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• Entity Framework one-to-one relationship mapping flattened in code

  - by Josh Close

  I have a table structure like so. Address: AddressId int not null primary key identity ...more columns AddressContinental: AddressId int not null primary key identity foreign key to pk of Address County State AddressInternational: AddressId int not null primary key identity foreign key to pk of Address ProvinceRegion I don't have control over schema, this is just the way it is. Now, what I want to do is have a single Address object. public class Address { public int AddressId { get; set; } public County County { get; set; } public State State { get; set } public ProvinceRegion { get; set; } } I want to have EF pull it out of the database as a single entity. When saving, I want to save the single entity and have EF know to split it into the three tables. How would I map this in EF 4.1 Code First? I've been searching around and haven't found anything that meets my case yet. UPDATE An address record will have a record in Address and one in either AddressContinental or AddressInternational, but not both.

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• Why is CoRegisterClassObject creating two extra threads?

  - by Stijn Sanders

  I'm trying to fix a problem that only recently happens on a number of machine's on a VPN. They each run a client application I wrote that exposes a COM automation object. For some strange reason I haven't been able to discover yet, one thread in the application takes up all of the available CPU time, slowing other operation on the machine. In observing the application's strange behaviour, I've noticed it's the third thread started, and if I debug on my machine I notice the first call to CoRegisterClassObject created two extra threads. If the second of these two threads is the one that gets into an infinite loop, I'm not at all shure how to fix this. Where could I check next about what's wrong? Could it have started by one of the recent patches rolled out by Microsoft this last 'patch tuesday'? I had a go with ProcessExplorer to extract a stack trace of the thread: ntoskrnl.exe!ExReleaseResourceLite+0x1a3 ntoskrnl.exe!PsGetContextThread+0x329 WLDAP32.dll!Ordinal325+0x1231 WLDAP32.dll!Ordinal325+0x129e WLDAP32.dll!Ordinal325+0x1178 ntdll.dll!LdrInitializeThunk+0x24 ntdll.dll!LdrShutdownThread+0xe9 kernel32.dll!ExitThread+0x3e kernel32.dll!FreeLibraryAndExitThread+0x1e ole32.dll!StringFromGUID2+0x65d kernel32.dll!GetModuleFileNameA+0x1ba

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• PageableListView Not rendering my data as required

  - by Robin

  i am working on wicket, where i am supposed to show my data's under <tr> <td>Name</td> <td>Single Player Score</td> <td>Double Player Score</td> <td>Total Score</td> </tr> <tr wicket:id="data"> <td wicket:id="name"></td> <td wicket:id="singlePlayerScore"></td> <td wicket:id="doublePlayerScore"></td> <td wicket:id="totalScore"></td> </tr> My Player model class is as: Player class with attributes singlePlayerScore, doublePlayerScore(), name with getter and setter and also a list data obtained from database. Data from SQLQuery is as; name score gamemode A 200 singlePlayerMode A 100 doublePLayerMode B 400 singlePlayerMode B 300 doublePLayerMode dataList == player.getScoreList(); My PageableListView is as: final PageableListView listView = new PageableListView("data",dataList,10){ @Override protected void populateItem(Item item){ player = (Player)item.getModelObject(); item.add(Label("name",player.getName())); item.add(Label("singlePlayerScore",player.getName())); item.add(Label("doublePlayerScore",player.getName())); item.add(Label("totalScore",String.valueOf(player.getSinglePlayerScore()+player.getDoublePlayerScore()))); } } My Problem is as: What view i get is as: Name single Player Score Double Player Score Total Score A 0 100 100 A 200 0 200 B 0 300 300 B 400 0 400 How do i achieve below view on my webpage? Name single Player Score Double Player Score Total Score A 200 100 300 B 400 300 700 Please help me as to why is this happening? I guess my list has size four that's one reason why as to it is rendering the view? So what can i do to get as require rendering view?

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• How do I make a function in SQL Server that accepts a column of data?

  - by brandon k

  I made the following function in SQL Server 2008 earlier this week that takes two parameters and uses them to select a column of "detail" records and returns them as a single varchar list of comma separated values. Now that I get to thinking about it, I would like to take this table and application-specific function and make it more generic. I am not well-versed in defining SQL functions, as this is my first. How can I change this function to accept a single "column" worth of data, so that I can use it in a more generic way? Instead of calling: SELECT ejc_concatFormDetails(formuid, categoryName) I would like to make it work like: SELECT concatColumnValues(SELECT someColumn FROM SomeTable) Here is my function definition: FUNCTION [DNet].[ejc_concatFormDetails](@formuid AS int, @category as VARCHAR(75)) RETURNS VARCHAR(1000) AS BEGIN DECLARE @returnData VARCHAR(1000) DECLARE @currentData VARCHAR(75) DECLARE dataCursor CURSOR FAST_FORWARD FOR SELECT data FROM DNet.ejc_FormDetails WHERE formuid = @formuid AND category = @category SET @returnData = '' OPEN dataCursor FETCH NEXT FROM dataCursor INTO @currentData WHILE (@@FETCH_STATUS = 0) BEGIN SET @returnData = @returnData + ', ' + @currentData FETCH NEXT FROM dataCursor INTO @currentData END CLOSE dataCursor DEALLOCATE dataCursor RETURN SUBSTRING(@returnData,3,1000) END As you can see, I am selecting the column data within my function and then looping over the results with a cursor to build my comma separated varchar. How can I alter this to accept a single parameter that is a result set and then access that result set with a cursor?

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• MySQL Config File for Large System

