9 above) and we have the tSQLt test set up, then our build in Bamboo should fail. However, re-running the build shows the following: - sadly, a successful build! To make sure the tSQLt tests are run as part of the integration test, we need to amend a switch in the Red Gate CI config file. First, navigate to file sqlCI.targets in your working folder: Edit this document, make the following change, save the document, then commit and sync this change in the GitHub client:    <enableTsqlt>true</enableTsqlt> Now, if we re-run the build in Bamboo (NB: I’ve moved to a new server here, hence different address and build number): - superb, a broken build!! The error message isn’t great here, so to get more detailed info, click on the full build log link on this page (below the fold). The interesting part of the log shown is towards the bottom. Pulling out this part: 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 Build FAILED. 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 "C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj" (default target) (1) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 (sqlCI target) -> 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: RedGate.Deploy.SqlServerDbPackage.Shared.Exceptions.InvalidSqlException: Test Case Summary: 1 test case(s) executed, 0 succeeded, 1 failed, 0 errored. [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [MyChecks].[test Check Email Addresses] failed: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: ringo.starr@beatles [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: +----------------------+ [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] 21-Jun-2013 11:35:19 EXEC : sqlCI error occurred: |Test Execution Summary| [C:\Users\Administrator\bamboo-home\xml-data\build-dir\RGA-RGP-JOB1\sqlCI.proj] As a final check, we should make sure that, if we now fix this error, the build succeeds. So in SSMS, I’m going to correct the invalid email address, then check this change in to SQL Source Control (with a comment), commit to GitHub, and re-run the build: This should have fixed the build: It worked! Summary This has been a very quick run through the implementation of CI for databases, including tSQLt tests to test whether your database updates are working. The next post in this series will focus on automated deployment – we’ve tested our database changes, how can we now deploy these to target sites?

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Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio Ultimate 2010-Part 3

- by Tarun Arora

Welcome back once again, in Part 1 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I talked about why Performance Testing the application is important, the test tools available in Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 and various test rig topologies, in Part 2 of Load and Web Performance Testing using Visual Studio 2010 I discussed the details of web performance & load tests as well as why it’s important to follow a goal based pattern while performance testing your application. In part 3 I’ll be discussing Test Result Analysis, Test Result Drill through, Test Report Generation, Test Run Comparison, Asp.net Profiler and some closing thoughts. Test Results – I see some creepy worms! In Part 2 we put together a web performance test and a load test, lets run the test to see load test to see how the Web site responds to the load simulation. While the load test is running you will be able to see close to real time analysis in the Load Test Analyser window. You can use the Load Test Analyser to conduct load test analysis in three ways: Monitor a running load test - A condensed set of the performance counter data is maintained in memory. To prevent the results memory requirements from growing unbounded, up to 200 samples for each performance counter are maintained. This includes 100 evenly spaced samples that span the current elapsed time of the run and the most recent 100 samples. After the load test run is completed - The test controller spools all collected performance counter data to a database while the test is running. Additional data, such as timing details and error details, is loaded into the database when the test completes. The performance data for a completed test is loaded from the database and analysed by the Load Test Analyser. Below you can see a screen shot of the summary view, this provides key results in a format that is compact and easy to read. You can also print the load test summary, this is generated after the test has completed or been stopped. Analyse the load test results of a previously run load test – We’ll see this in the section where i discuss comparison between two test runs. The performance counters can be plotted on the graphs. You also have the option to highlight a selected part of the test and view details, drill down to the user activity chart where you can hover over to see more details of the test run. Generate Report => Test Run Comparisons The level of reports you can generate using the Load Test Analyser is astonishing. You have the option to create excel reports and conduct side by side analysis of two test results or to track trend analysis. The tools also allows you to export the graph data either to MS Excel or to a CSV file. You can view the ASP.NET profiler report to conduct further analysis as well. View Data and Diagnostic Attachments opens the Choose Diagnostic Data Adapter Attachment dialog box to select an adapter to analyse the result type. For example, you can select an IntelliTrace adapter, click OK and open the IntelliTrace summary for the test agent that was used in the load test. Compare results This creates a set of reports that compares the data from two load test results using tables and bar charts. I have taken these screen shots from the MSDN documentation, I would highly recommend exploring the wealth of knowledge available on MSDN. Leaving Thoughts While load testing the application with an excessive load for a longer duration of time, i managed to bring the IIS to its knees by piling up a huge queue of requests waiting to be processed. This clearly means that the IIS had run out of threads as all the threads were busy processing existing request, one easy way of fixing this is by increasing the default number of allocated threads, but this might escalate the problem. The better suggestion is to try and drill down to the actual root cause of the problem. When ever the garbage collection runs it stops processing any pages so all requests that come in during that period are queued up, but realistically the garbage collection completes in fraction of a a second. To understand this better lets look at the .net heap, it is divided into large heap and small heap, anything greater than 85kB in size will be allocated to the Large object heap, the Large object heap is non compacting and remember large objects are expensive to move around, so if you are allocating something in the large object heap, make sure that you really need it! The small object heap on the other hand is divided into generations, so all objects that are supposed to be short-lived are suppose to live in Gen-0 and the long living objects eventually move to Gen-2 as garbage collection goes through. As you can see in the picture below all < 85 KB size objects are first assigned to Gen-0, when Gen-0 fills up and a new object comes in and finds Gen-0 full, the garbage collection process is started, the process checks for all the dead objects and assigns them as the valid candidate for deletion to free up memory and promotes all the remaining objects in Gen-0 to Gen-1. So in the future when ever you clean up Gen-1 you have to clean up Gen-0 as well. When you fill up Gen – 0 again, all of Gen – 1 dead objects are drenched and rest are moved to Gen-2 and Gen-0 objects are moved to Gen-1 to free up Gen-0, but by this time your Garbage collection process has started to take much more time than it usually takes. Now as I mentioned earlier when garbage collection is being run all page requests that come in during that period are queued up. Does this explain why possibly page requests are getting queued up, apart from this it could also be the case that you are waiting for a long running database process to complete. Lets explore the heap a bit more… What is really a case of crisis is when the objects are living long enough to make it to Gen-2 and then dying, this is definitely a high cost operation. But sometimes you need objects in memory, for example when you cache data you hold on to the objects because you need to use them right across the user session, which is acceptable. But if you wanted to see what extreme caching can do to your server then write a simple application that chucks in a lot of data in cache, run a load test over it for about 10-15 minutes, forcing a lot of data in memory causing the heap to run out of memory. If you get to such a state where you start running out of memory the IIS as a mode of recovery restarts the worker process. It is great way to free up all your memory in the heap but this would clear the cache. The problem with this is if the customer had 10 items in their shopping basket and that data was stored in the application cache, the user basket will now be empty forcing them either to get frustrated and go to a competitor website or if the customer is really patient, give it another try! How can you address this, well two ways of addressing this; 1. Workaround – A x86 bit processor only allows a maximum of 4GB of RAM, this means the machine effectively has around 3.4 GB of RAM available, the OS needs about 1.5 GB of RAM to run efficiently, the IIS and .net framework also need their share of memory, leaving you a heap of around 800 MB to play with. Because Team builds by default build your application in ‘Compile as any mode’ it means the application is build such that it will run in x86 bit mode if run on a x86 bit processor and run in a x64 bit mode if run on a x64 but processor. The problem with this is not all applications are really x64 bit compatible specially if you are using com objects or external libraries. So, as a quick win if you compiled your application in x86 bit mode by changing the compile as any selection to compile as x86 in the team build, you will be able to run your application on a x64 bit machine in x86 bit mode (WOW – By running Windows on Windows) and what that means is, you could use 8GB+ worth of RAM, if you take away everything else your application will roughly get a heap size of at least 4 GB to play with, which is immense. If you need a heap size of more than 4 GB you have either build a software for NASA or there is something fundamentally wrong in your application. 2. Solution – Now that you have put a workaround in place the IIS will not restart the worker process that regularly, which means you can take a breather and start working to get to the root cause of this memory leak. But this begs a question “How do I Identify possible memory leaks in my application?” Well i won’t say that there is one single tool that can tell you where the memory leak is, but trust me, ‘Performance Profiling’ is a great start point, it definitely gets you started in the right direction, let’s have a look at how. Performance Wizard - Start the Performance Wizard and select Instrumentation, this lets you measure function call counts and timings. Before running the performance session right click the performance session settings and chose properties from the context menu to bring up the Performance session properties page and as shown in the screen shot below, check the check boxes in the group ‘.NET memory profiling collection’ namely ‘Collect .NET object allocation information’ and ‘Also collect the .NET Object lifetime information’. Now if you fire off the profiling session on your pages you will notice that the results allows you to view ‘Object Lifetime’ which shows you the number of objects that made it to Gen-0, Gen-1, Gen-2, Large heap, etc. Another great feature about the profile is that if your application has > 5% cases where objects die right after making to the Gen-2 storage a threshold alert is generated to alert you. Since you have the option to also view the most expensive methods and by capturing the IntelliTrace data you can drill in to narrow down to the line of code that is the root cause of the problem. Well now that we have seen how crucial memory management is and how easy Visual Studio Ultimate 2010 makes it for us to identify and reproduce the problem with the best of breed tools in the product. Caching One of the main ways to improve performance is Caching. Which basically means you tell the web server that instead of going to the database for each request you keep the data in the webserver and when the user asks for it you serve it from the webserver itself. BUT that can have consequences! Let’s look at some code, trust me caching code is not very intuitive, I define a cache key for almost all searches made through the common search page and cache the results. The approach works fine, first time i get the data from the database and second time data is served from the cache, significant performance improvement, EXCEPT when two users try to do the same operation and run into each other. But it is easy to handle this by adding the lock as you can see in the snippet below. So, as long as a user comes in and finds that the cache is empty, the user locks and starts to get the cache no more concurrency issues. But lets say you are processing 10 requests per second, by the time i have locked the operation to get the results from the database, 9 other users came in and found that the cache key is null so after i have come out and populated the cache they will still go in to get the results again. The application will still be faster because the next set of 10 users and so on would continue to get data from the cache. BUT if we added another null check after locking to build the cache and before actual call to the db then the 9 users who follow me would not make the extra trip to the database at all and that would really increase the performance, but didn’t i say that the code won’t be very intuitive, may be you should leave a comment you don’t want another developer to come in and think what a fresher why is he checking for the cache key null twice !!! The downside of caching is, you are storing the data outside of the database and the data could be wrong because the updates applied to the database would make the data cached at the web server out of sync. So, how do you invalidate the cache? Well if you only had one way of updating the data lets say only one entry point to the data update you can write some logic to say that every time new data is entered set the cache object to null. But this approach will not work as soon as you have several ways of feeding data to the system or your system is scaled out across a farm of web servers. The perfect solution to this is Micro Caching which means you cache the query for a set time duration and invalidate the cache after that set duration. The advantage is every time the user queries for that data with in the time span for which you have cached the results there are no calls made to the database and the data is served right from the server which makes the response immensely quick. Now figuring out the appropriate time span for which you micro cache the query results really depends on the application. Lets say your website gets 10 requests per second, if you retain the cache results for even 1 minute you will have immense performance gains. You would reduce 90% hits to the database for searching. Ever wondered why when you go to e-bookers.com or xpedia.com or yatra.com to book a flight and you click on the book button because the fare seems too exciting and you get an error message telling you that the fare is not valid any more. Yes, exactly => That is a cache failure! These travel sites or price compare engines are not going to hit the database every time you hit the compare button instead the results will be served from the cache, because the query results are micro cached, its a perfect trade-off, by micro caching the results the site gains 100% performance benefits but every once in a while annoys a customer because the fare has expired. But the trade off works in the favour of these sites as they are still able to process up to 30+ page requests per second which means cater to the site traffic by may be losing 1 customer every once in a while to a competitor who is also using a similar caching technique what are the odds that the user will not come back to their site sooner or later? Recap Resources Below are some Key resource you might like to review. I would highly recommend the documentation, walkthroughs and videos available on MSDN. You can always make use of Fiddler to debug Web Performance Tests. Some community test extensions and plug ins available on Codeplex might also be of interest to you. The Road Ahead Thank you for taking the time out and reading this blog post, you may also want to read Part I and Part II if you haven’t so far. If you enjoyed the post, remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. Questions/Feedback/Suggestions, etc please leave a comment. Next ‘Load Testing in the cloud’, I’ll be working on exploring the possibilities of running Test controller/Agents in the Cloud. See you on the other side! Thank You! Share this post : CodeProject

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ASP.NET and HTML5 Local Storage

- by Stephen Walther

My favorite feature of HTML5, hands-down, is HTML5 local storage (aka DOM storage). By taking advantage of HTML5 local storage, you can dramatically improve the performance of your data-driven ASP.NET applications by caching data in the browser persistently. Think of HTML5 local storage like browser cookies, but much better. Like cookies, local storage is persistent. When you add something to browser local storage, it remains there when the user returns to the website (possibly days or months later). Importantly, unlike the cookie storage limitation of 4KB, you can store up to 10 megabytes in HTML5 local storage. Because HTML5 local storage works with the latest versions of all modern browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari), you can start taking advantage of this HTML5 feature in your applications right now. Why use HTML5 Local Storage? I use HTML5 Local Storage in the JavaScript Reference application: http://Superexpert.com/JavaScriptReference The JavaScript Reference application is an HTML5 app that provides an interactive reference for all of the syntax elements of JavaScript (You can read more about the application and download the source code for the application here). When you open the application for the first time, all of the entries are transferred from the server to the browser (all 300+ entries). All of the entries are stored in local storage. When you open the application in the future, only changes are transferred from the server to the browser. The benefit of this approach is that the application performs extremely fast. When you click the details link to view details on a particular entry, the entry details appear instantly because all of the entries are stored on the client machine. When you perform key-up searches, by typing in the filter textbox, matching entries are displayed very quickly because the entries are being filtered on the local machine. This approach can have a dramatic effect on the performance of any interactive data-driven web application. Interacting with data on the client is almost always faster than interacting with the same data on the server. Retrieving Data from the Server In the JavaScript Reference application, I use Microsoft WCF Data Services to expose data to the browser. WCF Data Services generates a REST interface for your data automatically. Here are the steps: Create your database tables in Microsoft SQL Server. For example, I created a database named ReferenceDB and a database table named Entities. Use the Entity Framework to generate your data model. For example, I used the Entity Framework to generate a class named ReferenceDBEntities and a class named Entities. Expose your data through WCF Data Services. I added a WCF Data Service to my project and modified the data service class to look like this: using System.Data.Services; using System.Data.Services.Common; using System.Web; using JavaScriptReference.Models; namespace JavaScriptReference.Services { [System.ServiceModel.ServiceBehavior(IncludeExceptionDetailInFaults = true)] public class EntryService : DataService<ReferenceDBEntities> { // This method is called only once to initialize service-wide policies. public static void InitializeService(DataServiceConfiguration config) { config.UseVerboseErrors = true; config.SetEntitySetAccessRule("*", EntitySetRights.All); config.DataServiceBehavior.MaxProtocolVersion = DataServiceProtocolVersion.V2; } // Define a change interceptor for the Products entity set. [ChangeInterceptor("Entries")] public void OnChangeEntries(Entry entry, UpdateOperations operations) { if (!HttpContext.Current.Request.IsAuthenticated) { throw new DataServiceException("Cannot update reference unless authenticated."); } } } } The WCF data service is named EntryService. Notice that it derives from DataService<ReferenceEntitites>. Because it derives from DataService<ReferenceEntities>, the data service exposes the contents of the ReferenceEntitiesDB database. In the code above, I defined a ChangeInterceptor to prevent un-authenticated users from making changes to the database. Anyone can retrieve data through the service, but only authenticated users are allowed to make changes. After you expose data through a WCF Data Service, you can use jQuery to retrieve the data by performing an Ajax call. For example, I am using an Ajax call that looks something like this to retrieve the JavaScript entries from the EntryService.svc data service: $.ajax({ dataType: "json", url: “/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries”, success: function (result) { var data = callback(result["d"]); } }); Notice that you must unwrap the data using result[“d”]. After you unwrap the data, you have a JavaScript array of the entries. I’m transferring all 300+ entries from the server to the client when the application is opened for the first time. In other words, I transfer the entire database from the server to the client, once and only once, when the application is opened for the first time. The data is transferred using JSON. Here is a fragment: { "d" : [ { "__metadata": { "uri": "http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries(1)", "type": "ReferenceDBModel.Entry" }, "Id": 1, "Name": "Global", "Browsers": "ff3_6,ie8,ie9,c8,sf5,es3,es5", "Syntax": "object", "ShortDescription": "Contains global variables and functions", "FullDescription": "<p>\nThe Global object is determined by the host environment. In web browsers, the Global object is the same as the windows object.\n</p>\n<p>\nYou can use the keyword <code>this</code> to refer to the Global object when in the global context (outside of any function).\n</p>\n<p>\nThe Global object holds all global variables and functions. For example, the following code demonstrates that the global <code>movieTitle</code> variable refers to the same thing as <code>window.movieTitle</code> and <code>this.movieTitle</code>.\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar movieTitle = \"Star Wars\";\nconsole.log(movieTitle === this.movieTitle); // true\nconsole.log(movieTitle === window.movieTitle); // true\n</pre>\n", "LastUpdated": "634298578273756641", "IsDeleted": false, "OwnerId": null }, { "__metadata": { "uri": "http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries(2)", "type": "ReferenceDBModel.Entry" }, "Id": 2, "Name": "eval(string)", "Browsers": "ff3_6,ie8,ie9,c8,sf5,es3,es5", "Syntax": "function", "ShortDescription": "Evaluates and executes JavaScript code dynamically", "FullDescription": "<p>\nThe following code evaluates and executes the string \"3+5\" at runtime.\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar result = eval(\"3+5\");\nconsole.log(result); // returns 8\n</pre>\n<p>\nYou can rewrite the code above like this:\n</p>\n<pre>\nvar result;\neval(\"result = 3+5\");\nconsole.log(result);\n</pre>", "LastUpdated": "634298580913817644", "IsDeleted": false, "OwnerId": 1 } … ]} I worried about the amount of time that it would take to transfer the records. According to Google Chome, it takes about 5 seconds to retrieve all 300+ records on a broadband connection over the Internet. 5 seconds is a small price to pay to avoid performing any server fetches of the data in the future. And here are the estimated times using different types of connections using Fiddler: Notice that using a modem, it takes 33 seconds to download the database. 33 seconds is a significant chunk of time. So, I would not use the approach of transferring the entire database up front if you expect a significant portion of your website audience to connect to your website with a modem. Adding Data to HTML5 Local Storage After the JavaScript entries are retrieved from the server, the entries are stored in HTML5 local storage. Here’s the reference documentation for HTML5 storage for Internet Explorer: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197062(VS.85).aspx You access local storage by accessing the windows.localStorage object in JavaScript. This object contains key/value pairs. For example, you can use the following JavaScript code to add a new item to local storage: <script type="text/javascript"> window.localStorage.setItem("message", "Hello World!"); </script> You can use the Google Chrome Storage tab in the Developer Tools (hit CTRL-SHIFT I in Chrome) to view items added to local storage: After you add an item to local storage, you can read it at any time in the future by using the window.localStorage.getItem() method: <script type="text/javascript"> window.localStorage.setItem("message", "Hello World!"); </script> You only can add strings to local storage and not JavaScript objects such as arrays. Therefore, before adding a JavaScript object to local storage, you need to convert it into a JSON string. In the JavaScript Reference application, I use a wrapper around local storage that looks something like this: function Storage() { this.get = function (name) { return JSON.parse(window.localStorage.getItem(name)); }; this.set = function (name, value) { window.localStorage.setItem(name, JSON.stringify(value)); }; this.clear = function () { window.localStorage.clear(); }; } If you use the wrapper above, then you can add arbitrary JavaScript objects to local storage like this: var store = new Storage(); // Add array to storage var products = [ {name:"Fish", price:2.33}, {name:"Bacon", price:1.33} ]; store.set("products", products); // Retrieve items from storage var products = store.get("products"); Modern browsers support the JSON object natively. If you need the script above to work with older browsers then you should download the JSON2.js library from: https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSON-js The JSON2 library will use the native JSON object if a browser already supports JSON. Merging Server Changes with Browser Local Storage When you first open the JavaScript Reference application, the entire database of JavaScript entries is transferred from the server to the browser. Two items are added to local storage: entries and entriesLastUpdated. The first item contains the entire entries database (a big JSON string of entries). The second item, a timestamp, represents the version of the entries. Whenever you open the JavaScript Reference in the future, the entriesLastUpdated timestamp is passed to the server. Only records that have been deleted, updated, or added since entriesLastUpdated are transferred to the browser. The OData query to get the latest updates looks like this: http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries?$filter=(LastUpdated%20gt%20634301199890494792L) If you remove URL encoding, the query looks like this: http://superexpert.com/javascriptreference/Services/EntryService.svc/Entries?$filter=(LastUpdated gt 634301199890494792L) This query returns only those entries where the value of LastUpdated > 634301199890494792 (the version timestamp). The changes – new JavaScript entries, deleted entries, and updated entries – are merged with the existing entries in local storage. The JavaScript code for performing the merge is contained in the EntriesHelper.js file. The merge() method looks like this: merge: function (oldEntries, newEntries) { // concat (this performs the add) oldEntries = oldEntries || []; var mergedEntries = oldEntries.concat(newEntries); // sort this.sortByIdThenLastUpdated(mergedEntries); // prune duplicates (this performs the update) mergedEntries = this.pruneDuplicates(mergedEntries); // delete mergedEntries = this.removeIsDeleted(mergedEntries); // Sort this.sortByName(mergedEntries); return mergedEntries; }, The contents of local storage are then updated with the merged entries. I spent several hours writing the merge() method (much longer than I expected). I found two resources to be extremely useful. First, I wrote extensive unit tests for the merge() method. I wrote the unit tests using server-side JavaScript. I describe this approach to writing unit tests in this blog entry. The unit tests are included in the JavaScript Reference source code. Second, I found the following blog entry to be super useful (thanks Nick!): http://nicksnettravels.builttoroam.com/post/2010/08/03/OData-Synchronization-with-WCF-Data-Services.aspx One big challenge that I encountered involved timestamps. I originally tried to store an actual UTC time as the value of the entriesLastUpdated item. I quickly discovered that trying to work with dates in JSON turned out to be a big can of worms that I did not want to open. Next, I tried to use a SQL timestamp column. However, I learned that OData cannot handle the timestamp data type when doing a filter query. Therefore, I ended up using a bigint column in SQL and manually creating the value when a record is updated. I overrode the SaveChanges() method to look something like this: public override int SaveChanges(SaveOptions options) { var changes = this.ObjectStateManager.GetObjectStateEntries( EntityState.Modified | EntityState.Added | EntityState.Deleted); foreach (var change in changes) { var entity = change.Entity as IEntityTracking; if (entity != null) { entity.LastUpdated = DateTime.Now.Ticks; } } return base.SaveChanges(options); } Notice that I assign Date.Now.Ticks to the entity.LastUpdated property whenever an entry is modified, added, or deleted. Summary After building the JavaScript Reference application, I am convinced that HTML5 local storage can have a dramatic impact on the performance of any data-driven web application. If you are building a web application that involves extensive interaction with data then I recommend that you take advantage of this new feature included in the HTML5 standard.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 01, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, December 01, 2010Popular ReleasesUltimateJB: UltimateJB 2.02 PL3 KAKAROTO + CE-X-3.41 EvilSperm: Voici une version attendu avec impatience pour beaucoup : - La Version CEX341 pour pouvoir jouer avec des jeux demandant le firmware 3.50 ( certain ne fonctionne tous simplement pas ). - Pour l'instant le CEX341 n'est disponible qu'avec les PS3 en firmwares 3.41 !!! - La version PL3 KAKAROTO intégre ses dernières modification et intégre maintenant le firmware 3.30 !!! Conclusion : - UltimateJB CEX341 => Spoof le Firmware 3.41 en 3.50 ( facilite l'utilisation de certain jeux avec openManage...Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.2 Beta2: - Added keyboard navigation support with access keys - Shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-A are now supported(where the browser permits it) - The PopupMenuSeparator is now completely based on the PopupMenuItem class - Moved item manipulation code to a partial class in PopupMenuItemsControl.cs - Simplified the layout by removing the RootGrid element(all content is now placed in OverlayCanvas and is accessed by the new ContentRoot property) - Added properties AccessKey, AccessKeyModifier, AccessKeyElemen...EnhSim: EnhSim 2.1.1: 2.1.1This release adds in the changes for 4.03a. To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Switched Searing Flames bac...AI: Initial 0.0.1: It’s simply just one code file; it simulates AI and machine in a simulated world. The AI has a little understanding of its body machine and parts, and able to use its feet to do actions just start and stop walking. The world is all of white with nothing but just the machine on a white planet. Colors, odors and position information make no sense. I’m previous C# programmer and I’m learning F# during this project, although I’m still not a good F# programmer, in this project I learning to prog...Microsoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V1.0 - N-Layer DDD Sample App .NET 4.0: Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Expression Blend 4 SQL Server 2008 R2 Express/Standard/Enterprise Unity Application Block 2.0 - Published May 5th 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2D24F179-E0A6-49D7-89C4-5B67D939F91B&displaylang=en http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/31277 PEX & MOLES 0.94.51023.0, 29/Oct/2010 - Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools http://re...Sense/Net Enterprise Portal & ECMS: SenseNet 6.0.1 Community Edition: Sense/Net 6.0.1 Community Edition This half year we have been working quite fiercely to bring you the long-awaited release of Sense/Net 6.0. Download this Community Edition to see what we have been up to. These months we have worked on getting the WebCMS capabilities of Sense/Net 6.0 up to par. New features include: New, powerful page and portlet editing experience. HTML and CSS cleanup, new, powerful site skinning system. Upgraded, lightning-fast indexing and query via Lucene. Limita...Minecraft GPS: Minecraft GPS 1.1.1: New Features Compass! New style. Set opacity on main window to allow overlay of Minecraft. Open World in any folder. Fixes Fixed style so listbox won't grow the window size. Fixed open file dialog issue on non-vista kernel machines.DotSpatial: DotSpatial 11-28-2001: This release introduces some exciting improvements. Support for big raster, both in display and changing the scheme. Faster raster scheme creation for all rasters. Caching of the "sample" values so once obtained the raster symbolizer dialog loads faster. Reprojection supported for raster and image classes. Affine transform fully supported for images and rasters, so skewed images are now possible. Projection uses better checks when loading unprojected layers. GDAL raster support f...SuperWebSocket: SuperWebSocket(60438): It is the first release of SuperWebSocket. Because it is base on SuperSocket, most features of SuperSocket are supported in SuperWebSocket. The source code include a LiveChat demo.MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.25.7002: Fixed updater Fixed FileServe Fixed LetItBitCropper: 1.9.4: Mostly fixes for issues with a few feature requests. Fixed Issues 2730 & 3638 & 14467 11044 11447 11448 11449 14665 Implemented Features 6123 11581PFC: PFC for PB 11.5: This is just a migration from the 11.0 code. No changes have been made yet (and they are needed) for it to work properly with 11.5.PDF Rider: PDF Rider 0.5: This release does not add any new feature for pdf manipulation, but enables automatic updates checking, so it is reccomended to install it in order to stay updated with next releases. Prerequisites * Microsoft Windows Operating Systems (XP - Vista - 7) * Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 runtime * A PDF rendering software (i.e. Adobe Reader) that can be opened inside Internet Explorer. Installation instructionsChoose one of the following methods: 1. Download and run the "pdfRider0...BCLExtensions: BCL Extensions v1.0: The files associated with v1.0 of the BCL Extensions library.XamlQuery/WPF - The Write Less, Do More, WPF Library: XamlQuery-WPF v1.2 (Runtime, Source): This is the first release of popular XamlQuery library for WPF. XamlQuery has already gained recognition among Silverlight developers.Math.NET Numerics: Beta 1: First beta of Math.NET Numerics. Only contains the managed linear algebra provider. Beta 2 will include the native linear algebra providers along with better documentation and examples.Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework: Visual Studio 2010 Code Samples 2010-11-25: Code samples for Visual Studio 2010Wii Backup Fusion: Wii Backup Fusion 0.8.5 Beta: - WBFS repair (default) options fixed - Transfer to image fixed - Settings ui widget names fixed - Some little bug fixes You need to reset the settings! Delete WiiBaFu's config file or registry entries on windows: Linux: ~/.config/WiiBaFu/wiibafu.conf Windows: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WiiBaFu\wiibafu Mac OS X: ~/Library/Preferences/com.wiibafu.wiibafu.plist Caution: This is a BETA version! Errors, crashes and data loss not impossible! Use in test environments only, not on productive syste...Minemapper: Minemapper v0.1.3: Added process count and world size calculation progress to the status bar. Added View->'Status Bar' menu item to show/hide the status bar. Status bar is automatically shown when loading a world. Added a prompt, when loading a world, to use or clear cached images.Sexy Select: sexy select v0.4: Changes in v0.4 Added method : elements. This returns all the option elements that are currently added to the select list Added method : selectOption. This method accepts two values, the element to be modified and the selected state. (true/false)New ProjectsAbstract SQL: ADO.NET Sql classes wrapper; provides a clean fluent interface library that allows you to write very concise code and avoid the repetitiveness of ADO.NET. It can be used in all types of applications, even supports CLR stored procedures. It is written in C# 2.0.AI: The Artificial Intelligence program built on F#.Another .NET wrapper for the MailChimp API: A .NET wrapper for the MailChimp API 1.3 written in F# by DK.App-V Tool Suite: A collection of tools for Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V). These tools were developed at Sinclair Community College in the process of setting up and then supporting its App-V implementation.b2b: Project-01tBham.CmuCam: A library and GUI front-end for the CMUcam series of cameras for use by .NET-based applications, the GUI can also run standalone.BizTalk Deployment Tool: Yet another BizTalk Deployment Tool to make it easier for BizTalk deployment that needs to support orchestration versioning, multiple environments. Features includes but not limited to: GAC Verification, Receive Locations and Send Ports management, Orchestration States managementCertificate Request (PKCS#10) Generator: A .NET application that can create PKCS#10 Certificate Requests, either by generating a new key or reusing a preexisting one. Minimum requirement : Windows Vista and above. .NET 2.0.Cloud Billing: Cloud billing proposal.Currency Converter: Coding4Fun Windows Phone 7 Currency ConverterDiffLib: A diff implementation class library for .NET 3.5 written in C#.expression Blend 4.0 Comment Uncomment Xaml Code Extension: BlendShortCuts Extension makes it easier for blend users to comment and uncomment xaml code. you'll no longer have to insert tag  just press ALt+C and ALT+U it's developed in c# (.Net framework 4.0, microsoft expression library)Game Studio: Game Studio is an Integrated Development Environment “IDE” that helps game developers in designing their games. The software generates code for the mesh, models, pictures and sounds. It has a form designer, code editor and a special framework for the “Game Studio”.Gridify for ASP.NET MVC: Easy solution for grids on top of ASP.NET MVC Make grids from your data tables in a really lightweight manner! How lightweight? Well, exactly TWO line changes. You don't have to add new action parameters or anything. Really simple!In-House Inventory System: a normal inventory management system, normal use case and normal function.In-House Money Saver: just for school project, it may not be useful, however, it is my first project using Microsoft technology.ITICup2009: Programs used in ITICup 2009.libobs++: Implementation of a signal/slot system, created exclusively for developers that uses Visual Studio's 2010 IDE/Compiler. The classes are templated, and really easy to learn. The callbacks are fast, and type-safe.Longan ERP: Open Source Business Solutions.Lucienne - WebScripting Assignment: Lucienne - WebScripting AssignmentMercurial.Net: .NET wrapper class library for the Mercurial Distributed Version Control System (DVCS) - (http://mercurial.selenic.com/), written in C# 3.0 for the .NET 3.5 Client Profile runtime.Mini C++ UI Framework: Mini C++ UI Framework for my work.MinuRaamu: MeieRaamuMobile Device Browser File: The Mobile Browser Definition File contains definitions for individual mobile devices and browsers. At run time, ASP.NET uses the information in the request header to determine what type of device/browser has made the request.NKinect: .NET 4.0 (C++/CLI) based open source implementation of Microsoft Kinect. Currently supports CodeLaboratories NUI SDK, but will be brought to OpenKinect/libfreenect when a Windows version is stable.Oblivion Cell - Oblivion mmo project: We are working on creating a mmorpg mod/Addon for Oblivion using C# and hooking to the accual game with obse and a few other mods. We also use Cell Framework for our base server system.Optional: Optional is a library to create options and commands from command-line arguments. It uses Convention over Configuration to get out of your way. Attributes can be used to set properties which differ from the convention.Paypal adaptive payments using .NET (C#): This is a C# project to help you interface with the PayPal adaptive payments API. https://www.x.com/community/ppx/adaptive_payments. POS bd: Dynamic POS. this project is being devoloped on focused to local market only. the initial project is projected for a single company whose main business is selling lighting-bulb instruments.PowerEvents for Windows PowerShell: A Microsoft Windows PowerShell module to assist with managing permanent WMI event consumer registrations. You can use this module to register for, and respond to, system-level events available to WMI.PPL Daily Report Helper: Daily Reporting Helper Tool for Phoenix Propulsion LabsRandom Passwd Generator: This is a simple program developed in C# that generates random passwords of the specified length with the specified characters to be used. It's in beta version.SharePoint MUI Manager: The SharePoint MUI Manager allows you to translate user-specified text, such as the Title and Description of the site, throught the web interface. There is no need to download, edit and upload a RESX file. Sqlite Client for Windows Phone: Sqlite client for Windows Phone 7 . Supports transactionsTouchToolkit: A toolkit to simplify the multi-touch application development and testing complexities. It currently supports WPF and Silverlight.TSI4: Proyecto para facultad de ingenieríaVS2010 Debugger Visualizers Contrib: This project is for hosting user-contributed debugger visualizers for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.Windows Shell Framework: Windows Shell Framework is a managed wrappers for a subset of the windows shell. This Project is for of .NET Shell Namespace Extension FrameworkWork in Progress: Work in progressWPFtest: A simpel test project for experimenting with WPF.YingYangXonix: YingYangXonixZeroUnit.net: The zero dependency, zero friction, sugar free Unit Testing framework for .Net.ZXing barcode for Windows Phone: Barcode support for Windows Phone 7 using ZXing