  - by Jonathon

  We are running MySQL on a Windows 2003 Server Enterpise Edition box. MySQL is about the only program running on the box. We have approx. 8 slaves replicated to it, but my understanding is that having multiple slaves connecting to the same master does not significantly slow down performance, if at all. The master server has 16G RAM, 10 Terabyte drives in RAID 10, and four dual-core processors. From what I have seen from other sites, we have a really robust machine as our master db server. We just upgraded from a machine with only 4G RAM, but with similar hard drives, RAID, etc. It also ran Apache on it, so it was our db server and our application server. It was getting a little slow, so we split the db server onto this new machine and kept the application server on the first machine. We also distributed the application load amongst a few of our other slave servers, which also run the application. The problem is the new db server has mysqld.exe consuming 95-100% of CPU almost all the time and is really causing the app to run slowly. I know we have several queries and table structures that could be better optimized, but since they worked okay on the older, smaller server, I assume that our my.ini (MySQL config) file is not properly configured. Most of what I see on the net is for setting config files on small machines, so can anyone help me get the my.ini file correct for a large dedicated machine like ours? I just don't see how mysqld could get so bogged down! FYI: We have about 100 queries per second. We only use MyISAM tables, so skip-innodb is set in the ini file. And yes, I know it is reading the ini file correctly because I can change some settings (like the server-id and it will kill the server at startup). Here is the my.ini file: #MySQL Server Instance Configuration File # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # Generated by the MySQL Server Instance Configuration Wizard # # # Installation Instructions # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # # On Linux you can copy this file to /etc/my.cnf to set global options, # mysql-data-dir/my.cnf to set server-specific options # (@localstatedir@ for this installation) or to # ~/.my.cnf to set user-specific options. # # On Windows you should keep this file in the installation directory # of your server (e.g. C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server X.Y). To # make sure the server reads the config file use the startup option # "--defaults-file". # # To run run the server from the command line, execute this in a # command line shell, e.g. # mysqld --defaults-file="C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server X.Y\my.ini" # # To install the server as a Windows service manually, execute this in a # command line shell, e.g. # mysqld --install MySQLXY --defaults-file="C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server X.Y\my.ini" # # And then execute this in a command line shell to start the server, e.g. # net start MySQLXY # # # Guildlines for editing this file # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # # In this file, you can use all long options that the program supports. # If you want to know the options a program supports, start the program # with the "--help" option. # # More detailed information about the individual options can also be # found in the manual. # # # CLIENT SECTION # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # # The following options will be read by MySQL client applications. # Note that only client applications shipped by MySQL are guaranteed # to read this section. If you want your own MySQL client program to # honor these values, you need to specify it as an option during the # MySQL client library initialization. # [client] port=3306 [mysql] default-character-set=latin1 # SERVER SECTION # ---------------------------------------------------------------------- # # The following options will be read by the MySQL Server. Make sure that # you have installed the server correctly (see above) so it reads this # file. # [mysqld] # The TCP/IP Port the MySQL Server will listen on port=3306 #Path to installation directory. All paths are usually resolved relative to this. basedir="D:/MySQL/" #Path to the database root datadir="D:/MySQL/data" # The default character set that will be used when a new schema or table is # created and no character set is defined default-character-set=latin1 # The default storage engine that will be used when create new tables when default-storage-engine=MYISAM # Set the SQL mode to strict #sql-mode="STRICT_TRANS_TABLES,NO_AUTO_CREATE_USER,NO_ENGINE_SUBSTITUTION" # we changed this because there are a couple of queries that can get blocked otherwise sql-mode="" #performance configs skip-locking max_allowed_packet = 1M table_open_cache = 512 # The maximum amount of concurrent sessions the MySQL server will # allow. One of these connections will be reserved for a user with # SUPER privileges to allow the administrator to login even if the # connection limit has been reached. max_connections=1510 # Query cache is used to cache SELECT results and later return them # without actual executing the same query once again. Having the query # cache enabled may result in significant speed improvements, if your # have a lot of identical queries and rarely changing tables. See the # "Qcache_lowmem_prunes" status variable to check if the current value # is high enough for your load. # Note: In case your tables change very often or if your queries are # textually different every time, the query cache may result in a # slowdown instead of a performance improvement. query_cache_size=168M # The number of open tables for all threads. Increasing this value # increases the number of file descriptors that mysqld requires. # Therefore you have to make sure to set the amount of open files # allowed to at least 4096 in the variable "open-files-limit" in # section [mysqld_safe] table_cache=3020 # Maximum size for internal (in-memory) temporary tables. If a table # grows larger than this value, it is automatically converted to disk # based table This limitation is for a single table. There can be many # of them. tmp_table_size=30M # How many threads we should keep in a cache for reuse. When a client # disconnects, the client's threads are put in the cache if there aren't # more than thread_cache_size threads from before. This greatly reduces # the amount of thread creations needed if you have a lot of new # connections. (Normally this doesn't give a notable performance # improvement if you have a good thread implementation.) thread_cache_size=64 #*** MyISAM Specific options # The maximum size of the temporary file MySQL is allowed to use while # recreating the index (during REPAIR, ALTER TABLE or LOAD DATA INFILE. # If the file-size would be bigger than this, the index will be created # through the key cache (which is slower). myisam_max_sort_file_size=100G # If the temporary file used for fast index creation would be bigger # than using the key cache by the amount specified here, then prefer the # key cache method. This is mainly used to force long character keys in # large tables to use the slower key cache method to create the index. myisam_sort_buffer_size=64M # Size of the Key Buffer, used to cache index blocks for MyISAM tables. # Do not set it larger than 30% of your available memory, as some memory # is also required by the OS to cache rows. Even if you're not using # MyISAM tables, you should still set it to 8-64M as it will also be # used for internal temporary disk tables. key_buffer_size=3072M # Size of the buffer used for doing full table scans of MyISAM tables. # Allocated per thread, if a full scan is needed. read_buffer_size=2M read_rnd_buffer_size=8M # This buffer is allocated when MySQL needs to rebuild the index in # REPAIR, OPTIMZE, ALTER table statements as well as in LOAD DATA INFILE # into an empty table. It is allocated per thread so be careful with # large settings. sort_buffer_size=2M #*** INNODB Specific options *** innodb_data_home_dir="D:/MySQL InnoDB Datafiles/" # Use this option if you have a MySQL server with InnoDB support enabled # but you do not plan to use it. This will save memory and disk space # and speed up some things. skip-innodb # Additional memory pool that is used by InnoDB to store metadata # information. If InnoDB requires more memory for this purpose it will # start to allocate it from the OS. As this is fast enough on most # recent operating systems, you normally do not need to change this # value. SHOW INNODB STATUS will display the current amount used. innodb_additional_mem_pool_size=11M # If set to 1, InnoDB will flush (fsync) the transaction logs to the # disk at each commit, which offers full ACID behavior. If you are # willing to compromise this safety, and you are running small # transactions, you may set this to 0 or 2 to reduce disk I/O to the # logs. Value 0 means that the log is only written to the log file and # the log file flushed to disk approximately once per second. Value 2 # means the log is written to the log file at each commit, but the log # file is only flushed to disk approximately once per second. innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 # The size of the buffer InnoDB uses for buffering log data. As soon as # it is full, InnoDB will have to flush it to disk. As it is flushed # once per second anyway, it does not make sense to have it very large # (even with long transactions). innodb_log_buffer_size=6M # InnoDB, unlike MyISAM, uses a buffer pool to cache both indexes and # row data. The bigger you set this the less disk I/O is needed to # access data in tables. On a dedicated database server you may set this # parameter up to 80% of the machine physical memory size. Do not set it # too large, though, because competition of the physical memory may # cause paging in the operating system. Note that on 32bit systems you # might be limited to 2-3.5G of user level memory per process, so do not # set it too high. innodb_buffer_pool_size=500M # Size of each log file in a log group. You should set the combined size # of log files to about 25%-100% of your buffer pool size to avoid # unneeded buffer pool flush activity on log file overwrite. However, # note that a larger logfile size will increase the time needed for the # recovery process. innodb_log_file_size=100M # Number of threads allowed inside the InnoDB kernel. The optimal value # depends highly on the application, hardware as well as the OS # scheduler properties. A too high value may lead to thread thrashing. innodb_thread_concurrency=10 #replication settings (this is the master) log-bin=log server-id = 1 Thanks for all the help. It is greatly appreciated.

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• Why is Log4Net not creating log file in production?