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When is a SQL function not a function?

- by Rob Farley

Should SQL Server even have functions? (Oh yeah – this is a T-SQL Tuesday post, hosted this month by Brad Schulz) Functions serve an important part of programming, in almost any language. A function is a piece of code that is designed to return something, as opposed to a piece of code which isn’t designed to return anything (which is known as a procedure). SQL Server is no different. You can call stored procedures, even from within other stored procedures, and you can call functions and use these in other queries. Stored procedures might query something, and therefore ‘return data’, but a function in SQL is considered to have the type of the thing returned, and can be used accordingly in queries. Consider the internal GETDATE() function. SELECT GETDATE(), SomeDatetimeColumn FROM dbo.SomeTable; There’s no logical difference between the field that is being returned by the function and the field that’s being returned by the table column. Both are the datetime field – if you didn’t have inside knowledge, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell which was which. And so as developers, we find ourselves wanting to create functions that return all kinds of things – functions which look up values based on codes, functions which do string manipulation, and so on. But it’s rubbish. Ok, it’s not all rubbish, but it mostly is. And this isn’t even considering the SARGability impact. It’s far more significant than that. (When I say the SARGability aspect, I mean “because you’re unlikely to have an index on the result of some function that’s applied to a column, so try to invert the function and query the column in an unchanged manner”) I’m going to consider the three main types of user-defined functions in SQL Server: Scalar Inline Table-Valued Multi-statement Table-Valued I could also look at user-defined CLR functions, including aggregate functions, but not today. I figure that most people don’t tend to get around to doing CLR functions, and I’m going to focus on the T-SQL-based user-defined functions. Most people split these types of function up into two types. So do I. Except that most people pick them based on ‘scalar or table-valued’. I’d rather go with ‘inline or not’. If it’s not inline, it’s rubbish. It really is. Let’s start by considering the two kinds of table-valued function, and compare them. These functions are going to return the sales for a particular salesperson in a particular year, from the AdventureWorks database. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_inline(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS TABLE AS RETURN ( SELECT e.LoginID as EmployeeLogin, o.OrderDate, o.SalesOrderID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101') AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ) ; GO CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_multi(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS @results TABLE ( EmployeeLogin nvarchar(512), OrderDate datetime, SalesOrderID int ) AS BEGIN INSERT @results (EmployeeLogin, OrderDate, SalesOrderID) SELECT e.LoginID, o.OrderDate, o.SalesOrderID FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101') AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ; RETURN END ; GO You’ll notice that I’m being nice and responsible with the use of the DATEADD function, so that I have SARGability on the OrderDate filter. Regular readers will be hoping I’ll show what’s going on in the execution plans here. Here I’ve run two SELECT * queries with the “Show Actual Execution Plan” option turned on. Notice that the ‘Query cost’ of the multi-statement version is just 2% of the ‘Batch cost’. But also notice there’s trickery going on. And it’s nothing to do with that extra index that I have on the OrderDate column. Trickery. Look at it – clearly, the first plan is showing us what’s going on inside the function, but the second one isn’t. The second one is blindly running the function, and then scanning the results. There’s a Sequence operator which is calling the TVF operator, and then calling a Table Scan to get the results of that function for the SELECT operator. But surely it still has to do all the work that the first one is doing... To see what’s actually going on, let’s look at the Estimated plan. Now, we see the same plans (almost) that we saw in the Actuals, but we have an extra one – the one that was used for the TVF. Here’s where we see the inner workings of it. You’ll probably recognise the right-hand side of the TVF’s plan as looking very similar to the first plan – but it’s now being called by a stack of other operators, including an INSERT statement to be able to populate the table variable that the multi-statement TVF requires. And the cost of the TVF is 57% of the batch! But it gets worse. Let’s consider what happens if we don’t need all the columns. We’ll leave out the EmployeeLogin column. Here, we see that the inline function call has been simplified down. It doesn’t need the Employee table. The join is redundant and has been eliminated from the plan, making it even cheaper. But the multi-statement plan runs the whole thing as before, only removing the extra column when the Table Scan is performed. A multi-statement function is a lot more powerful than an inline one. An inline function can only be the result of a single sub-query. It’s essentially the same as a parameterised view, because views demonstrate this same behaviour of extracting the definition of the view and using it in the outer query. A multi-statement function is clearly more powerful because it can contain far more complex logic. But a multi-statement function isn’t really a function at all. It’s a stored procedure. It’s wrapped up like a function, but behaves like a stored procedure. It would be completely unreasonable to expect that a stored procedure could be simplified down to recognise that not all the columns might be needed, but yet this is part of the pain associated with this procedural function situation. The biggest clue that a multi-statement function is more like a stored procedure than a function is the “BEGIN” and “END” statements that surround the code. If you try to create a multi-statement function without these statements, you’ll get an error – they are very much required. When I used to present on this kind of thing, I even used to call it “The Dangers of BEGIN and END”, and yes, I’ve written about this type of thing before in a similarly-named post over at my old blog. Now how about scalar functions... Suppose we wanted a scalar function to return the count of these. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_scalar(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS int AS BEGIN RETURN ( SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101') AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ); END ; GO Notice the evil words? They’re required. Try to remove them, you just get an error. That’s right – any scalar function is procedural, despite the fact that you wrap up a sub-query inside that RETURN statement. It’s as ugly as anything. Hopefully this will change in future versions. Let’s have a look at how this is reflected in an execution plan. Here’s a query, its Actual plan, and its Estimated plan: SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, dbo.FetchSales_scalar(p.SalesPersonID, y.year) AS NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID; We see here that the cost of the scalar function is about twice that of the outer query. Nicely, the query optimizer has worked out that it doesn’t need the Employee table, but that’s a bit of a red herring here. There’s actually something way more significant going on. If I look at the properties of that UDF operator, it tells me that the Estimated Subtree Cost is 0.337999. If I just run the query SELECT dbo.FetchSales_scalar(281,2003); we see that the UDF cost is still unchanged. You see, this 0.0337999 is the cost of running the scalar function ONCE. But when we ran that query with the CROSS JOIN in it, we returned quite a few rows. 68 in fact. Could’ve been a lot more, if we’d had more salespeople or more years. And so we come to the biggest problem. This procedure (I don’t want to call it a function) is getting called 68 times – each one between twice as expensive as the outer query. And because it’s calling it in a separate context, there is even more overhead that I haven’t considered here. The cheek of it, to say that the Compute Scalar operator here costs 0%! I know a number of IT projects that could’ve used that kind of costing method, but that’s another story that I’m not going to go into here. Let’s look at a better way. Suppose our scalar function had been implemented as an inline one. Then it could have been expanded out like a sub-query. It could’ve run something like this: SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, (SELECT COUNT(*) FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID WHERE o.SalesPersonID = p.SalesPersonID AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,y.year-2000,'20000101') AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,y.year-2000+1,'20000101') ) AS NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID; Don’t worry too much about the Scan of the SalesOrderHeader underneath a Nested Loop. If you remember from plenty of other posts on the matter, execution plans don’t push the data through. That Scan only runs once. The Index Spool sucks the data out of it and populates a structure that is used to feed the Stream Aggregate. The Index Spool operator gets called 68 times, but the Scan only once (the Number of Executions property demonstrates this). Here, the Query Optimizer has a full picture of what’s being asked, and can make the appropriate decision about how it accesses the data. It can simplify it down properly. To get this kind of behaviour from a function, we need it to be inline. But without inline scalar functions, we need to make our function be table-valued. Luckily, that’s ok. CREATE FUNCTION dbo.FetchSales_inline2(@salespersonid int, @orderyear int) RETURNS table AS RETURN (SELECT COUNT(*) as NumSales FROM Sales.SalesOrderHeader AS o LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = o.SalesPersonID WHERE o.SalesPersonID = @salespersonid AND o.OrderDate >= DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000,'20000101') AND o.OrderDate < DATEADD(year,@orderyear-2000+1,'20000101') ); GO But we can’t use this as a scalar. Instead, we need to use it with the APPLY operator. SELECT e.LoginID, y.year, n.NumSales FROM (VALUES (2001),(2002),(2003),(2004)) AS y (year) CROSS JOIN Sales.SalesPerson AS p LEFT JOIN HumanResources.Employee AS e ON e.EmployeeID = p.SalesPersonID OUTER APPLY dbo.FetchSales_inline2(p.SalesPersonID, y.year) AS n; And now, we get the plan that we want for this query. All we’ve done is tell the function that it’s returning a table instead of a single value, and removed the BEGIN and END statements. We’ve had to name the column being returned, but what we’ve gained is an actual inline simplifiable function. And if we wanted it to return multiple columns, it could do that too. I really consider this function to be superior to the scalar function in every way. It does need to be handled differently in the outer query, but in many ways it’s a more elegant method there too. The function calls can be put amongst the FROM clause, where they can then be used in the WHERE or GROUP BY clauses without fear of calling the function multiple times (another horrible side effect of functions). So please. If you see BEGIN and END in a function, remember it’s not really a function, it’s a procedure. And then fix it. @rob_farley

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Django doesn't refresh my request object when reloading the current page.