  - by uriDium

  I am using VS2005, a website project, a web deployment project and Log4Net. I can use logging when I am developing locally. I can see the log files and everything is fine. When I build my website, (using the web deployment project), I use the deploy as a single DLL option. When I then check the locations of where my log files should be I cannot see any files. Is there a way to troubleshoot this. I don't think adding the debug value to the App Settings will help because I don't have a console because it is a website. EDIT I don't want the 150 rep to go to waste so one last time. I compared the internal trace from my dev environment to the trace from the production. My dev environment trace shows the call the Xml Configurator where the production one does not. I have code in the global.asax on application_start() method. I put debug code in there and it is getting called in dev but not in production. I think this is where the web deployment project is causing some issues. Does the global.asax get compiled into the single DLL? When I do a build in the deployment directory I see a global.compiled file. Must this go into the bin folder in production? Or is the global.asax code in the single DLL? Having both in the bin folder or the just the DLL didn't change anything.

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• .net remoting - Better solution to wait for a service to initialize ?

  - by CitizenInsane

  Context I have a client application (which i cannot modify, i.e. i only have the binary) that needs to run from time to time external commands that depends on a resource which is very long to initialize (about 20s). I thus decided to initialize this resource once for all in a "CommandServer.exe" application (single instance in the system tray) and let my client application call an intermediate "ExecuteCommand.exe" program that uses .net remoting to perform the operation on the server. The "ExecuteCommand.exe" is in charge for starting the server on first call and then leave it alive to speed up further commands. The service: public interface IMyService { void ExecuteCommand(string[] args); } The "CommandServer.exe" (using WindowsFormsApplicationBase for single instance management + user friendly splash screen during resource initializations): private void onStartupFirstInstance(object sender, StartupEventArgs e) { // Register communication channel channel = new TcpServerChannel("CommandServerChannel", 8234); ChannelServices.RegisterChannel(channel, false); // Register service var resource = veryLongToInitialize(); service = new MyServiceImpl(resource); RemotingServices.Marshal(service, "CommandServer"); // Create icon in system tray notifyIcon = new NotifyIcon(); ... } The intermediate "ExecuteCommand.exe": static void Main(string[] args) { startCommandServerIfRequired(); var channel = new TcpClientChannel(); ChannelServices.RegisterChannel(channel, false); var service = (IMyService)Activator.GetObject(typeof(IMyService), "tcp://localhost:8234/CommandServer"); service.RunCommand(args); } Problem As the server is very long to start (about 20s to initialize the required resources), the "ExecuteCommand.exe" fails on service.RunCommand(args) line because the server is yet not available. Question Is there a elegant way I can tune the delay before to receive "service not available" when calling service.RunCommand ? NB1: Currently I'm working around the issue by adding a mutex in server to indicate for complete initiliazation and have "ExecuteCommand.exe" to wait for this mutex before to call service.RunCommand. NB2: I have no background with .net remoting, nor WCF which is recommended replacer. (I chose .net remoting because this looked easier to set-up for this single shot issue in running external commands).

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• Can the size of a structure change after compiled?

  - by Sarah Altiva

  Hi, suppose you have the following structure: #include <windows.h> // BOOL is here. #include <stdio.h> typedef struct { BOOL someBool; char someCharArray[100]; int someIntValue; BOOL moreBools, anotherOne, yetAgain; char someOthercharArray[23]; int otherInt; } Test; int main(void) { printf("Structure size: %d, BOOL size: %d.\n", sizeof(Test), sizeof(BOOL)); } When I compile this piece of code in my machine (32-bit OS) the output is the following: Structure size: 148, BOOL size: 4. I would like to know if, once compiled, these values may change depending on the machine which runs the program. E.g.: if I ran this program in a 64-bit machine, would the output be the same? Or once it's compiled it'll always be the same? Thank you very much, and forgive me if the answer to this question is obvious...

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• .NET 4 ... Parallel.ForEach() question

  - by CirrusFlyer

  I understand that the new TPL (Task Parallel Library) has implemented the Parallel.ForEach() such that it works with "expressed parallelism." Meaning, it does not guarantee that your delegates will run in multiple threads, but rather it checks to see if the host platform has multiple cores, and if true, only then does it distribute the work across the cores (essentially 1 thread per core). If the host system does not have multiple cores (getting harder and harder to find such a computer) then it will run your code sequenceally like a "regular" foreach loop would. Pretty cool stuff, frankly. Normally I would do something like the following to place my long running operation on a background thread from the ThreadPool: ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem( new WaitCallback(targetMethod), new Object2PassIn() ); In a situation whereby the host computer only has a single core does the TPL's Parallel.ForEach() automatically place the invocation on a background thread? Or, should I manaully invoke any TPL calls from a background thead so that if I am executing from a single core computer at least that logic will be off of the GUI's dispatching thread? My concern is if I leave the TPL in charge of all this I want to ensure if it determines it's a single core box that it still marshalls the code that's inside of the Parallel.ForEach() loop on to a background thread like I would have done, so as to not block my GUI. Thanks for any thoughts or advice you may have ...

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• understanding and implementing Boids

  - by alphablender

  So I'm working on porting Boids to Brightscript, based on the pseudocode here: http://www.kfish.org/boids/pseudocode.html I'm trying to understand the data structures involved, for example is Velocity a single value, or is it a 3D value, ie velocity={x,y,z} It seems as if the pseudocode seems to mix this up where sometimes it has an equation that incudes both vectors and single-value items: v1 = rule1(b) v2 = rule2(b) v3 = rule3(b) b.velocity = b.velocity + v1 + v2 + v3 If Velocity is a tripartite value then this would make sense, but I'm not sure. So my first question here is, is this the correct datastructure for a single boid based on the Pseudocode on that page: boid={position:{px:0,py:0,pz:0},velocity:{x:0,y:0,z:0},vector:{x:0,y:0,z:0},pc:{x:0,y:0,z:0},pv:{x:0,y:0,z:0}) where pc=perceived center, pv= perceived velocity I"ve implemented a vector_add, vector_sub, vector_div, and vector boolean functions. The reason I'm starting from this pseudocode is I've not been able to find anything else that is as readable, but it still leaves me with lots of questions as the data structures are not explicitly defined for each variable. (edit) here's a good example of what i'm talking about: IF |b.position - bJ.position| < 100 THEN if b.position - b[j].position are both 3D coordinates, how can they be considered "less than 100" unless they are < {100,100,100} ? Maybe that is what I need to do here, use a vector comparison function?

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• Tips on refactoring an Android prototype

  - by Brad

  I have an Android project I've inherited from another developer. The original code was hacked together using a single View and a single Activity. The view class has a State variable that is switched on during input and rendering. Each "screen" is a single bitmap rendered directly onto the screen. There are no layouts used at all. To make things even worse each variable in both the View and Activity classes were all declared public static and would access each other frequently. I've reworked the code so it is now somewhat manageable, but it's still in those original two classes. This is my first decently sized Android app so I'm not completely sure where to go next. From the looks of things, each "screen" should have its own View and Activity. Is this the general practice? If so I need some way to share data between the separate Activities. I've read suggestions to use a Singleton class that holds generic data. Is there any other ways that are more built into the Android framework? Thanks in advance.