- by Boris Rusev

I have a Django web site which I want ot be viewable in different languages. Until this morning everything was working fine. Here is the deal. I go to my say About Us page and it is in English. Below it there is the change language button and when I press it everything "magically" translates to Bulgarian just the way I want it. On the other hand I have a JS menu from which the user is able to browse through the products. I click on 'T-Shirt' then a sub-menu opens bellow the previously pressed containing different categories - Men, Women, Children. The link guides me to a page where the exact clothes I have requested are listed. BUT... When I try to change the language THEN, nothing happens. I go to the Abouts Page, change the language from there, return to the clothes catalog and the language is changed... I will no paste some code. This is my change button code: function changeLanguage() { if (getCookie('language') == 'EN') { setCookie("language", 'BG'); } else { setCookie("language", 'EN'); } window.location.reload(); } These are my URL patterns: urlpatterns = patterns('', # Example: # (r'^enter_clothing/', include('enter_clothing.foo.urls')), # Uncomment the admin/doc line below and add 'django.contrib.admindocs' # to INSTALLED_APPS to enable admin documentation: # (r'^admin/doc/', include('django.contrib.admindocs.urls')), # Uncomment the next line to enable the admin: (r'^site_media/(?P<path>.*)$', 'django.views.static.serve', {'document_root': '/home/boris/Projects/enter_clothing/templates/media', 'show_indexes': True}), (r'^$', 'enter_clothing.clothes_app.views.index'), (r'^home', 'enter_clothing.clothes_app.views.home'), (r'^products', 'enter_clothing.clothes_app.views.products'), (r'^orders', 'enter_clothing.clothes_app.views.orders'), (r'^aboutUs', 'enter_clothing.clothes_app.views.aboutUs'), (r'^contactUs', 'enter_clothing.clothes_app.views.contactUs'), (r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)), (r'^(\w+)/(\w+)/page=(\d+)', 'enter_clothing.clothes_app.views.displayClothes'), ) My About Us page: @base def aboutUs(request): return """<b>%s</b>""" % getTranslation("About Us Text", request.COOKIES['language']) The @base method: def base(myfunc): def inner_func(*args, **kwargs): try: args[0].COOKIES['language'] except: args[0].COOKIES['language'] = 'BG' resetGlobalVariables() initCollections(args[0]) categoriesByCollection = dict((collection, getCategoriesFromCollection(args[0], collection)) for collection in collections) if args[0].COOKIES['language'] == 'BG': for k, v in categoriesByCollection.iteritems(): categoriesByCollection[k] = reduce(lambda a,b: a+b, map(lambda x: """<li><a href="/%s/%s/page=1">%s</a></li>""" % (translateCategory(args[0], x), translateCollection(args[0], k), str(x)), v), "") else: for k, v in categoriesByCollection.iteritems(): categoriesByCollection[k] = reduce(lambda a,b: a+b, map(lambda x: """<li><a href="/%s/%s/page=1">%s</a></li>""" % (str(x), str(k), str(x)), v), "") contents = myfunc(*args, **kwargs) return render_to_response('index.html', {'title': title, 'categoriesByCollection': categoriesByCollection.iteritems(), 'keys': enumerate(keys), 'values': enumerate(values), 'contents': contents, 'btnHome':getTranslation("Home Button", args[0].COOKIES['language']), 'btnProducts':getTranslation("Products Button", args[0].COOKIES['language']), 'btnOrders':getTranslation("Orders Button", args[0].COOKIES['language']), 'btnAboutUs':getTranslation("About Us Button", args[0].COOKIES['language']), 'btnContacts':getTranslation("Contact Us Button", args[0].COOKIES['language']), 'btnChangeLanguage':getTranslation("Button Change Language", args[0].COOKIES['language'])}) return inner_func And the catalog page: @base def displayClothes(request, category, collection, page): clothesToDisplay = getClothesFromCollectionAndCategory(request, category, collection) contents = "" pageCount = len(clothesToDisplay) / ( rowCount * columnCount) + 1 matrixSize = rowCount * columnCount currentPage = str(page).replace("page=", "") currentPage = int(currentPage) - 1 #raise Exception(request) # this is for the clothes layout for x in range(currentPage * matrixSize, matrixSize * (currentPage + 1)): if x < len(clothesToDisplay): if request.COOKIES['language'] == 'EN': contents += """<div class="clothes">%s</div>""" % clothesToDisplay[x].getEnglishHTML() else: contents += """<div class="clothes">%s</div>""" % clothesToDisplay[x].getBulgarianHTML() if (x + 1) % columnCount == 0: contents += """<div class="clear"></div>""" contents += """<div class="clear"></div>""" # this is for the page links if pageCount > 1: for x in range(0, pageCount): if x == currentPage: contents += """<a href="/%s/%s/page=%s"><span style="font-size: 20pt; color: black;">%s</span></a>""" % (category, collection, x + 1, x + 1) else: contents += """<a href="/%s/%s/page=%s"><span style="font-size: 20pt; color: blue;">%s</span></a>""" % (category, collection, x + 1, x + 1) return """%s""" % (contents) Let me explain that you needn't be alarmed by the large quantities of code I have posted. You don't have to understand it or even look at all of it. I've published it just in case because I really can't understand the origins of the bug. Now this is how I have narrowed the problem. I am debuging with "raise Exception(request)" every time I want to know what's inside my request object. When I place this in my aboutUs method, the language cookie value changes every time I press the language button. But NOT when I am in the displayClothes method. There the language stays the same. Also I tried putting the exception line in the beginning of the @base method. It turns out the situation there is exactly the same. When I am in my About Us page and click on the button, the language in my request object changes, but when I press the button while in the catalog page it remains unchanged. That is all I could find, and I have no idea as to how Django distinguishes my pages and in what way. P.S. The JavaScript I think works perfectly, I have tested it in multiple ways. Thank you, I hope some of you will read this enormous post, and don't hesitate to ask for more code excerpts.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 07, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, December 07, 2010Popular ReleasesMy Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).Aura: Aura Preview 1: Rewritten from scratch. This release supports getting color only from icon of foreground window.myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. Added Portuguese version You can now Hide details panel Add support for FLAC tags You can now imports books from BibTex Xml file BugFixingmytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta: mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta web Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.4, MVC3 RC WARNING For run and debug mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src download and ...Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.3 Beta: - Added keyboard navigation support with access keys - Shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-A are now supported(where the browser permits it) - The PopupMenuSeparator is now completely based on the PopupMenuItem class - Moved item manipulation code to a partial class in PopupMenuItemsControl.cs - Moved menu management and keyboard navigation code to the new PopupMenuManager class - Simplified the layout by removing the RootGrid element(all content is now placed in OverlayCanvas and is accessed by the new ...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.0: First public releaseMiniTwitter: 1.62: MiniTwitter 1.62 ???? ?? ??????????????????????????????????????? 140 ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? ?? ??????????????????????????????????Phalanger - The PHP Language Compiler for the .NET Framework: 2.0 (December 2010): The release is targetted for stable daily use. With improved performance and enhanced compatibility with several latest PHP open source applications; it makes this release perfect replacement of your old PHP runtime. Changes made within this release include following and much more: Performance improvements based on real-world applications experience. We determined biggest bottlenecks and we found and removed overheads causing performance problems in many PHP applications. Reimplemented nat...Chronos WPF: Chronos v2.0 Beta 3: Release notes: Updated introduction document. Updated Visual Studio 2010 Extension (vsix) package. Added horizontal scrolling to the main window TaskBar. Added new styles for ListView, ListViewItem, GridViewColumnHeader, ... Added a new WindowViewModel class (allowing to fetch data). Added a new Navigate method (with several overloads) to the NavigationViewModel class (protected). Reimplemented Task usage for the WorkspaceViewModel.OnDelete method. Removed the reflection effect...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.26.7024: Fixed updater; Fixed MegauploadDJ - jQuery WebControls for ASP.NET: DJ 1.2: What is new? Update to support jQuery 1.4.2 Update to support jQuery ui 1.8.6 Update to Visual Studio 2010 New WebControls with samples added Autocomplete WebControl Button WebControl ToggleButt WebControl The example web site is including in source code project.LateBindingApi.Excel: LateBindingApi.Excel Release 0.7g: Unterschiede zur Vorgängerversion: - Zusätzliche Interior Properties - Group / Ungroup Methoden für Range - Bugfix COM Reference Handling für Application Objekt in einigen Klassen Release+Samples V0.7g: - Enthält Laufzeit DLL und Beispielprojekte Beispielprojekte: COMAddinExample - Demonstriert ein versionslos angebundenes COMAddin Example01 - Background Colors und Borders für Cells Example02 - Font Attributes undAlignment für Cells Example03 - Numberformats Example04 - Shapes, WordArts, P...ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit: November 2010 - v2.1: ESRI ArcGIS Silverlight Toolkit v2.1 Added Windows Phone 7 build. New controls added: InfoWindow ChildPage (Windows Phone 7 only) See what's new here full details for : http://help.arcgis.com/en/webapi/silverlight/help/#/What_s_new_in_2_1/016600000025000000/ Note: Requires Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4.0 and Silverlight 4.0.ASP .NET MVC CMS (Content Management System): Atomic CMS 2.1.1: Atomic CMS 2.1.1 release notes Atomic CMS installation guide Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts v3.6.5 beta Released: Hi, Today we are releasing Visifire 3.6.5 beta with the following new feature: New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. Also this release includes few bug fixes: AxisXLabel label were getting clipped if angle was set for AxisLabels and ScrollingEnabled was not set in Chart. If LabelStyle property was set as 'Inside', size of the Pie was not proper. Yo...AI: Initial 0.0.1: It’s simply just one code file; it simulates AI and machine in a simulated world. The AI has a little understanding of its body machine and parts, and able to use its feet to do actions just start and stop walking. The world is all of white with nothing but just the machine on a white planet. Colors, odors and position information make no sense. I’m previous C# programmer and I’m learning F# during this project, although I’m still not a good F# programmer, in this project I learning to prog...NKinect: NKinect Preview: Build features: Accelerometer reading Motor serial number property Realtime image update Realtime depth calculation Export to PLY (On demand) Control motor LED Control Kinect tiltMicrosoft - Domain Oriented N-Layered .NET 4.0 App Sample (Microsoft Spain): V1.0 - N-Layer DDD Sample App .NET 4.0: Required Software (Microsoft Base Software needed for Development environment) Visual Studio 2010 RTM & .NET 4.0 RTM (Final Versions) Expression Blend 4 SQL Server 2008 R2 Express/Standard/Enterprise Unity Application Block 2.0 - Published May 5th 2010 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=2D24F179-E0A6-49D7-89C4-5B67D939F91B&displaylang=en http://unity.codeplex.com/releases/view/31277 PEX & MOLES 0.94.51023.0, 29/Oct/2010 - Visual Studio 2010 Power Tools http://re...New ProjectsAcorn: Little acorns lead to mighty oaks.Algorithmia: Algorithm and data-structure library for .NET 3.5 and up. Algorithmia contains sophisticated algorithms and data-structures like graphs, priority queues, command, undo-redo and more. Base Station Verification system: Base Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station Verification systemBase Station VerificatioBlueAd: Simple app to broadcast messages to bluetooth enabled devicesBuiltWith Fiddler Integration: Project Description BuiltWithFiddler adds BuildWith functionality to the HTTP Debugging Proxy Fiddler. It helps to determine the underlying technologies used in HTTP responses. www.builtwith.com www.fiddler2.com It is written in C# by Andy at Bare Web BVCMS.app: The Bellevue Church Management System is a complete Web-based application for managing your church. This iPhone app provides tools to connect to bvcms so that users can search, check-in members, and other actions.coffeeGreet: CoffeeGreet is a WordPress plug-in that will greet your visitors with coffee depending on the hour of the day, by displaying images using the Flickr API.DCEL data structure: Doubly-connected edge list data structure implementation in C#.El Bruno ClickOnce Demo: Demo de ClickOnce en CodePlexFiren's Laboratory: NothingFunCam: A fun application for playing with your webcam. Experiment with different overlays and exciting effects. Save the images when you want, or on a timer. Great fun for parties! (WPF/C#) Uses WPF Media Kit for webcam integration, and Shazzam for the great shader effects.GammaJul LgLcd: A .NET wrapper around the Logitech SDK for G15/G19 keyboard screens. Supports raw byte sending, GDI+ drawing and rendering WPF elements onto the screen.Getting Started CodePlex: This is a demo for using TFS in CodePlexGPUG (Dynamics GP User Group): The location for GPUG members to share code.HPMC: DemoImageOfMeLocator: Team Boarders Platform: WordPress Objectives: 1. Create a plugin for WordPress. 2. Create a plugin that allows users to browse images uploaded on their Flickr Account and use them as overlays for store locations on a large map. 3. Create a plugjDepot: jQuery ajax, jquery UI and ASP.NET MVC based online store application. This software will let a user manage their product inventory by exposiing CRUD operations through the UI. Customers can buy these products and track each shipment separately. It is developed in C#.JQuery Cycle Carousel for DotNetNuke®: DNN Module JQuery Cycle Carousel This module will show images as a carousel using the cycle JQuery plugin. You can easyly change Cycle effect and other settings in the module.Local Movie DB in C#: C# WPF project. Will create local movie database where users can create their own DB of the movies they own/seen/liked ... etcLocation Framework for Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure: A framework to build location based applications with Windows Phone 7 and Windows Azure.OraLibs: Collection of useful PL/SQL procedures, which contain methods for working with arrays, strings, numbers, dates.Phyo: License managementRepositório de Monografias: O Repositório de Monografias terá como função: - Salvar em um repositório todas as monografias postadas no período pelos os alunos da FACISA/FCM/ESAC. - O administrador do sistema, fará uma avaliação de acordo com ABNT e retornará para o aluno as nescessárias correções.Secure SharePoint Silverlight Web Part - Silverlight Security & Auditing: The Secure Silverlight WebPart provides both builtin security using default SharePoint security mechanisms as well as site collection specific auditing to record an event a Silverlight file is newly hosted in the SharePoint environment. SilverlightColorPicker: Photoshop like ColorPicker built in silverlight from scratchSparrow.Net Connect: This is a passport system.Sparrow.NET TaskMe: TaskMe is a project management web application.Written using Sparrow.Net frameworkSQLiteWrapper: A light c# wrapper around the sqlite library's functionsSuperMarioBros.Net: A .Net Super Mario Bros clon.Virtualizing Tree View: Tree View for large amount of itemsWindows Forms GUI based Trace Listener: Gives a simple UI based Trace Listener to debug / Trace information . No need to look at EventLog / Xml file etc. This code Library helps you View the Trace and debug entries. Can plug in to your WinForms App as well.WP Socially Related: Automatically include related posts from Twitter, WordPress.com and Bing Search into each of your blog posts

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Event Handlers Not Getting Called? - wxWidgets & C++

- by Alex

Hello all, I'm working on a program for my C++ programming class, using wxWidgets. I'm having a huge problem in that my event handlers (I assume) are not getting called, because when I click on the button to trigger the event, nothing happens. My question is: Can you help me find the problem and explain why they would not be getting called? The event handlers OnAbout and OnQuit are working, just not OnCompute or OnClear. I'm really frustrated as I can't figure this out. Thanks a bunch in advance! #include "wx/wx.h" #include "time.h" #include <string> using std::string; // create object of Time class Time first; class App: public wxApp { virtual bool OnInit(); }; class MainPanel : public wxPanel { public: // Constructor for panel class // Constructs my panel class // Params - wxWindow pointer // no return type // pre-conditions: none // post-conditions: none MainPanel(wxWindow* parent); // OnCompute is the event handler for the Compute button // params - none // preconditions - none // postconditions - tasks will have been carried otu successfully // returns void void OnCompute(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)); // OnClear is the event handler for the Clear button // params - none // preconditions - none // postconditions - all text areas will be cleared of data // returns void void OnClear(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)); // Destructor for panel class // params none // preconditions - none // postconditions - none // no return type ~MainPanel( ); private: wxStaticText *startLabel; wxStaticText *endLabel; wxStaticText *pCLabel; wxStaticText *newEndLabel; wxTextCtrl *start; wxTextCtrl *end; wxTextCtrl *pC; wxTextCtrl *newEnd; wxButton *compute; wxButton *clear; DECLARE_EVENT_TABLE() }; class MainFrame: public wxFrame { private: wxPanel *mainPanel; public: MainFrame(const wxString& title, const wxPoint& pos, const wxSize& size); void OnQuit(wxCommandEvent& event); void OnAbout(wxCommandEvent& event); ~MainFrame(); DECLARE_EVENT_TABLE() }; enum { ID_Quit = 1, ID_About, BUTTON_COMPUTE = 100, BUTTON_CLEAR = 200 }; IMPLEMENT_APP(App) BEGIN_EVENT_TABLE(MainFrame, wxFrame) EVT_MENU(ID_Quit, MainFrame::OnQuit) EVT_MENU(ID_About, MainFrame::OnAbout) END_EVENT_TABLE() BEGIN_EVENT_TABLE(MainPanel, wxPanel) EVT_MENU(BUTTON_COMPUTE, MainPanel::OnCompute) EVT_MENU(BUTTON_CLEAR, MainPanel::OnClear) END_EVENT_TABLE() bool App::OnInit() { MainFrame *frame = new MainFrame( _("Good Guys Delivery Time Calculator"), wxPoint(50, 50), wxSize(450,340) ); frame->Show(true); SetTopWindow(frame); return true; } MainPanel::MainPanel(wxWindow* parent) : wxPanel(parent) { startLabel = new wxStaticText(this, -1, "Start Time:", wxPoint(75, 35)); start = new wxTextCtrl(this, -1, "", wxPoint(135, 35), wxSize(40, 21)); endLabel = new wxStaticText(this, -1, "End Time:", wxPoint(200, 35)); end = new wxTextCtrl(this, -1, "", wxPoint(260, 35), wxSize(40, 21)); pCLabel = new wxStaticText(this, -1, "Percent Change:", wxPoint(170, 85)); pC = new wxTextCtrl(this, -1, "", wxPoint(260, 85), wxSize(40, 21)); newEndLabel = new wxStaticText(this, -1, "New End Time:", wxPoint(180, 130)); newEnd = new wxTextCtrl(this, -1, "", wxPoint(260, 130), wxSize(40, 21)); compute = new wxButton(this, BUTTON_COMPUTE, "Compute", wxPoint(135, 185), wxSize(75, 35)); clear = new wxButton(this, BUTTON_CLEAR, "Clear", wxPoint(230, 185), wxSize(75, 35)); } MainPanel::~MainPanel() {} MainFrame::MainFrame(const wxString& title, const wxPoint& pos, const wxSize& size) : wxFrame( NULL, -1, title, pos, size ) { mainPanel = new MainPanel(this); wxMenu *menuFile = new wxMenu; menuFile->Append( ID_About, _("&About...") ); menuFile->AppendSeparator(); menuFile->Append( ID_Quit, _("E&xit") ); wxMenuBar *menuBar = new wxMenuBar; menuBar->Append( menuFile, _("&File") ); SetMenuBar( menuBar ); CreateStatusBar(); SetStatusText( _("Hi") ); } MainFrame::~MainFrame() {} void MainFrame::OnQuit(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)) { Close(TRUE); } void MainFrame::OnAbout(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)) { wxMessageBox( _("Alex Olson\nProject 11"), _("About"), wxOK | wxICON_INFORMATION, this); } void MainPanel::OnCompute(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)) { int startT; int endT; int newEndT; double tD; wxString startTString = start->GetValue(); wxString endTString = end->GetValue(); startT = wxAtoi(startTString); endT = wxAtoi(endTString); pC->GetValue().ToDouble(&tD); first.SetStartTime(startT); first.SetEndTime(endT); first.SetTimeDiff(tD); try { first.ValidateData(); newEndT = first.ComputeEndTime(); *newEnd << newEndT; } catch (BaseException& e) { wxMessageBox(_(e.GetMessage()), _("Something Went Wrong!"), wxOK | wxICON_INFORMATION, this); } } void MainPanel::OnClear(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)) { start->Clear(); end->Clear(); pC->Clear(); newEnd->Clear(); }

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eBooks on iPad vs. Kindle: More Debate than Smackdown

- by andrewbrust

When the iPad was presented at its San Francisco launch event on January 28th, Steve Jobs spent a significant amount of time explaining how well the device would serve as an eBook reader. He showed the iBooks reader application and iBookstore and laid down the gauntlet before Amazon and its beloved Kindle device. Almost immediately afterwards, criticism came rushing forth that the iPad could never beat the Kindle for book reading. The curious part of that criticism is that virtually no one offering it had actually used the iPad yet. A few weeks later, on April 3rd, the iPad was released for sale in the United States. I bought one on that day and in the few additional weeks that have elapsed, I’ve given quite a workout to most of its capabilities, including its eBook features. I’ve also spent some time with the Kindle, albeit a first-generation model, to see how it actually compares to the iPad. I had some expectations going in, but I came away with conclusions about each device that were more scenario-based than absolute. I present my findings to you here. Vital Statistics Let’s start with an inventory of each device’s underlying technology. The iPad has a color, backlit LCD screen and an on-screen keyboard. It has a battery which, on a full charge, lasts anywhere from 6-10 hours. The Kindle offers a monochrome, reflective E Ink display, a physical keyboard and a battery that on my first gen loaner unit can go up to a week between charges (Amazon claims the battery on the Kindle 2 can last up to 2 weeks on a single charge). The Kindle connects to Amazon’s Kindle Store using a 3G modem (the technology and network vary depending on the model) that incurs no airtime service charges whatsoever. The iPad units that are on-sale today work over WiFi only. 3G-equipped models will be on sale shortly and will command a $130 premium over their WiFi-only counterparts. 3G service on the iPad, in the U.S. from AT&T, will be fee-based, with a 250MB plan at $14.99 per month and an unlimited plan at $29.99. No contract is required for 3G service. All these tech specs aside, I think a more useful observation is that the iPad is a multi-purpose Internet-connected entertainment device, while the Kindle is a dedicated reading device. The question is whether those differences in design and intended use create a clear-cut winner for reading electronic publications. Let’s take a look at each device, in isolation, now. Kindle To me, what’s most innovative about the Kindle is its E Ink display. E Ink really looks like ink on a sheet of paper. It requires no backlight, it’s fully visible in direct sunlight and it causes almost none of the eyestrain that LCD-based computer display technology (like that used on the iPad) does. It’s really versatile in an all-around way. Forgive me if this sounds precious, but reading on it is really a joy. In fact, it’s a genuinely relaxing experience. Through the Kindle Store, Amazon allows users to download books (including audio books), magazines, newspapers and blog feeds. Books and magazines can be purchased either on a single-issue basis or as an annual subscription. Books, of course, are purchased singly. Oddly, blogs are not free, but instead carry a monthly subscription fee, typically $1.99. To me this is ludicrous, but I suppose the free 3G service is partially to blame. Books and magazine issues download quickly. Magazine and blog subscriptions cause new issues or posts to be pushed to your device on an automated basis. Available blogs include 9000-odd feeds that Amazon offers on the Kindle Store; unless I missed something, arbitrary RSS feeds are not supported (though there are third party workarounds to this limitation). The shopping experience is integrated well, has an huge selection, and offers certain graphical perks. For example, magazine and newspaper logos are displayed in menus, and book cover thumbnails appear as well. A simple search mechanism is provided and text entry through the physical keyboard is relatively painless. It’s very easy and straightforward to enter the store, find something you like and start reading it quickly. If you know what you’re looking for, it’s even faster. Given Kindle’s high portability, very reliable battery, instant-on capability and highly integrated content acquisition, it makes reading on whim, and in random spurts of downtime, very attractive. The Kindle’s home screen lists all of your publications, and easily lets you select one, then start reading it. Once opened, publications display in crisp, attractive text that is adjustable in size. “Turning” pages is achieved through buttons dedicated to the task. Notes can be recorded, bookmarks can be saved and pages can be saved as clippings. I am not an avid book reader, and yet I found the Kindle made it really fun, convenient and soothing to read. There’s something about the easy access to the material and the simplicity of the display that makes the Kindle seduce you into chilling out and reading page after page. On the other hand, the Kindle has an awkward navigation interface. While menus are displayed clearly on the screen, the method of selecting menu items is tricky: alongside the right-hand edge of the main display is a thin column that acts as a second display. It has a white background, and a scrollable silver cursor that is moved up or down through the use of the device’s scrollwheel. Picking a menu item on the main display involves scrolling the silver cursor to a position parallel to that menu item and pushing the scrollwheel in. This navigation technique creates a disconnect, literally. You don’t really click on a selection so much as you gesture toward it. I got used to this technique quickly, but I didn’t love it. It definitely created a kind of anxiety in me, making me feel the need to speed through menus and get to my destination document quickly. Once there, I could calm down and relax. Books are great on the Kindle. Magazines and newspapers much less so. I found the rendering of photographs, and even illustrations, to be unacceptably crude. For this reason, I expect that reading textbooks on the Kindle may leave students wanting. I found that the original flow and layout of any publication was sacrificed on the Kindle. In effect, browsing a magazine or newspaper was almost impossible. Reading the text of individual articles was enjoyable, but having to read this way made the whole experience much more “a la carte” than cohesive and thematic between articles. I imagine that for academic journals this is ideal, but for consumer publications it imposes a stripped-down, low-fidelity experience that evokes a sense of deprivation. In general, the Kindle is great for reading text. For just about anything else, especially activity that involves exploratory browsing, meandering and short-attention-span reading, it presents a real barrier to entry and adoption. Avid book readers will enjoy the Kindle (if they’re not already). It’s a great device for losing oneself in a book over long sittings. Multitaskers who are more interested in periodicals, be they online or off, will like it much less, as they will find compromise, and even sacrifice, to be palpable. iPad The iPad is a very different device from the Kindle. While the Kindle is oriented to pages of text, the iPad orbits around applications and their interfaces. Be it the pinch and zoom experience in the browser, the rich media features that augment content on news and weather sites, or the ability to interact with social networking services like Twitter, the iPad is versatile. While it shares a slate-like form factor with the Kindle, it’s effectively an elegant personal computer. One of its many features is the iBook application and integration of the iBookstore. But it’s a multi-purpose device. That turns out to be good and bad, depending on what you’re reading. The iBookstore is great for browsing. It’s color, rich animation-laden user interface make it possible to shop for books, rather than merely search and acquire them. Unfortunately, its selection is rather sparse at the moment. If you’re looking for a New York Times bestseller, or other popular titles, you should be OK. If you want to read something more specialized, it’s much harder. Unlike the awkward navigation interface of the Kindle, the iPad offers a nearly flawless touch-screen interface that seduces the user into tinkering and kibitzing every bit as much as the Kindle lulls you into a deep, concentrated read. It’s a dynamic and interactive device, whereas the Kindle is static and passive. The iBook reader is slick and fun. Use the iPad in landscape mode and you can read the book in 2-up (left/right 2-page) display; use it in portrait mode and you can read one page at a time. Rather than clicking a hardware button to turn pages, you simply drag and wipe from right-to-left to flip the single or right-hand page. The page actually travels through an animated path as it would in a physical book. The intuitiveness of the interface is uncanny. The reader also accommodates saving of bookmarks, searching of the text, and the ability to highlight a word and look it up in a dictionary. Pages display brightly and clearly. They’re easy to read. But the backlight and the glare made me less comfortable than I was with the Kindle. The knowledge that completely different applications (including the Web and email and Twitter) were just a few taps away made me antsy and very tempted to task-switch. The knowledge that battery life is an issue created subtle discomfort. If the Kindle makes you feel like you’re in a library reading room, then the iPad makes you feel, at best, like you’re under fluorescent lights at a Barnes and Noble or Borders store. If you’re lucky, you’d be on a couch or at a reading table in the store, but you might also be standing up, in the aisles. Clearly, I didn’t find this conducive to focused and sustained reading. But that may have more to do with my own tendency to read periodicals far more than books, and my neurotic . And, truth be known, the book reading experience, when not explicitly compared to Kindle’s, was still pleasant. It is also important to point out that Kindle Store-sourced books can be read on the iPad through a Kindle reader application, from Amazon, specific to the device. This offered a less rich experience than the iBooks reader, but it was completely adequate. Despite the Kindle brand of the reader, however, it offered little in terms of simulating the reading experience on its namesake device. When it comes to periodicals, the iPad wins hands down. Magazines, even if merely scanned images of their print editions, read on the iPad in a way that felt similar to reading hard copy. The full color display, touch navigation and even the ability to render advertisements in their full glory makes the iPad a great way to read through any piece of work that is measured in pages, rather than chapters. There are many ways to get magazines and newspapers onto the iPad, including the Zinio reader, and publication-specific applications like the Wall Street Journal’s and Popular Science’s. The New York Times’ free Editors’ Choice application offers a Times Reader-like interface to a subset of the Gray Lady’s daily content. The completely Web-based but iPad-optimized Times Skimmer site (at www.nytimes.com/timesskimmer) works well too. Even conventional Web sites themselves can be read much like magazines, given the iPad’s ability to zoom in on the text and crop out advertisements on the margins. While the Kindle does have an experimental Web browser, it reminded me a lot of early mobile phone browsers, only in a larger size. For text-heavy sites with simple layout, it works fine. For just about anything else, it becomes more trouble than it’s worth. And given the way magazine articles make me think of things I want to look up online, I think that’s a real liability for the Kindle. Summing Up What I came to realize is that the Kindle isn’t so much a computer or even an Internet device as it is a printer. While it doesn’t use physical paper, it still renders its content a page at a time, just like a laser printer does, and its output appears strikingly similar. You can read the rendered text, but you can’t interact with it in any way. That’s why the navigation requires a separate cursor display area. And because of the page-oriented rendering behavior, turning pages causes a flash on the display and requires a sometimes long pause before the next page is rendered. The good side of this is that once the page is generated, no battery power is required to display it. That makes for great battery life, optimal viewing under most lighting conditions (as long as there is some light) and low-eyestrain text-centric display of content. The Kindle is highly portable, has an excellent selection in its store and is refreshingly distraction-free. All of this is ideal for reading books. And iPad doesn’t offer any of it. What iPad does offer is versatility, variety, richness and luxury. It’s flush with accoutrements even if it’s low on focused, sustained text display. That makes it inferior to the Kindle for book reading. But that also makes it better than the Kindle for almost everything else. As such, and given that its book reading experience is still decent (even if not superior), I think the iPad will give Kindle a run for its money. True book lovers, and people on a budget, will want the Kindle. People with a robust amount of discretionary income may want both devices. Everyone else who is interested in a slate form factor e-reading device, especially if they also wish to have leisure-friendly Internet access, will likely choose the iPad exclusively. One thing is for sure: iPad has reduced Kindle’s market, and may have shifted its mass market potential to a mere niche play. If Amazon is smart, it will improve its iPad-based Kindle reader app significantly. It can then leverage the iPad channel as a significant market for the Kindle Store. After all, selling the eBooks themselves is what Amazon should care most about.

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You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if…

- by Mark Rackley

Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down. Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you. :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer: “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields. You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well. Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET, sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast! Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe. Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible. Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

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Event Handlers Not Getting Called? - wxWidgets

- by Alex

Hello all, I'm working on a program for my C++ programming class, using wxWidgets. I'm having a huge problem in that my event handlers (I assume) are not getting called, because when I click on the button to trigger the event, nothing happens. My question is: Can you help me find the problem and explain why they would not be getting called? The event handlers OnAbout and OnQuit are working, just not OnCompute or OnClear. I'm really frustrated as I can't figure this out. Thanks a bunch in advance! #include "wx/wx.h" #include "time.h" #include <string> using std::string; // create object of Time class Time first; class App: public wxApp { virtual bool OnInit(); }; class MainPanel : public wxPanel { public: // Constructor for panel class // Constructs my panel class // Params - wxWindow pointer // no return type // pre-conditions: none // post-conditions: none MainPanel(wxWindow* parent); // OnCompute is the event handler for the Compute button // params - none // preconditions - none // postconditions - tasks will have been carried otu successfully // returns void void OnCompute(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)); // OnClear is the event handler for the Clear button // params - none // preconditions - none // postconditions - all text areas will be cleared of data // returns void void OnClear(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)); // Destructor for panel class // params none // preconditions - none // postconditions - none // no return type ~MainPanel( ); private: wxStaticText *startLabel; wxStaticText *endLabel; wxStaticText *pCLabel; wxStaticText *newEndLabel; wxTextCtrl *start; wxTextCtrl *end; wxTextCtrl *pC; wxTextCtrl *newEnd; wxButton *compute; wxButton *clear; DECLARE_EVENT_TABLE() }; class MainFrame: public wxFrame { private: wxPanel *mainPanel; public: MainFrame(const wxString& title, const wxPoint& pos, const wxSize& size); void OnQuit(wxCommandEvent& event); void OnAbout(wxCommandEvent& event); ~MainFrame(); DECLARE_EVENT_TABLE() }; enum { ID_Quit = 1, ID_About, BUTTON_COMPUTE = 100, BUTTON_CLEAR = 200 }; IMPLEMENT_APP(App) BEGIN_EVENT_TABLE(MainFrame, wxFrame) EVT_MENU(ID_Quit, MainFrame::OnQuit) EVT_MENU(ID_About, MainFrame::OnAbout) END_EVENT_TABLE() BEGIN_EVENT_TABLE(MainPanel, wxPanel) EVT_MENU(BUTTON_COMPUTE, MainPanel::OnCompute) EVT_MENU(BUTTON_CLEAR, MainPanel::OnClear) END_EVENT_TABLE() bool App::OnInit() { MainFrame *frame = new MainFrame( _("Good Guys Delivery Time Calculator"), wxPoint(50, 50), wxSize(450,340) ); frame->Show(true); SetTopWindow(frame); return true; } MainPanel::MainPanel(wxWindow* parent) : wxPanel(parent) { startLabel = new wxStaticText(this, -1, "Start Time:", wxPoint(75, 35)); start = new wxTextCtrl(this, -1, "", wxPoint(135, 35), wxSize(40, 21)); endLabel = new wxStaticText(this, -1, "End Time:", wxPoint(200, 35)); end = new wxTextCtrl(this, -1, "", wxPoint(260, 35), wxSize(40, 21)); pCLabel = new wxStaticText(this, -1, "Percent Change:", wxPoint(170, 85)); pC = new wxTextCtrl(this, -1, "", wxPoint(260, 85), wxSize(40, 21)); newEndLabel = new wxStaticText(this, -1, "New End Time:", wxPoint(180, 130)); newEnd = new wxTextCtrl(this, -1, "", wxPoint(260, 130), wxSize(40, 21)); compute = new wxButton(this, BUTTON_COMPUTE, "Compute", wxPoint(135, 185), wxSize(75, 35)); clear = new wxButton(this, BUTTON_CLEAR, "Clear", wxPoint(230, 185), wxSize(75, 35)); } MainPanel::~MainPanel() {} MainFrame::MainFrame(const wxString& title, const wxPoint& pos, const wxSize& size) : wxFrame( NULL, -1, title, pos, size ) { mainPanel = new MainPanel(this); wxMenu *menuFile = new wxMenu; menuFile->Append( ID_About, _("&About...") ); menuFile->AppendSeparator(); menuFile->Append( ID_Quit, _("E&xit") ); wxMenuBar *menuBar = new wxMenuBar; menuBar->Append( menuFile, _("&File") ); SetMenuBar( menuBar ); CreateStatusBar(); SetStatusText( _("Hi") ); } MainFrame::~MainFrame() {} void MainFrame::OnQuit(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)) { Close(TRUE); } void MainFrame::OnAbout(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)) { wxMessageBox( _("Alex Olson\nProject 11"), _("About"), wxOK | wxICON_INFORMATION, this); } void MainPanel::OnCompute(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)) { int startT; int endT; int newEndT; double tD; wxString startTString = start->GetValue(); wxString endTString = end->GetValue(); startT = wxAtoi(startTString); endT = wxAtoi(endTString); pC->GetValue().ToDouble(&tD); first.SetStartTime(startT); first.SetEndTime(endT); first.SetTimeDiff(tD); try { first.ValidateData(); newEndT = first.ComputeEndTime(); *newEnd << newEndT; } catch (BaseException& e) { wxMessageBox(_(e.GetMessage()), _("Something Went Wrong!"), wxOK | wxICON_INFORMATION, this); } } void MainPanel::OnClear(wxCommandEvent& WXUNUSED(event)) { start->Clear(); end->Clear(); pC->Clear(); newEnd->Clear(); }