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• Need help with transferring data between MySQL db's using PHP

  - by JM4

  In one of the sites I manage, the client has decided to take on ACH/Bank Account administration where it was previously outsourced. As a result, the information submitted in our online form which used to simply store in a single database for processing now must sit in 'limbo' until the funds used for payment have been verified. My original plan is as follows: At the end of an enrollment, all form data is collected and stored in a single MySQL database. Our internal administrator will receive an email notification reminding him enrollments have taken place. He will process the ACH information collected and wait the 3-4 business days needed for payment to clear. Once the payment information has been returned as Good (haven't considered what I will do with the 'bad' yet), the administrator can log into a secure portal which allows him to click a button to 'process' the full information once compared and verified. the process is simplified as: Enrollment complete: data stored in DB 'A' Funds verified and link clicked: data from 'A' is copied to DB 'B' and 'A' is deleted. I have run similar processes with CSV output before and simply used //transfers old data to archive $transfer = mysql_query('INSERT INTO '.$archive.' SELECT * FROM '.$table) or die(mysql_error()); //empties existing table $query = mysql_query('TRUNCATE TABLE '.$table) or die(mysql_error()); but in those cases, ALL data returned was copied and deleted. I only want to copy and delete a single record. Any idea how to accomplish this?

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• How to do a partial database backup and restore?

  - by Workshop Alex

  Simple problem. I'm working on a single SQL Server database which is shared between several offices. Each office has their own schema inside this database, thus dividing the database in logical pieces. (Plus one schema that is shared between multiple offices.) The database is stored on a dedicated server and we use a single database to keep the backup/restore procedure easier. The problem, however, is that the Accounting Office might be modifying a lot of data and then the Secretary Office makes a mistake which requires restoration of a backup. Unfortunately, restoring the backup means that Accounting will lose their recently added data. So, the alternative solution is by restoring the backup into a new database, remove the data from the old accounting schema and move the data for accounting only from the backup top the original database. This is the current solution and it's time-consuming and error-prone. So, is there a way to make backups of a single schema, possibly through code? And then to restore just that schema, probably through code too?

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• What's a good way to organize a large collection of personal scripts using git?

  - by spooky note

  I have a large collection of my personal scripts that I would like to start versioning using Git. I've previously organized my code as follows: ~/code/python/projects/ (for large stuff, each project contained in an individual folder) ~/code/python/scripts/ (single file scripts all contained in this directory) ~/code/python/sandbox/ (my testing area) ~/code/python/docs/ (downloaded documentation) ~/code/java/... (as above) Now i'm going to start versioning my code using git, so that I can have history and backup all my code to a remote server. I know if I were using SVN I would just keep my entire "~/code/" directory in a large repository, but I understand this is not a good way to do things with Git. Most info I've seen online suggests keeping all my project folders in a single place (as in, no separate directories for python or java) with each project containing it's own git repository, and simply having a "snippets" directory containing all single-file scripts/experiments that can be converted into projects at a later date. But I'm not sure how I feel about consolidating all of my code directories into one area. Is there a good way to keep my separate code directories intact, or is it not worth the effort? Maybe I'm just attached to the separate code directories because I've never known anything else... Also (as a side note), I'd like to quickly be able to see a chronological history of all my projects and scripts. So I can see which projects I created most recently. I used to do this by keeping a number at the beginning of all my projects, 002project, 003project. Is there automatic or easy way to do this in git without having to add a number to all of the project names? I'm open to any practical or philosophical code organizing advice you have. Thanks!!!

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• In sync query calls, one query causing other query to run slower. Why?

  - by Irchi

  Sorry for the long question, but I think this is an interesting situation and I couldn't find any explanations for it: I was involved in optimization of an application that performed a large number of sequential SELECT and INSERT statements on a single dedicated SQL Server database. The process needs to INSERT a large number of records into a table, but for each of them there should be some value mappings, which performed using SELECT statements on another table in the same database. For a specific execution, it took 90 minutes to run. I used a profiler (JProfiler - the application is Java-based) to determine how much time does each part of the application take. It yields that 60% of the time was spent on INSERT method calls, and almost 20% on SELECT calls (the rest distributed in other parts). After some trials, I came to this situation: I commented out the INSERT query that took 60% of the time. I was expecting for the total run time to be around 35 minutes, as I have removed 60% of the 90 minutes. But the whole process took the same 90 minutes (doing only SELECTs and nothing else), but each SELECT took longer this time! Everything was running sync, there were no async calls. And there was only one single thread of execution. SELECT and INSERT queries are very simple, and don't have anything special, and they are on different tables, but on the same DB. I tested with both the DB on the application machine, and on a remote network machine. I can't think of any explanation for this, as the Profiler (Application profiler, not SQL Profiler) reported the changes in the method call times, and by removing INSERT statements SELECT statements took longer to run. Can anyone give me some kind of explanation of what could have happened? (there can't be cache / query optimization stuff, because the queries were run in sync, and in a single thread, and it was far from affecting the cache this much) I should note that the bottleneck of the speed was in SQL server, using most of the CPU time.

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• Java socket bug on linux (0xFF sent, -3 received)

  - by Marius

  While working on a WebSocket server in Java I came across this strange bug. I've reduced it down to two small java files, one is the server, the other is the client. The client simply sends 0x00, the string Hello and then 0xFF (per the WebSocket specification). On my windows machine, the server prints the following: Listening byte: 0 72 101 108 108 111 recieved: 'Hello' While on my unix box the same code prints the following: Listening byte: 0 72 101 108 108 111 -3 Instead of receiving 0xFF it gets -3, never breaks out of the loop and never prints what it has received. The important part of the code looks like this: byte b = (byte)in.read(); System.out.println("byte: "+b); StringBuilder input = new StringBuilder(); b = (byte)in.read(); while((b & 0xFF) != 0xFF){ input.append((char)b); System.out.print(b+" "); b = (byte)in.read(); } inputLine = input.toString(); System.out.println("recieved: '" + inputLine+"'"); if(inputLine.equals("bye")){ break; } I've also uploaded the two files to my server: Server.java Client.java My Windows machine is running windows 7 and my Linux machine is running Debian

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• Is it possible to get a truly unique id for a particular JVM instance?

  - by Uri

  I need a way to uniquely and permanently identify an instance of the JVM from within Java code running in that JVM. That is, if I have two JVMs running at the same time on the same machine, each is distinguishable. It is also distinguishable from running JVMs on other machines and from future executions on the same machine even if the process id is reused. I figure I could implement something like this by identifying the start time, the machine MAC, and the process id, and combining them in some way. I'm wondering if there is some standard way to achieve this. Update: I see that everyone recommended a UUID for the entire session. That seems like a good idea though possibly a little too heavyweight. Here is my problem though: I want to use the JVM id to create multiple unique identifiers in each JVM execution that somehow incorporate the JVM instance. My understanding is that you shouldn't really mix other numbers into a UUID because uniqueness is no longer guaranteed. An alternative is to make the UUID into a string and chain it, but then it becomes too long. Any ideas on overcoming this?