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Synchronize Data between a Silverlight ListBox and a User Control

- by psheriff

One of the great things about XAML is the powerful data-binding capabilities. If you load up a list box with a collection of objects, you can display detail data about each object without writing any C# or VB.NET code. Take a look at Figure 1 that shows a collection of Product objects in a list box. When you click on a list box you bind the current Product object selected in the list box to a set of controls in a user control with just a very simple Binding statement in XAML. Figure 1: Synchronizing a ListBox to a User Control is easy with Data Binding Product and Products Classes To illustrate this data binding feature I am going to just create some local data instead of using a WCF service. The code below shows a Product class that has three properties, namely, ProductId, ProductName and Price. This class also has a constructor that takes 3 parameters and allows us to set the 3 properties in an instance of our Product class. C#public class Product{ public Product(int productId, string productName, decimal price) { ProductId = productId; ProductName = productName; Price = price; } public int ProductId { get; set; } public string ProductName { get; set; } public decimal Price { get; set; }} VBPublic Class Product Public Sub New(ByVal _productId As Integer, _ ByVal _productName As String, _ ByVal _price As Decimal) ProductId = _productId ProductName = _productName Price = _price End Sub Private mProductId As Integer Private mProductName As String Private mPrice As Decimal Public Property ProductId() As Integer Get Return mProductId End Get Set(ByVal value As Integer) mProductId = value End Set End Property Public Property ProductName() As String Get Return mProductName End Get Set(ByVal value As String) mProductName = value End Set End Property Public Property Price() As Decimal Get Return mPrice End Get Set(ByVal value As Decimal) mPrice = value End Set End PropertyEnd Class To fill up a list box you need a collection class of Product objects. The code below creates a generic collection class of Product objects. In the constructor of the Products class I have hard-coded five product objects and added them to the collection. In a real-world application you would get your data through a call to service to fill the list box, but for simplicity and just to illustrate the data binding, I am going to just hard code the data. C#public class Products : List<Product>{ public Products() { this.Add(new Product(1, "Microsoft VS.NET 2008", 1000)); this.Add(new Product(2, "Microsoft VS.NET 2010", 1000)); this.Add(new Product(3, "Microsoft Silverlight 4", 1000)); this.Add(new Product(4, "Fundamentals of N-Tier eBook", 20)); this.Add(new Product(5, "ASP.NET Security eBook", 20)); }} VBPublic Class Products Inherits List(Of Product) Public Sub New() Me.Add(New Product(1, "Microsoft VS.NET 2008", 1000)) Me.Add(New Product(2, "Microsoft VS.NET 2010", 1000)) Me.Add(New Product(3, "Microsoft Silverlight 4", 1000)) Me.Add(New Product(4, "Fundamentals of N-Tier eBook", 20)) Me.Add(New Product(5, "ASP.NET Security eBook", 20)) End SubEnd Class The Product Detail User Control Below is a user control (named ucProduct) that is used to display the product detail information seen in the bottom portion of Figure 1. This is very basic XAML that just creates a text block and a text box control for each of the three properties in the Product class. Notice the {Binding Path=[PropertyName]} on each of the text box controls. This means that if the DataContext property of this user control is set to an instance of a Product class, then the data in the properties of that Product object will be displayed in each of the text boxes. <UserControl x:Class="SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS.ucProduct" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" HorizontalAlignment="Left" VerticalAlignment="Top"> <Grid Margin="4"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition MinWidth="120" /> <ColumnDefinition /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBlock Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="0" Text="Product Id" /> <TextBox Grid.Row="0" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Path=ProductId}" /> <TextBlock Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="0" Text="Product Name" /> <TextBox Grid.Row="1" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Path=ProductName}" /> <TextBlock Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="0" Text="Price" /> <TextBox Grid.Row="2" Grid.Column="1" Text="{Binding Path=Price}" /> </Grid></UserControl> Synchronize ListBox with User Control You are now ready to fill the list box with the collection class of Product objects and then bind the SelectedItem of the list box to the Product detail user control. The XAML below is the complete code for Figure 1. <UserControl x:Class="SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS.MainPage" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:src="clr-namespace:SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS" VerticalAlignment="Top" HorizontalAlignment="Left"> <UserControl.Resources> <src:Products x:Key="productCollection" /> </UserControl.Resources> <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Margin="4" Background="White"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <ListBox x:Name="lstData" Grid.Row="0" BorderBrush="Black" BorderThickness="1" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource productCollection}}" DisplayMemberPath="ProductName" /> <src:ucProduct x:Name="prodDetail" Grid.Row="1" DataContext="{Binding ElementName=lstData, Path=SelectedItem}" /> </Grid></UserControl> The first step to making this happen is to reference the Silverlight project (SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS) where the Product and Products classes are located. I added this namespace and assigned it a namespace prefix of “src” as shown in the line below: xmlns:src="clr-namespace:SL_SyncListBoxAndUserControl_CS" Next, to use the data from an instance of the Products collection, you create a UserControl.Resources section in the XAML and add a tag that creates an instance of the Products class and assigns it a key of “productCollection”. <UserControl.Resources> <src:Products x:Key="productCollection" /> </UserControl.Resources> Next, you bind the list box to this productCollection object using the ItemsSource property. You bind the ItemsSource of the list box to the static resource named productCollection. You can then set the DisplayMemberPath attribute of the list box to any property of the Product class that you want. In the XAML below I used the ProductName property. <ListBox x:Name="lstData" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource productCollection}}" DisplayMemberPath="ProductName" /> You now need to create an instance of the ucProduct user contol below the list box. You do this by once again referencing the “src” namespace and typing in the name of the user control. You then set the DataContext property on this user control to a binding. The binding uses the ElementName attribute to bind to the list box name, in this case “lstData”. The Path of the data is SelectedItem. These two attributes together tell Silverlight to bind the DataContext to the selected item of the list box. That selected item is a Product object. So, once this is bound, the bindings on each text box in the user control are updated and display the current product information. <src:ucProduct x:Name="prodDetail" DataContext="{Binding ElementName=lstData, Path=SelectedItem}" /> Summary Once you understand the basics of data binding in XAML, you eliminate a lot code that is otherwise needed to move data into controls and out of controls back into an object. Connecting two controls together is easy by just binding using the ElementName and Path properties of the Binding markup extension. Another good tip out of this blog is use user controls and set the DataContext of the user control to have all of the data on the user control update through the bindings. NOTE: You can download the complete sample code (in both VB and C#) at my website. http://www.pdsa.com/downloads. Choose Tips & Tricks, then "SL – Synchronize List Box Data with User Control" from the drop-down. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free eBook on "Fundamentals of N-Tier".

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Stop Spinning Your Wheels… Sage Advice for Aspiring Developers

- by Mark Rackley

So… lately I’ve been tasked with helping bring some non-developers over the hump and become full-fledged, all around, SharePoint developers. Well, only time will tell if I’m successful or a complete failure. Good thing about failures though, you know what NOT to do next time! Anyway, I’ve been writing some sort of code since I was about 10 years old; so I sometimes take for granted the effort some people have to go through to learn a new technology. I guess if I had to say I was an “expert” in one thing it would be learning (and getting “stuff” done) in new technologies. Maybe that’s why I’ve embraced SharePoint and the SharePoint community. SharePoint is the first technology I haven’t been able to master or get everything done without help from other people. I KNOW I’ll never know it all and I learn something new every day. It keeps it interesting, it keeps me motivated, and keeps me involved. So, what some people may consider a downside of SharePoint, I definitely consider a plus. Crap.. I’m rambling. Where was I? Oh yeah… me trying to be helpful. Like I said, I am able to quickly and effectively pick up new languages, technology, etc. and put it to good use. Am I just brilliant? Well, my mom thinks so.. but maybe not. Maybe I’ve just been doing it for a long time…. 25 years in some form or fashion… wow I’m old… Anyway, what I lack in depth I make up for in breadth and being the “go-to” guy wherever I work when someone needs to “get stuff done”. Let’s see if I can take some of that experience and put it to practical use to help new people get up to speed faster, learn things more effectively, and become that go-to guy. First off… make sure you… Know The Basics I don’t have the time to teach new developers the basics, but you gotta know them. I’ve only been “taught” two languages.. Fortran 77 and C… everything else I’ve picked up from “doing”. I HAD to know the basics though, and all new developers need to understand the very basics of development. 97.23% of all languages will have the following: Variables Functions Arrays If statements For loops / While loops If you think about it, most development is “if this, do this… or while this, do this…”. “This” may be some unique method to your language or something you develop, but the basics are the basics. YES there are MANY other development topics you need to understand, but you shouldn’t be scratching your head trying to figure out what a ”for loop” is… (Also learn about classes and hashtables as quickly as possible). Once you have the basics down it makes it much easier to… Learn By Doing This may just apply to me and my warped brain. I don’t learn a new technology by reading or hearing someone speak about it. I learn by doing. It does me no good to try and learn all of the intricacies of a new language or technology inside-and-out before getting my hands dirty. Just show me how to do one thing… let me get that working… then show me how to do the next thing.. let me get that working… Now, let’s see what I can figure out on my own. Okay.. now it starts to make sense. I see how the language works, I can step through the code, and before you know it.. I’m productive in a new technology. Be careful here though…. make sure you… Don’t Reinvent The Wheel People have been writing code for what… 50+ years now? So, why are you trying to tackle ANYTHING without first Googling it with Bing to see what others have done first? When I was first learning C# (I had come from a Java background) I had to call a web service. Sure! No problem! I’d done this many times in Java. So, I proceeded to write an HTTP Handler, called the Web Service and it worked like a charm!!! Probably about 2.3 seconds after I got it working completely someone says to me “Why didn’t you just add a Web Reference?” Really? You can do that? oops… I just wasted a lot of time. Before undertaking the development of any sort of utility method in a new language, make sure it’s not already handled for you… Okay… you are starting to write some code and are curious about the possibilities? Well… don’t just sit there… Try It And See What Happens This is actually one of my biggest pet peeves. “So… ‘x++’ works in C#, but does it also work in JavaScript?” Really? Did you just ask me that? In the time it spent for you to type that email, press the send button, me receive the email, get around to reading it, and replying with “yes” you could have tested it 47 times and know the answer! Just TRY it! See what happens! You aren’t doing brain surgery. You aren’t going to kill anyone, and you BETTER not be developing in production. So, you are not going to crash any production systems!! Seriously! Get off your butt and just try it yourself. The extra added benefit is that it doesn’t work, the absolute best way to learn is to… Learn From Your Failures I don’t know about you… but if I screw up and something doesn’t work, I learn A LOT more debugging my problem than if everything magically worked. It’s okay that you aren’t perfect! Not everyone can be me? In the same vein… don’t ask someone else to debug your problem until you have made a valiant attempt to do so yourself. There’s nothing quite like stepping through code line by line to see what it’s REALLY doing… and you’ll never feel more stupid sometimes than when you realize WHY it’s not working.. but you realize... you learn... and you remember. There is nothing wrong with failure as long as you learn from it. As you start writing more and more and more code make sure that you ALWAYS… Develop for Production You will soon learn that the “prototype” you wrote last week to show as a “proof of concept” is going to go directly into production no matter how much you beg and plead and try to explain it’s not ready to go into production… it’s going to go straight there.. and it’s like herpes.. it doesn’t go away and there’s no fixing it once it’s in there. So, why not write ALL your code like it will be put in production? It MIGHT take a little longer, but in the long run it will be easier to maintain, get help on, and you won’t be embarrassed that it’s sitting on a production server for everyone to use and see. So, now that you are getting comfortable and writing code for production it is important to to remember the… KISS Principle… Learn It… Love It… Keep It Simple Stupid Seriously.. don’t try to show how smart you are by writing the most complicated code in history. Break your problem up into discrete steps and write each step. If it turns out you have some redundancy, you can always go back and tweak your code later. How bad is it when you write code that LOOKS cocky? I’ve seen it before… some of the most abstract and complicated classes when a class wasn’t even needed! Or the most elaborate unreadable code jammed into one really long line when it could have been written in three lines, performed just as well, and been SOOO much easier to maintain. Keep it clear and simple.. baby steps people. This will help you learn the technology, debug problems, AND it will help others help you find your problems if they don’t have to decipher the Dead Sea Scrolls just to figure out what you are trying to do…. Really.. don’t be that guy… try to curb your ego and… Keep an Open Mind No matter how smart you are… how fast you type… or how much you get paid, don’t let your ego get in the way. There is probably a better way to do everything you’ve ever done. Don’t become so cocky that you can’t think someone knows more than you. There’s a lot of brilliant, helpful people out there willing to show you tricks if you just give them a chance. A very super-awesome developer once told me “So what if you’ve been writing code for 10 years or more! Does your code look basically the same? Are you not growing as a developer?” Those 10 years become pretty meaningless if you just “know” that you are right and have not picked up new tips, tricks, methods, and patterns along the way. Learn from others and find out what’s new in development land (you know you don’t have to specifically use pointers anymore??). Along those same lines… If it’s not working, first assume you are doing something wrong. You have no idea how much it annoys people who are trying to help you when you first assume that the help they are trying to give you is wrong. Just MAYBE… you… the person learning is making some small mistake? Maybe you didn’t describe your problem correctly? Maybe you are using the wrong terminology? “I did exactly what you said and it didn’t work.” Oh really? Are you SURE about that? “Your solution doesn’t work.” Well… I’m pretty sure it works, I’ve used it 200 times… What are you doing differently? First try some humility and appreciation.. it will go much further, especially when it turns out YOU are the one that is wrong. When all else fails…. Try Professional Training Some people just don’t have the mindset to go and figure stuff out. It’s a gift and not everyone has it. If everyone could do it I wouldn’t have a job and there wouldn’t be professional training available. So, if you’ve tried everything else and no light bulbs are coming on, contact the experts who specialize in training. Be careful though, there is bad training out there. Want to know the names of some good places? Just shoot me a message and I’ll let you know. I’m boycotting endorsing Andrew Connell anymore until I get that free course dangit!! So… that’s it.. that’s all I got right now. Maybe you thought all of this is common sense, maybe you think I’m smoking crack. If so, don’t just sit there, there’s a comments section for a reason. Finally, what about you? What tips do you have to help this aspiring to learn the dark arts??