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• Parallel features in .Net 4.0

  - by Jonathan.Peppers

  I have been going over the practicality of some of the new parallel features in .Net 4.0. Say I have code like so: foreach (var item in myEnumerable) myDatabase.Insert(item.ConvertToDatabase()); Imagine myDatabase.Insert is performing some work to insert to a SQL database. Theoretically you could write: Parallel.ForEach(myEnumerable, item => myDatabase.Insert(item.ConvertToDatabase())); And automatically you get code that takes advantage of multiple cores. But what if myEnumerable can only be interacted with by a single thread? Will the Parallel class enumerate by a single thread and only dispatch the result to worker threads in the loop? What if myDatabase can only be interacted with by a single thread? It would certainly not be better to make a database connection per iteration of the loop. Finally, what if my "var item" happens to be a UserControl or something that must be interacted with on the UI thread? What design pattern should I follow to solve these problems? It's looking to me that switching over to Parallel/PLinq/etc is not exactly easy when you are dealing with real-world applications.

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• Using FiddlerCore to capture HTTP Requests with .NET

  - by Rick Strahl

  Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on my Web load testing utility West Wind WebSurge. One of the key components of a load testing tool is the ability to capture URLs effectively so that you can play them back later under load. One of the options in WebSurge for capturing URLs is to use its built-in capture tool which acts as an HTTP proxy to capture any HTTP and HTTPS traffic from most Windows HTTP clients, including Web Browsers as well as standalone Windows applications and services. To make this happen, I used Eric Lawrence’s awesome FiddlerCore library, which provides most of the functionality of his desktop Fiddler application, all rolled into an easy to use library that you can plug into your own applications. FiddlerCore makes it almost too easy to capture HTTP content! For WebSurge I needed to capture all HTTP traffic in order to capture the full HTTP request – URL, headers and any content posted by the client. The result of what I ended up creating is this semi-generic capture form: In this post I’m going to demonstrate how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to build this HTTP Capture Form.  If you want to jump right in here are the links to get Telerik’s Fiddler Core and the code for the demo provided here. FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore on NuGet Show me the Code (WebSurge Integration code from GitHub) Download the WinForms Sample Form West Wind Web Surge (example implementation in live app) Note that FiddlerCore is bound by a license for commercial usage – see license.txt in the FiddlerCore distribution for details. Integrating FiddlerCore FiddlerCore is a library that simply plugs into your application. You can download it from the Telerik site and manually add the assemblies to your project, or you can simply install the NuGet package via:       PM> Install-Package FiddlerCore The library consists of the FiddlerCore.dll as well as a couple of support libraries (CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll) that are used for installing SSL certificates. I’ll have more on SSL captures and certificate installation later in this post. But first let’s see how easy it is to use FiddlerCore to capture HTTP content by looking at how to build the above capture form. Capturing HTTP Content Once the library is installed it’s super easy to hook up Fiddler functionality. Fiddler includes a number of static class methods on the FiddlerApplication object that can be called to hook up callback events as well as actual start monitoring HTTP URLs. In the following code directly lifted from WebSurge, I configure a few filter options on Form level object, from the user inputs shown on the form by assigning it to a capture options object. In the live application these settings are persisted configuration values, but in the demo they are one time values initialized and set on the form. Once these options are set, I hook up the AfterSessionComplete event to capture every URL that passes through the proxy after the request is completed and start up the Proxy service:void Start() { if (tbIgnoreResources.Checked) CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = true; else CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources = false; string strProcId = txtProcessId.Text; if (strProcId.Contains('-')) strProcId = strProcId.Substring(strProcId.IndexOf('-') + 1).Trim(); strProcId = strProcId.Trim(); int procId = 0; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(strProcId)) { if (!int.TryParse(strProcId, out procId)) procId = 0; } CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId = procId; CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain = txtCaptureDomain.Text; FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete += FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; FiddlerApplication.Startup(8888, true, true, true); } The key lines for FiddlerCore are just the last two lines of code that include the event hookup code as well as the Startup() method call. Here I only hook up to the AfterSessionComplete event but there are a number of other events that hook various stages of the HTTP request cycle you can also hook into. Other events include BeforeRequest, BeforeResponse, RequestHeadersAvailable, ResponseHeadersAvailable and so on. In my case I want to capture the request data and I actually have several options to capture this data. AfterSessionComplete is the last event that fires in the request sequence and it’s the most common choice to capture all request and response data. I could have used several other events, but AfterSessionComplete is one place where you can look both at the request and response data, so this will be the most common place to hook into if you’re capturing content. The implementation of AfterSessionComplete is responsible for capturing all HTTP request headers and it looks something like this:private void FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete(Session sess) { // Ignore HTTPS connect requests if (sess.RequestMethod == "CONNECT") return; if (CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId > 0) { if (sess.LocalProcessID != 0 && sess.LocalProcessID != CaptureConfiguration.ProcessId) return; } if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain)) { if (sess.hostname.ToLower() != CaptureConfiguration.CaptureDomain.Trim().ToLower()) return; } if (CaptureConfiguration.IgnoreResources) { string url = sess.fullUrl.ToLower(); var extensions = CaptureConfiguration.ExtensionFilterExclusions; foreach (var ext in extensions) { if (url.Contains(ext)) return; } var filters = CaptureConfiguration.UrlFilterExclusions; foreach (var urlFilter in filters) { if (url.Contains(urlFilter)) return; } } if (sess == null || sess.oRequest == null || sess.oRequest.headers == null) return; string headers = sess.oRequest.headers.ToString(); var reqBody = sess.GetRequestBodyAsString(); // if you wanted to capture the response //string respHeaders = session.oResponse.headers.ToString(); //var respBody = session.GetResponseBodyAsString(); // replace the HTTP line to inject full URL string firstLine = sess.RequestMethod + " " + sess.fullUrl + " " + sess.oRequest.headers.HTTPVersion; int at = headers.IndexOf("\r\n"); if (at < 0) return; headers = firstLine + "\r\n" + headers.Substring(at + 1); string output = headers + "\r\n" + (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(reqBody) ? reqBody + "\r\n" : string.Empty) + Separator + "\r\n\r\n"; BeginInvoke(new Action<string>((text) => { txtCapture.AppendText(text); UpdateButtonStatus(); }), output); } The code starts by filtering out some requests based on the CaptureOptions I set before the capture is started. These options/filters are applied when requests actually come in. This is very useful to help narrow down the requests that are captured for playback based on options the user picked. I find it useful to limit requests to a certain domain for captures, as well as filtering out some request types like static resources – images, css, scripts etc. This is of course optional, but I think it’s a common scenario and WebSurge makes good use of this feature. AfterSessionComplete like other FiddlerCore events, provides a Session object parameter which contains all the request and response details. There are oRequest and oResponse objects to hold their respective data. In my case I’m interested in the raw request headers and body only, as you can see in the commented code you can also retrieve the response headers and body. Here the code captures the request headers and body and simply appends the output to the textbox on the screen. Note that the Fiddler events are asynchronous, so in order to display the content in the UI they have to be marshaled back the UI thread with BeginInvoke, which here simply takes the generated headers and appends it to the existing textbox test on the form. As each request is processed, the headers are captured and appended to the bottom of the textbox resulting in a Session HTTP capture in the format that Web Surge internally supports, which is basically raw request headers with a customized 1st HTTP Header line that includes the full URL rather than a server relative URL. When the capture is done the user can either copy the raw HTTP session to the clipboard, or directly save it to file. This raw capture format is the same format WebSurge and also Fiddler use to import/export request data. While this code is application specific, it demonstrates the kind of logic that you can easily apply to the request capture process, which is one of the reasonsof why FiddlerCore is so powerful. You get to choose what content you want to look up as part of your own application logic and you can then decide how to capture or use that data as part of your application. The actual captured data in this case is only a string. The user can edit the data by hand or in the the case of WebSurge, save it to disk and automatically open the captured session as a new load test. Stopping the FiddlerCore Proxy Finally to stop capturing requests you simply disconnect the event handler and call the FiddlerApplication.ShutDown() method:void Stop() { FiddlerApplication.AfterSessionComplete -= FiddlerApplication_AfterSessionComplete; if (FiddlerApplication.IsStarted()) FiddlerApplication.Shutdown(); } As you can see, adding HTTP capture functionality to an application is very straight forward. FiddlerCore offers tons of features I’m not even touching on here – I suspect basic captures are the most common scenario, but a lot of different things can be done with FiddlerCore’s simple API interface. Sky’s the limit! The source code for this sample capture form (WinForms) is provided as part of this article. Adding Fiddler Certificates with FiddlerCore One of the sticking points in West Wind WebSurge has been that if you wanted to capture HTTPS/SSL traffic, you needed to have the full version of Fiddler and have HTTPS decryption enabled. Essentially you had to use Fiddler to configure HTTPS decryption and the associated installation of the Fiddler local client certificate that is used for local decryption of incoming SSL traffic. While this works just fine, requiring to have Fiddler installed and then using a separate application to configure the SSL functionality isn’t ideal. Fortunately FiddlerCore actually includes the tools to register the Fiddler Certificate directly using FiddlerCore. Why does Fiddler need a Certificate in the first Place? Fiddler and FiddlerCore are essentially HTTP proxies which means they inject themselves into the HTTP conversation by re-routing HTTP traffic to a special HTTP port (8888 by default for Fiddler) and then forward the HTTP data to the original client. Fiddler injects itself as the system proxy in using the WinInet Windows settings  which are the same settings that Internet Explorer uses and that are configured in the Windows and Internet Explorer Internet Settings dialog. Most HTTP clients running on Windows pick up and apply these system level Proxy settings before establishing new HTTP connections and that’s why most clients automatically work once Fiddler – or FiddlerCore/WebSurge are running. For plain HTTP requests this just works – Fiddler intercepts the HTTP requests on the proxy port and then forwards them to the original port (80 for HTTP and 443 for SSL typically but it could be any port). For SSL however, this is not quite as simple – Fiddler can easily act as an HTTPS/SSL client to capture inbound requests from the server, but when it forwards the request to the client it has to also act as an SSL server and provide a certificate that the client trusts. This won’t be the original certificate from the remote site, but rather a custom local certificate that effectively simulates an SSL connection between the proxy and the client. If there is no custom certificate configured for Fiddler the SSL request fails with a certificate validation error. The key for this to work is that a custom certificate has to be installed that the HTTPS client trusts on the local machine. For a much more detailed description of the process you can check out Eric Lawrence’s blog post on Certificates. If you’re using the desktop version of Fiddler you can install a local certificate into the Windows certificate store. Fiddler proper does this from the Options menu: This operation does several things: It installs the Fiddler Root Certificate It sets trust to this Root Certificate A new client certificate is generated for each HTTPS site monitored Certificate Installation with FiddlerCore You can also provide this same functionality using FiddlerCore which includes a CertMaker class. Using CertMaker is straight forward to use and it provides an easy way to create some simple helpers that can install and uninstall a Fiddler Root certificate:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } return true; } InstallCertificate() works by first checking whether the root certificate is already installed and if it isn’t goes ahead and creates a new one. The process of creating the certificate is a two step process – first the actual certificate is created and then it’s moved into the certificate store to become trusted. I’m not sure why you’d ever split these operations up since a cert created without trust isn’t going to be of much value, but there are two distinct steps. When you trigger the trustRootCert() method, a message box will pop up on the desktop that lets you know that you’re about to trust a local private certificate. This is a security feature to ensure that you really want to trust the Fiddler root since you are essentially installing a man in the middle certificate. It’s quite safe to use this generated root certificate, because it’s been specifically generated for your machine and thus is not usable from external sources, the only way to use this certificate in a trusted way is from the local machine. IOW, unless somebody has physical access to your machine, there’s no useful way to hijack this certificate and use it for nefarious purposes (see Eric’s post for more details). Once the Root certificate has been installed, FiddlerCore/Fiddler create new certificates for each site that is connected to with HTTPS. You can end up with quite a few temporary certificates in your certificate store. To uninstall you can either use Fiddler and simply uncheck the Decrypt HTTPS traffic option followed by the remove Fiddler certificates button, or you can use FiddlerCore’s CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts() which removes the root cert and any of the intermediary certificates Fiddler created. Keep in mind that when you uninstall you uninstall the certificate for both FiddlerCore and Fiddler, so use UninstallCertificate() with care and realize that you might affect the Fiddler application’s operation by doing so as well. When to check for an installed Certificate Note that the check to see if the root certificate exists is pretty fast, while the actual process of installing the certificate is a relatively slow operation that even on a fast machine takes a few seconds. Further the trust operation pops up a message box so you probably don’t want to install the certificate repeatedly. Since the check for the root certificate is fast, you can