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Why is my WCF RIA Services custom object deserializing with an extra list member?

- by oasasaurus

I have been developing a Silverlight WCF RIA Services application dealing with mock financial transactions. To more efficiently send summary data to the client without going overboard with serialized entities I have created a summary class that isn’t in my EDM, and figured out how to serialize and send it over the wire to the SL client using DataContract() and DataMember(). Everything seemed to be working out great, until I tried to bind controls to a list inside my custom object. The list seems to always get deserialized with an extra, almost empty entity in it that I don’t know how to get rid of. So, here are some of the pieces. First the relevant bits from the custom object class: <DataContract()> _ Public Class EconomicsSummary Public Sub New() RecentTransactions = New List(Of Transaction) TotalAccountHistory = New List(Of Transaction) End Sub Public Sub New(ByVal enUser As EntityUser) Me.UserId = enUser.UserId Me.UserName = enUser.UserName Me.Accounts = enUser.Accounts Me.Jobs = enUser.Jobs RecentTransactions = New List(Of Transaction) TotalAccountHistory = New List(Of Transaction) End Sub <DataMember()> _ <Key()> _ Public Property UserId As System.Guid <DataMember()> _ Public Property NumTransactions As Integer <DataMember()> _ <Include()> _ <Association("Summary_RecentTransactions", "UserId", "User_UserId")> _ Public Property RecentTransactions As List(Of Transaction) <DataMember()> _ <Include()> _ <Association("Summary_TotalAccountHistory", "UserId", "User_UserId")> _ Public Property TotalAccountHistory As List(Of Transaction) End Class Next, the relevant parts of the function called to return the object: Public Function GetEconomicsSummary(ByVal guidUserId As System.Guid) As EconomicsSummary Dim objOutput As New EconomicsSummary(enUser) For Each objTransaction As Transaction In (From t As Transaction In Me.ObjectContext.Transactions.Include("Account") Where t.Account.aspnet_User_UserId = guidUserId Select t Order By t.TransactionDate Descending Take 10) objTransaction.User_UserId = objOutput.UserId objOutput.RecentTransactions.Add(objTransaction) Next objOutput.NumTransactions = objOutput.RecentTransactions.Count … Return objOutput End Function Notice that I’m collecting the NumTransactions count before serialization. Should be 10 right? It is – BEFORE serialization. The DataGrid is bound to the data source as follows: <sdk:DataGrid AutoGenerateColumns="False" Height="100" MaxWidth="{Binding ElementName=aciSummary, Path=ActualWidth}" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource EconomicsSummaryRecentTransactionsViewSource}, Mode=OneWay}" Name="gridRecentTransactions" RowDetailsVisibilityMode="VisibleWhenSelected" IsReadOnly="True"> <sdk:DataGrid.Columns> <sdk:DataGridTextColumn x:Name="TransactionDateColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=TransactionDate, StringFormat=\{0:d\}}" Header="Date" Width="SizeToHeader" /> <sdk:DataGridTextColumn x:Name="AccountNameColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=Account.Title}" Header="Account" Width="SizeToCells" /> <sdk:DataGridTextColumn x:Name="CurrencyAmountColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=CurrencyAmount, StringFormat=\{0:c\}}" Header="Amount" Width="SizeToHeader" /> <sdk:DataGridTextColumn x:Name="TitleColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=Title}" Header="Description" Width="SizeToCells" /> <sdk:DataGridTextColumn x:Name="ItemQuantityColumn" Binding="{Binding Path=ItemQuantity}" Header="Qty" Width="SizeToHeader" /> </sdk:DataGrid.Columns> </sdk:DataGrid> You might be wondering where the ItemsSource is coming from, that looks like this: <CollectionViewSource x:Key="EconomicsSummaryRecentTransactionsViewSource" Source="{Binding Path=DataView.RecentTransactions, ElementName=EconomicsSummaryDomainDataSource}" /> When I noticed that the DataGrid had the extra row I tried outputting some data after the data source finishes loading, as follows: Private Sub EconomicsSummaryDomainDataSource_LoadedData(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.Windows.Controls.LoadedDataEventArgs) Handles EconomicsSummaryDomainDataSource.LoadedData If e.HasError Then System.Windows.MessageBox.Show(e.Error.ToString, "Load Error", System.Windows.MessageBoxButton.OK) e.MarkErrorAsHandled() End If Dim objSummary As EconomicsSummary = CType(EconomicsSummaryDomainDataSource.Data(0), EconomicsSummary) Dim sb As New StringBuilder("") sb.AppendLine(String.Format("Num Transactions: {0} ({1})", objSummary.RecentTransactions.Count.ToString(), objSummary.NumTransactions.ToString())) For Each objTransaction As Transaction In objSummary.RecentTransactions sb.AppendLine(String.Format("Recent TransactionId {0} dated {1} CurrencyAmount {2} NewBalance {3}", objTransaction.TransactionId.ToString, objTransaction.TransactionDate.ToString("d"), objTransaction.CurrencyAmount.ToString("c"), objTransaction.NewBalance.ToString("c"))) Next txtDebug.Text = sb.ToString() End Sub Output from that looks like this: Num Transactions: 11 (10) Recent TransactionId 2283 dated 6/1/2010 CurrencyAmount $31.00 NewBalance $392.00 Recent TransactionId 2281 dated 5/31/2010 CurrencyAmount $33.00 NewBalance $361.00 Recent TransactionId 2279 dated 5/28/2010 CurrencyAmount $8.00 NewBalance $328.00 Recent TransactionId 2277 dated 5/26/2010 CurrencyAmount $22.00 NewBalance $320.00 Recent TransactionId 2275 dated 5/24/2010 CurrencyAmount $5.00 NewBalance $298.00 Recent TransactionId 2273 dated 5/21/2010 CurrencyAmount $19.00 NewBalance $293.00 Recent TransactionId 2271 dated 5/20/2010 CurrencyAmount $20.00 NewBalance $274.00 Recent TransactionId 2269 dated 5/19/2010 CurrencyAmount $48.00 NewBalance $254.00 Recent TransactionId 2267 dated 5/18/2010 CurrencyAmount $42.00 NewBalance $206.00 Recent TransactionId 2265 dated 5/14/2010 CurrencyAmount $5.00 NewBalance $164.00 Recent TransactionId 0 dated 6/1/2010 CurrencyAmount $0.00 NewBalance $361.00 So I have a few different questions: -First and foremost, where the devil is that extra Transaction entity coming from and how do I get rid of it? Does it have anything to do with the other list of Transaction entities being serialized as part of the EconomicsSummary class (TotalAccountHistory)? Do I need to decorate the EconomicsSummary class members a little more/differently? -Second, where are the peculiar values coming from on that extra entity? PRE-POSTING UPDATE 1: I did a little checking, it looks like that last entry is the first one in the TotalAccountHistory list. Do I need to do something with CollectionDataContract()? PRE-POSTING UPDATE 2: I fixed one bug in TotalAccountHistory, since the objects weren’t coming from the database their keys weren’t unique. So I set the keys on the Transaction entities inside TotalAccountHistory to be unique and guess what? Now, after deserialization RecentTransactions contains all its original items, plus every item in TotalAccountHistory. I’m pretty sure this has to do with the deserializer getting confused by two collections of the same type. But I don’t yet know how to resolve it…

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EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL) at random during use of app. Bug in AppKit?

- by Ger Teunis

I'm currently testing a new version of an app of mine on OSX 10.5 An user reported some weird crashes during use of the application, sadly not reproducible by me. At first sight it seems to happen randomly, once he had the crash while opening an NSOpenPanel and once during focusing an NSTextField and once during NSView switch in a parent view. If you have any idea which area I should look at it would be greatly appreciated! I'm completely lost here. App is compiled in XCode 3.2.1 with SDK 10.5 and targetted at 10.5 He send me these crashes: Crash 1 Process: NZBVortex [43622] Path: /Users/cero/Downloads/NZBVortex.app/Contents/MacOS/NZBVortex Identifier: com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex Version: 0.5.5 (0.5.5) Code Type: X86-64 (Native) Parent Process: launchd [97] Interval Since Last Report: 1951 sec Crashes Since Last Report: 1 Per-App Interval Since Last Report: 1858 sec Per-App Crashes Since Last Report: 1 Date/Time: 2010-03-23 23:43:49.671 +0100 OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.8 (9L31a) Report Version: 6 Anonymous UUID: 98AB0386-590B-4E0D-B7AC-3F7AA4E7238E Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL) Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000 Crashed Thread: 0 Application Specific Information: objc[43622]: alt handlers in objc runtime are buggy! - Hide quoted text - Thread 0 Crashed: 0 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff82baef6e _objc_fatal + 238 1 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff82bb2ea4 objc_addExceptionHandler + 302 2 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff842b1090 _CFDoExceptionOperation + 528 3 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f75e26 _NSAppKitLock + 81 4 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f80f8f -[NSView nextKeyView] + 56 5 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f81018 -[NSView _primitiveSetNextKeyView:] + 72 6 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff820732b1 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 242 7 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82073300 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 321 8 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82073300 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 321 9 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82073300 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 321 10 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82073300 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 321 11 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82072fc3 -[NSView _setDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 279 12 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82072e70 -[NSWindow recalculateKeyViewLoop] + 36 13 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff821dd149 -[NSSavePanel(NSSavePanelRuntime) _loadPreviousModeAndLayout] + 39 14 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff821dcf9e -[NSSavePanel(NSSavePanelRuntime) runModalForDirectory:file:types:] + 71 15 com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex 0x000000010000b7ee -[MainWindowViewController openNZBFileButtonClick:] + 62 16 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff821c96bf -[NSToolbarButton sendAction:to:] + 77 17 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff821c8bb7 -[NSToolbarItemViewer mouseDown:] + 5362 18 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82082783 -[NSWindow sendEvent:] + 5068 19 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff8204fd46 -[NSApplication sendEvent:] + 5089 20 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81faa562 -[NSApplication run] + 497 21 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f772f0 NSApplicationMain + 373 22 com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex 0x0000000100012a69 main + 9 23 com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex 0x0000000100001a84 start + 52 Crash 2 Process: NZBVortex [43600] Path: /Users/cero/Downloads/NZBVortex.app/Contents/MacOS/NZBVortex Identifier: com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex Version: 0.5.5 (0.5.5) Code Type: X86-64 (Native) Parent Process: launchd [97] Interval Since Last Report: 727 sec Crashes Since Last Report: 1 Per-App Interval Since Last Report: 616 sec Per-App Crashes Since Last Report: 1 Date/Time: 2010-03-23 23:11:20.000 +0100 OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.8 (9L31a) Report Version: 6 Anonymous UUID: 98AB0386-590B-4E0D-B7AC-3F7AA4E7238E Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL) Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000 Crashed Thread: 0 Application Specific Information: objc[43600]: alt handlers in objc runtime are buggy! Thread 0 Crashed: 0 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff82baef6e _objc_fatal + 238 1 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff82bb2ea4 objc_addExceptionHandler + 302 2 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff842b1090 _CFDoExceptionOperation + 528 3 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f75e26 _NSAppKitLock + 81 4 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f80f8f -[NSView nextKeyView] + 56 5 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f81018 -[NSView _primitiveSetNextKeyView:] + 72 6 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff820732b1 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 242 7 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82156700 -[NSTabView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 119 8 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82073300 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 321 9 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82073300 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 321 10 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82072fc3 -[NSView _setDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 279 11 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82072e70 -[NSWindow recalculateKeyViewLoop] + 36 12 com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex 0x000000010000b527 -[MainWindowViewController showView:sender:] + 1639 13 com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex 0x000000010000ae6b -[MainWindowViewController preferencesSaveAlertDidEnd:returnCode:contextInfo:] + 91 14 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82224291 -[NSAlert didEndAlert:returnCode:contextInfo:] + 107 15 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82224197 -[NSAlert buttonPressed:] + 279 16 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82085d46 -[NSApplication sendAction:to:from:] + 97 17 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82085c7f -[NSControl sendAction:to:] + 97 18 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff820851b0 -[NSCell trackMouse:inRect:ofView:untilMouseUp:] + 1841 19 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff820849d6 -[NSButtonCell trackMouse:inRect:ofView:untilMouseUp:] + 611 20 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff8208422f -[NSControl mouseDown:] + 735 21 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82082783 -[NSWindow sendEvent:] + 5068 22 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff8204fd46 -[NSApplication sendEvent:] + 5089 23 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81faa562 -[NSApplication run] + 497 24 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f772f0 NSApplicationMain + 373 25 com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex 0x0000000100012a69 main + 9 26 com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex 0x0000000100001a84 start + 52 Crash 3 Process: NZBVortex [43520] Path: /Users/cero/Downloads/NZBVortex.app/Contents/MacOS/NZBVortex Identifier: com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex Version: 0.5.5 (0.5.5) Code Type: X86-64 (Native) Parent Process: launchd [97] Interval Since Last Report: 23487 sec Crashes Since Last Report: 2 Per-App Interval Since Last Report: 2025 sec Per-App Crashes Since Last Report: 1 Date/Time: 2010-03-23 22:59:05.484 +0100 OS Version: Mac OS X 10.5.8 (9L31a) Report Version: 6 Anonymous UUID: 98AB0386-590B-4E0D-B7AC-3F7AA4E7238E Exception Type: EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION (SIGILL) Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000001, 0x0000000000000000 Crashed Thread: 0 Application Specific Information: objc[43520]: alt handlers in objc runtime are buggy! Thread 0 Crashed: 0 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff82baef6e _objc_fatal + 238 1 libobjc.A.dylib 0x00007fff82bb2ea4 objc_addExceptionHandler + 302 2 com.apple.CoreFoundation 0x00007fff842b1090 _CFDoExceptionOperation + 528 3 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f75e26 _NSAppKitLock + 81 4 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f80f8f -[NSView nextKeyView] + 56 5 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f81018 -[NSView _primitiveSetNextKeyView:] + 72 6 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff820732b1 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 242 7 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82073300 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 321 8 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82073300 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 321 9 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82073300 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 321 10 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82073300 -[NSView _recursiveSetDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 321 11 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82072fc3 -[NSView _setDefaultKeyViewLoop] + 279 12 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82072e70 -[NSWindow recalculateKeyViewLoop] + 36 13 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff821dd149 -[NSSavePanel(NSSavePanelRuntime) _loadPreviousModeAndLayout] + 39 14 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff821dcf9e -[NSSavePanel(NSSavePanelRuntime) runModalForDirectory:file:types:] + 71 15 com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex 0x000000010000b7ee -[MainWindowViewController openNZBFileButtonClick:] + 62 16 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff821c96bf -[NSToolbarButton sendAction:to:] + 77 17 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff821c8bb7 -[NSToolbarItemViewer mouseDown:] + 5362 18 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff82082783 -[NSWindow sendEvent:] + 5068 19 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff8204fd46 -[NSApplication sendEvent:] + 5089 20 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81faa562 -[NSApplication run] + 497 21 com.apple.AppKit 0x00007fff81f772f0 NSApplicationMain + 373 22 com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex 0x0000000100012a69 main + 9 23 com.NZBVortex.NZBVortex 0x0000000100001a84 start + 52

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How to Visualize your Audit Data with BI Publisher?