easily put a call to InstallCertificate() in any capture startup code – in which case the certificate installation only triggers when a certificate is in fact not installed. Personally I like to make certificate installation explicit – just like Fiddler does, so in WebSurge I use a small drop down option on the menu to install or uninstall the SSL certificate:   This code calls the InstallCertificate and UnInstallCertificate functions respectively – the experience with this is similar to what you get in Fiddler with the extra dialog box popping up to prompt confirmation for installation of the root certificate. Once the cert is installed you can then capture SSL requests. There’s a gotcha however… Gotcha: FiddlerCore Certificates don’t stick by Default When I originally tried to use the Fiddler certificate installation I ran into an odd problem. I was able to install the certificate and immediately after installation was able to capture HTTPS requests. Then I would exit the application and come back in and try the same HTTPS capture again and it would fail due to a missing certificate. CertMaker.rootCertExists() would return false after every restart and if re-installed the certificate a new certificate would get added to the certificate store resulting in a bunch of duplicated root certificates with different keys. What the heck? CertMaker and BcMakeCert create non-sticky CertificatesI turns out that FiddlerCore by default uses different components from what the full version of Fiddler uses. Fiddler uses a Windows utility called MakeCert.exe to create the Fiddler Root certificate. FiddlerCore however installs the CertMaker.dll and BCMakeCert.dll assemblies, which use a different crypto library (Bouncy Castle) for certificate creation than MakeCert.exe which uses the Windows Crypto API. The assemblies provide support for non-windows operation for Fiddler under Mono, as well as support for some non-Windows certificate platforms like iOS and Android for decryption. The bottom line is that the FiddlerCore provided bouncy castle assemblies are not sticky by default as the certificates created with them are not cached as they are in Fiddler proper. To get certificates to ‘stick’ you have to explicitly cache the certificates in Fiddler’s internal preferences. A cache aware version of InstallCertificate looks something like this:public static bool InstallCertificate() { if (!CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.createRootCert()) return false; if (!CertMaker.trustRootCert()) return false; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", null); App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = FiddlerApplication.Prefs.GetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", null); } return true; } public static bool UninstallCertificate() { if (CertMaker.rootCertExists()) { if (!CertMaker.removeFiddlerGeneratedCerts(true)) return false; } App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert = null; App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key = null; return true; } In this code I store the Fiddler cert and private key in an application configuration settings that’s stored with the application settings (App.Configuration.UrlCapture object). These settings automatically persist when WebSurge is shut down. The values are read out of Fiddler’s internal preferences store which is set after a new certificate has been created. Likewise I clear out the configuration settings when the certificate is uninstalled. In order for these setting to be used you have to also load the configuration settings into the Fiddler preferences *before* a call to rootCertExists() is made. I do this in the capture form’s constructor:public FiddlerCapture(StressTestForm form) { InitializeComponent(); CaptureConfiguration = App.Configuration.UrlCapture; MainForm = form; if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert)) { FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.key", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Key); FiddlerApplication.Prefs.SetStringPref("fiddler.certmaker.bc.cert", App.Configuration.UrlCapture.Cert); }} This is kind of a drag to do and not documented anywhere that I could find, so hopefully this will save you some grief if you want to work with the stock certificate logic that installs with FiddlerCore. MakeCert provides sticky Certificates and the same functionality as Fiddler But there’s actually an easier way. If you want to skip the above Fiddler preference configuration code in your application you can choose to distribute MakeCert.exe instead of certmaker.dll and bcmakecert.dll. When you use MakeCert.exe, the certificates settings are stored in Windows so they are available without any custom configuration inside of your application. It’s easier to integrate and as long as you run on Windows and you don’t need to support iOS or Android devices is simply easier to deal with. To integrate into your project, you can remove the reference to CertMaker.dll (and the BcMakeCert.dll assembly) from your project. Instead copy MakeCert.exe into your output folder. To make sure MakeCert.exe gets pushed out, include MakeCert.exe in your project and set the Build Action to None, and Copy to Output Directory to Copy if newer. Note that the CertMaker.dll reference in the project has been removed and on disk the files for Certmaker.dll, as well as the BCMakeCert.dll files on disk. Keep in mind that these DLLs are resources of the FiddlerCore NuGet package, so updating the package may end up pushing those files back into your project. Once MakeCert.exe is distributed FiddlerCore checks for it first before using the assemblies so as long as MakeCert.exe exists it’ll be used for certificate creation (at least on Windows). Summary FiddlerCore is a pretty sweet tool, and it’s absolutely awesome that we get to plug in most of the functionality of Fiddler right into our own applications. A few years back I tried to build this sort of functionality myself for an app and ended up giving up because it’s a big job to get HTTP right – especially if you need to support SSL. FiddlerCore now provides that functionality as a turnkey solution that can be plugged into your own apps easily. The only downside is FiddlerCore’s documentation for more advanced features like certificate installation which is pretty sketchy. While for the most part FiddlerCore’s feature set is easy to work with without any documentation, advanced features are often not intuitive to gleam by just using Intellisense or the FiddlerCore help file reference (which is not terribly useful). While Eric Lawrence is very responsive on his forum and on Twitter, there simply isn’t much useful documentation on Fiddler/FiddlerCore available online. If you run into trouble the forum is probably the first place to look and then ask a question if you can’t find the answer. The best documentation you can find is Eric’s Fiddler Book which covers a ton of functionality of Fiddler and FiddlerCore. The book is a great reference to Fiddler’s feature set as well as providing great insights into the HTTP protocol. The second half of the book that gets into the innards of HTTP is an excellent read for anybody who wants to know more about some of the more arcane aspects and special behaviors of HTTP – it’s well worth the read. While the book has tons of information in a very readable format, it’s unfortunately not a great reference as it’s hard to find things in the book and because it’s not available online you can’t electronically search for the great content in it. But it’s hard to complain about any of this given the obvious effort and love that’s gone into this awesome product for all of these years. A mighty big thanks to Eric Lawrence  for having created this useful tool that so many of us use all the time, and also to Telerik for picking up Fiddler/FiddlerCore and providing Eric the resources to support and improve this wonderful tool full time and keeping it free for all. Kudos! Resources FiddlerCore Download FiddlerCore NuGet Fiddler Capture Sample Form Fiddler Capture Form in West Wind WebSurge (GitHub) Eric Lawrence’s Fiddler Book© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in .NET  HTTP   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Creating STA COM compatible ASP.NET Applications