- by kanichiro.nishida

Do you know how many reports on your BI Publisher server are accessed yesterday ? Or, how many users accessed to the reports yesterday, or what are the average number of the users accessed to the reports during the week vs. weekend or morning vs. afternoon ? With BI Publisher 11G, now you can audit your user’s reports access and understand the state of the reporting environment at your server, each user, or each report level. At the previous post I’ve talked about what the BI Publisher’s auditing functionality and how to enable it so that BI Publisher can start collecting such data. (How to Audit and Monitor BI Publisher Reports Access?)Now, how can you visualize such auditing data to have a better understanding and gain more insights? With Fusion Middleware Audit Framework you have an option to store the auditing data into a database instead of a log file, which is the default option. Once you enable the database storage option, that means you have your auditing data (or, user report access data) in your database tables, now no brainer, you can start visualize the data, create reports, analyze, and share with BI Publisher. So, first, let’s take a look on how to enable the database storage option for the auditing data. How to Feed the Auditing Data into Database First you need to create a database schema for Fusion Middleware Audit Framework with RCU (Repository Creation Utility). If you have already installed BI Publisher 11G you should be familiar with this RCU. It creates any database schema necessary to run any Fusion Middleware products including BI stuff. And you can use the same RCU that you used for your BI or BI Publisher installation to create this Audit schema. Create Audit Schema with RCU Here are the steps: Go to $RCU_HOME/bin and execute the ‘rcu’ command Choose Create at the starting screen and click Next. Enter your database details and click Next. Choose the option to create a new prefix, for example ‘BIP’, ‘KAN’, etc. Select 'Audit Services' from the list of schemas. Click Next and accept the tablespace creation. Click Finish to start the process. After this, there should be following three Audit related schema created in your database. <prefix>_IAU (e.g. KAN_IAU) <prefix>_IAU_APPEND (e.g. KAN_IAU_APPEND) <prefix>_IAU_VIEWER (e.g. KAN_IAU_VIEWER) Setup Datasource at WebLogic After you create a database schema for your auditing data, now you need to create a JDBC connection on your WebLogic Server so the Audit Framework can access to the database schema that was created with the RCU with the previous step. Connect to the Oracle WebLogic Server administration console: http://hostname:port/console (e.g. http://report.oracle.com:7001/console) Under Services, click the Data Sources link. Click ‘Lock & Edit’ so that you can make changes Click New –> ‘Generic Datasource’ to create a new data source. Enter the following details for the new data source: Name: Enter a name such as Audit Data Source-0. JNDI Name: jdbc/AuditDB Database Type: Oracle Click Next and select ‘Oracle's Driver (Thin XA) Versions: 9.0.1 or later’ as Database Driver (if you’re using Oracle database), and click Next. The Connection Properties page appears. Enter the following information: Database Name: Enter the name of the database (SID) to which you will connect. Host Name: Enter the hostname of the database. Port: Enter the database port. Database User Name: This is the name of the audit schema that you created in RCU. The suffix is always IAU for the audit schema. For example, if you gave the prefix as ‘BIP’, then the schema name would be ‘KAN_IAU’. Password: This is the password for the audit schema that you created in RCU. Click Next. Accept the defaults, and click Test Configuration to verify the connection. Click Next Check listed servers where you want to make this JDBC connection available. Click ‘Finish’ ! After that, make sure you click ‘Activate Changes’ at the left hand side top to take the new JDBC connection in effect. Register your Audit Data Storing Database to your Domain Finally, you can register the JNDI/JDBC datasource as your Auditing data storage with Fusion Middleware Control (EM). Here are the steps: 1. Login to Fusion Middleware Control 2. Navigate to Weblogic Domain, right click on ‘bifoundation…..’, select Security, then Audit Store. 3. Click the searchlight icon next to the Datasource JNDI Name field. 4.Select the Audit JNDI/JDBC datasource you created in the previous step in the pop-up window and click OK. 5. Click Apply to continue. 6. Restart the whole WebLogic Servers in the domain. After this, now the BI Publisher should start feeding all the auditing data into the database table called ‘IAU_BASE’. Try login to BI Publisher and open a couple of reports, you should see the activity audited in the ‘IAU_BASE’ table. If not working, you might want to check the log file, which is located at $BI_HOME/user_projects/domains/bifoundation_domain/servers/AdminServer/logs/AdminServer-diagnostic.log to see if there is any error. Once you have the data in the database table, now, it’s time to visualize with BI Publisher reports! Create a First BI Publisher Auditing Report Register Auditing Datasource as JNDI datasource First thing you need to do is to register the audit datasource (JNDI/JDBC connection) you created in the previous step as JNDI data source at BI Publisher. It is a JDBC connection registered as JNDI, that means you don’t need to create a new JDBC connection by typing the connection URL, username/password, etc. You can just register it using the JNDI name. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Login to BI Publisher as Administrator (e.g. weblogic) Go to Administration Page Click ‘JNDI Connection’ under Data Sources and Click ‘New’ Type Data Source Name and JNDI Name. The JNDI Name is the one you created in the WebLogic Console as the auditing datasource. (e.g. jdbc/AuditDB) Click ‘Test Connection’ to make sure the datasource connection works. Provide appropriate roles so that the report developers or viewers can share this data source to view reports. Click ‘Apply’ to save. Create Data Model Select Data Model from the tool bar menu ‘New’ Set ‘Default Data Source’ to the audit JNDI data source you have created in the previous step. Select ‘SQL Query’ for your data set Use Query Builder to build a query or just type a sql query. Either way, the table you want to report against is ‘IAU_BASE’. This IAU_BASE table contains all the auditing data for other products running on the WebLogic Server such as JPS, OID, etc. So, if you care only specific to BI Publisher then you want to filter by using ‘IAU_COMPONENTTYPE’ column which contains the product name (e.g. ’xmlpserver’ for BI Publisher). Here is my sample sql query. select "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" as "IAU_COMPONENTTYPE", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTTYPE" as "IAU_EVENTTYPE", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_EVENTCATEGORY" as "IAU_EVENTCATEGORY", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TSTZORIGINATING" as "IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'YYYY-MM-DD') IAU_DATE, to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'DAY') as IAU_DAY, to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'HH24') as IAU_HH24, to_char("IAU_TSTZORIGINATING", 'WW') as IAU_WEEK_OF_YEAR, "IAU_BASE"."IAU_INITIATOR" as "IAU_INITIATOR", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_RESOURCE" as "IAU_RESOURCE", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_TARGET" as "IAU_TARGET", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_MESSAGETEXT" as "IAU_MESSAGETEXT", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_FAILURECODE" as "IAU_FAILURECODE", "IAU_BASE"."IAU_REMOTEIP" as "IAU_REMOTEIP" from "KAN3_IAU"."IAU_BASE" "IAU_BASE" where "IAU_BASE"."IAU_COMPONENTTYPE" = 'xmlpserver' Once you saved a sample XML for this data model, now you can create a report with this data model. Create Report Now you can use one of the BI Publisher’s layout options to design the report layout and visualize the auditing data. I’m a big fan of Online Layout Editor, it’s just so easy and simple to create reports, and on top of that, all the reports created with Online Layout Editor has the Interactive View with automatic data linking and filtering feature without any setting or coding. If you haven’t checked the Interactive View or Online Layout Editor you might want to check these previous blog posts. (Interactive Reporting with BI Publisher 11G, Interactive Master Detail Report Just A Few Clicks Away!) But of course, you can use other layout design option such as RTF template. Here are some sample screenshots of my report design with Online Layout Editor. Visualize and Gain More Insights about your Customers (Users) ! Now you can visualize your auditing data to have better understanding and gain more insights about your reporting environment you manage. It’s been actually helping me personally to answer the questios like below. How many reports are accessed or opened yesterday, today, last week ? Who is accessing which report at what time ? What are the time windows when the most of the reports access happening ? What are the most viewed reports ? Who are the active users ? What are the # of reports access or user access trend for the last month, last 6 months, last 12 months, etc ? I was talking with one of the best concierge in the world at this hotel the other day, and he was telling me that the best concierge knows about their customers inside-out therefore they can provide a very private service that is customized to each customer to meet each customer’s specific needs. Well, this is true when it comes to how to administrate and manage your reporting environment, right ? The best way to serve your customers (report users, including both viewers and developers) is to understand how they use, what they use, when they use. Auditing is not just about compliance, but it’s the way to improve the customer service. The BI Publisher 11G Auditing feature enables just that to help you understand your customers better. Happy customer service, be the best reporting concierge! p.s. please share with us on what other information would be helpful for you for the auditing! Always, any feedback is a great value and inspiration for us!

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 17, 2012

CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, March 17, 2012Popular ReleasesAutoSPEditor: AutoSPEditor Installer: Installs the current version of the AutoSPEditor using ClickOnce. Your application will be updated automatically.Javascript .NET: Javascript .NET v0.6: Upgraded to the latest stable branch of v8 (/tags/3.9.18), and switched to using their scons build system. We no longer include v8 source code as part of this project's source code. Simultaneous multithreaded use of v8 now supported (v8 Isolates), although different contexts may not share objects or call each other. 64-bit .Net 4.0 DLL now included. 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Please see the information about the 2.5 and 2.5.4500 releases for more information on recent changes. This update did not even have an automatic update triggered for it. Adds error checking and reporting to all threads, not only those with message loopsAcDown????? - Anime&Comic Downloader: AcDown????? v3.9.2: ?? ●AcDown??????????、??、??????，????1M，????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????????????????????????，???，???????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ????32??64? Windows XP/Vista/7/8 ????????????? ??：????????Windows XP???,?????????.NET Framework 2.0???(x86)，?????"?????????"??? ??????????????，??????????： ??"AcDo...ArcGIS Editor for OpenStreetMap: ArcGIS Editor for OSM 2.0 Release Candidate: Your feedback is welcome - and this is your last chance to get your fixes in for this version! 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Issues Fixed with this Release Issue # Title 25012 25012 25018 25018 25023 25023 25014 25014 Visual Studio ALM Quick Reference Guidance: v3 - For Visual Studio 11: RELEASE README Welcome to the BETA release of the Quick Reference Guide preview As this is a BETA release and the quality bar for the final Release has not been achieved, we value your candid feedback and recommend that you do not use or deploy these BETA artifacts in a production environment. Quality-Bar Details Documentation has been reviewed by Visual Studio ALM Rangers Documentation has not been through an independent technical review Documentation ...AvalonDock: AvalonDock 2.0.0345: Welcome to early alpha release of AvalonDock 2.0 I've completely rewritten AvalonDock in order to take full advantage of the MVVM pattern. 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Instead, when adding multiple accounts to a subscription, each one needs to be added ...IronPython: 2.7.2.1: On behalf of the IronPython team, I'm happy to announce the final release IronPython 2.7.2. This release includes everything from IronPython 54498 and 62475 as well. Like all IronPython 2.7-series releases, .NET 4 is required to install it. Installing this release will replace any existing IronPython 2.7-series installation. Unlike previous releases, the assemblies for all supported platforms are included in the installer as well as the zip package, in the "Platforms" directory. IronPython 2...Kooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 3.2.0.0: Breaking changes: When upgrade from previous versions, MUST reset the all the content type templates, otherwise the content manager might get a compile error. New features Integrate with Windows azure. See: http://wiki.kooboo.com/?wiki=Kooboo CMS on Azure Complete solution to deploy on load balance servers. See: http://wiki.kooboo.com/?wiki=Kooboo CMS load balance Update Jquery and Jquery ui to the lastest version(Jquery 1.71, Jquery UI 1.8.16). Tree style text content editing. See:h...Extensions for Reactive Extensions (Rxx): Rxx 1.3: Please read the latest release notes for details about what's new. Related Work Items Content SummaryRxx provides the following features. See the Documentation for details. Many IObservable<T> extension methods and IEnumerable<T> extension methods. Many wrappers that convert asynchronous Framework Class Library APIs into observables. Many useful types such as ListSubject<T>, DictionarySubject<T>, CommandSubject, ViewModel, ObservableDynamicObject, Either<TLeft, TRight>, Maybe<T>, Scala...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.47: Properly output escaped characters in CSS identifiers throw an EOF error when parsing a CSS selector that doesn't end in a declaration block chased down a stack-overflow issue with really large JS sources. Needed to flatten out the AST tree for adjacent expression statements that the application merges into a single expression statement, or that already contain large, comma-separated expressions in the original source. fix issue #17569: tie together the -debug switch with the DEBUG defi...New ProjectsCOBOL Bubble Sort: The famous Bubble Sort algorithm using COBOLCross Site Media Dashboard (webpart) for SharePoint video content: View video content in easy to configure dashboard structure. Supports a vast range of video formatsDataObjects.Net Samples: DataObjects.Net SamplesDev Tracking Tool: Dev Tracking Tool is thought to help software developers keeping track of their activities in a fast way, and use these informations for later update of tasks in other informatic systems (i.e.: tracking tasks in TFS and/or other tracking tools).Governance Checklist - Create/manage your Governance Checklist: Governance Checklist - Create/manage your Governance Checklist. SharePoint Governance Checklist generated as a starting point however you can update to your own criteria. Visual Guages to show the status of your governance progresslibspotify.NET - a managed interop library for libspotify: libspotify.NET is a simple interop wrapper library for libspotify written in C#. It enables .NET developers to write applications that can browse, search, and stream digital music from the Spotify platform. This project is compatible with libspotify API version 10.1.16. Requires libspotify.dll, a Spotify premium account, and an application API key. More info on the libspotify API at http://developer.spotify.com/en/libspotify/overview/ Media.Net: All-In-One Media Player for Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8.MisTutoriales: MisTutoriales Ejemplos de programación.mobile video: mobile videoMugen MVVM Toolkit: Mugen MVVM Toolkit makes it easier to develop Silverlight, WPF and WP7 applications using the Model-View-ViewModel design pattern. It is very easy to use. It combines the pattern of DI (dependency injection) and MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel).Project SIMPLE Orca: SIMPLE makes it easier for non-programmers to create simple applications. You'll no longer have to learn an entire language in order to create that simple application you've been stressing over. S imple And I deal M acroed P rogramming L anguage For E aseRelational data Transfer Application: Relational data Transfer Application helps to move data scenarios from One relational database to other Relational database without moving entire tables. Basically this applciation moves a given data row along with its relational data to destination database. rGUI: rGUI is an open source .NET front-end for Robocopy written in C#. It is designed for users already familiar with the Robocopy command-line switches and what they do, but who want the command parameters presented in a visual way.S#: Spontaneous Sharp: A mix of very easy to use c# libraries, born out of spontaneous needs to simplify a large number of programming tasks in .NET C#.SDF - Smart Document Framework: Smart Document Framework offers an alternative to the FlowDocument which provides a simpler rendering engine and allows for better pagination.Shatong: Shatong SystemSPD 2007 Custom Activity Pause Until CheckOut = None: This activity can be added to the beginning of a SharePoint Designer 2007 workflow to pause the workflow until the item is no longer checked out (soft or hard checkout)Spontaneous XNA Library (SXL): Yet another XNA Library that has arisen from various spontaneous needs. Hopefully it can be as helpful to others as it has been to me.TeaFiles.Net - time series storage: TeaFiles.Net is an API for TeaFiles that makes it easy to store and exchange time series data between .Net programs and C++, Python, R and other applications. Written in C#. Find more details about the file specification, other APIs and tools at discretelogics.comTypePipe: TypePipe allows you to modify existing CLR types using a simple, expression-based API. Modifications from several tools and libraries (AOP, IoC etc.) can be combined. Types are generated via Reflection.Emit or user-defined back-ends.UCB_12_1: This is a research projectUCB_12_2: UCB_12_2UCB_12_3: UCB_12_3UCB_12_4: UCB_12_4UCB_12_Common: UCB_12_CommonVG Task Manager: task manager demo project created by Vivek Gupta.WP7 Map Control: Lightweight universal map control for Windows Phone 7xRM#: xRM# is focused on boosting productivity while developing JavaScript customizations for Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011. xRM# provided a platform to scribble code in C# and translating them to JavaScript snippet for xRM customizations. Developers can benefit from structural and coherent flow of using existing C# coding guidelines. Pseudo data types, IntelliSense and Code Documentation reduce code look-ups and increase productivity. xRM# also supports deploying generated scripts as minified ver...

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