  - by Rick Strahl

  When building ASP.NET applications that interface with old school COM objects like those created with VB6 or Visual FoxPro (MTDLL), it's extremely important that the threads that are serving requests use Single Threaded Apartment Threading. STA is a COM built-in technology that allows essentially single threaded components to operate reliably in a multi-threaded environment. STA's guarantee that COM objects instantiated on a specific thread stay on that specific thread and any access to a COM object from another thread automatically marshals that thread to the STA thread. The end effect is that you can have multiple threads, but a COM object instance lives on a fixed never changing thread. ASP.NET by default uses MTA (multi-threaded apartment) threads which are truly free spinning threads that pay no heed to COM object marshaling. This is vastly more efficient than STA threading which has a bit of overhead in determining whether it's OK to run code on a given thread or whether some sort of thread/COM marshaling needs to occur. MTA COM components can be very efficient, but STA COM components in a multi-threaded environment always tend to have a fair amount of overhead. It's amazing how much COM Interop I still see today so while it seems really old school to be talking about this topic, it's actually quite apropos for me as I have many customers using legacy COM systems that need to interface with other .NET applications. In this post I'm consolidating some of the hacks I've used to integrate with various ASP.NET technologies when using STA COM Components. STA in ASP.NET Support for STA threading in the ASP.NET framework is fairly limited. Specifically only the original ASP.NET WebForms technology supports STA threading directly via its STA Page Handler implementation or what you might know as ASPCOMPAT mode. For WebForms running STA components is as easy as specifying the ASPCOMPAT attribute in the @Page tag:<%@ Page Language="C#" AspCompat="true" %> which runs the page in STA mode. Removing it runs in MTA mode. Simple. Unfortunately all other ASP.NET technologies built on top of the core ASP.NET engine do not support STA natively. So if you want to use STA COM components in MVC or with class ASMX Web Services, there's no automatic way like the ASPCOMPAT keyword available. So what happens when you run an STA COM component in an MTA application? In low volume environments - nothing much will happen. The COM objects will appear to work just fine as there are no simultaneous thread interactions and the COM component will happily run on a single thread or multiple single threads one at a time. So for testing running components in MTA environments may appear to work just fine. However as load increases and threads get re-used by ASP.NET COM objects will end up getting created on multiple different threads. This can result in crashes or hangs, or data corruption in the STA components which store their state in thread local storage on the STA thread. If threads overlap this global store can easily get corrupted which in turn causes problems. STA ensures that any COM object instance loaded always stays on the same thread it was instantiated on. What about COM+? COM+ is supposed to address the problem of STA in MTA applications by providing an abstraction with it's own thread pool manager for COM objects. It steps in to the COM instantiation pipeline and hands out COM instances from its own internally maintained STA Thread pool. This guarantees that the COM instantiation threads are STA threads if using STA components. COM+ works, but in my experience the technology is very, very slow for STA components. It adds a ton of overhead and reduces COM performance noticably in load tests in IIS. COM+ can make sense in some situations but for Web apps with STA components it falls short. In addition there's also the need to ensure that COM+ is set up and configured on the target machine and the fact that components have to be registered in COM+. COM+ also keeps components up at all times, so if a component needs to be replaced the COM+ package needs to be unloaded (same is true for IIS hosted components but it's more common to manage that). COM+ is an option for well established components, but native STA support tends to provide better performance and more consistent usability, IMHO. STA for non supporting ASP.NET Technologies As mentioned above only WebForms supports STA natively. However, by utilizing the WebForms ASP.NET Page handler internally it's actually possible to trick various other ASP.NET technologies and let them work with STA components. This is ugly but I've used each of these in various applications and I've had minimal problems making them work with FoxPro STA COM components which is about as dififcult as it gets for COM Interop in .NET. In this post I summarize several STA workarounds that enable you to use STA threading with these ASP.NET Technologies: ASMX Web Services ASP.NET MVC WCF Web Services ASP.NET Web API ASMX Web Services I start with classic ASP.NET ASMX Web Services because it's the easiest mechanism that allows for STA modification. It also clearly demonstrates how the WebForms STA Page Handler is the key technology to enable the various other solutions to create STA components. Essentially the way this works is to override the WebForms Page class and hijack it's init functionality for processing requests. Here's what this looks like for Web Services:namespace FoxProAspNet { public class WebServiceStaHandler : System.Web.UI.Page, IHttpAsyncHandler { protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { IHttpHandler handler = new WebServiceHandlerFactory().GetHandler( this.Context, this.Context.Request.HttpMethod, this.Context.Request.FilePath, this.Context.Request.PhysicalPath); handler.ProcessRequest(this.Context); this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest( HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } } public class AspCompatWebServiceStaHandlerWithSessionState : WebServiceStaHandler, IRequiresSessionState { } } This class overrides the ASP.NET WebForms Page class which has a little known AspCompatBeginProcessRequest() and AspCompatEndProcessRequest() method that is responsible for providing the WebForms ASPCOMPAT functionality. These methods handle routing requests to STA threads. Note there are two classes - one that includes session state and one that does not. If you plan on using ASP.NET Session state use the latter class, otherwise stick to the former. This maps to the EnableSessionState page setting in WebForms. This class simply hooks into this functionality by overriding the BeginProcessRequest and EndProcessRequest methods and always forcing it into the AspCompat methods. The way this works is that BeginProcessRequest() fires first to set up the threads and starts intializing the handler. As part of that process the OnInit() method is fired which is now already running on an STA thread. The code then creates an instance of the actual WebService handler factory and calls its ProcessRequest method to start executing which generates the Web Service result. Immediately after ProcessRequest the request is stopped with Application.CompletRequest() which ensures that the rest of the Page handler logic doesn't fire. This means that even though the fairly heavy Page class is overridden here, it doesn't end up executing any of its internal processing which makes this code fairly efficient. In a nutshell, we're highjacking the Page HttpHandler and forcing it to process the WebService process handler in the context of the AspCompat handler behavior. Hooking up the Handler Because the above is an HttpHandler implementation you need to hook up the custom handler and replace the standard ASMX handler. To do this you need to modify the web.config file (here for IIS 7 and IIS Express): <configuration> <system.webServer> <handlers> <remove name="WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0" /> <add name="Asmx STA Web Service Handler" path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" precondition="integrated"/> </handlers> </system.webServer> </configuration> (Note: The name for the WebServiceHandlerFactory-Integrated-4.0 might be slightly different depending on your server version. Check the IIS Handler configuration in the IIS Management Console for the exact name or simply remove the handler from the list there which will propagate to your web.config). For IIS 5 & 6 (Windows XP/2003) or the Visual Studio Web Server use:<configuration> <system.web> <httpHandlers> <remove path="*.asmx" verb="*" /> <add path="*.asmx" verb="*" type="FoxProAspNet.WebServiceStaHandler" /> </httpHandlers> </system.web></configuration> To test, create a new ASMX Web Service and create a method like this: [WebService(Namespace = "http://foxaspnet.org/")] [WebServiceBinding(ConformsTo = WsiProfiles.BasicProfile1_1)] public class FoxWebService : System.Web.Services.WebService { [WebMethod] public string HelloWorld() { return "Hello World. Threading mode is: " + System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState(); } } Run this before you put in the web.config configuration changes and you should get: Hello World. Threading mode is: MTA Then put the handler mapping into Web.config and you should see: Hello World. Threading mode is: STA And you're on your way to using STA COM components. It's a hack but it works well! I've used this with several high volume Web Service installations with various customers and it's been fast and reliable. ASP.NET MVC ASP.NET MVC has quickly become the most popular ASP.NET technology, replacing WebForms for creating HTML output. MVC is more complex to get started with, but once you understand the basic structure of how requests flow through the MVC pipeline it's easy to use and amazingly flexible in manipulating HTML requests. In addition, MVC has great support for non-HTML output sources like JSON and XML, making it an excellent choice for AJAX requests without any additional tools. Unlike WebForms ASP.NET MVC doesn't support STA threads natively and so some trickery is needed to make it work with STA threads as well. MVC gets its handler implementation through custom route handlers using ASP.NET's built in routing semantics. To work in an STA handler requires working in the Page Handler as part of the Route Handler implementation. As with the Web Service handler the first step is to create a custom HttpHandler that can instantiate an MVC request pipeline properly:public class MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler : Page, IHttpAsyncHandler, IRequiresSessionState { private RequestContext _requestContext; public MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); _requestContext = requestContext; } public IAsyncResult BeginProcessRequest(HttpContext context, AsyncCallback cb, object extraData) { return this.AspCompatBeginProcessRequest(context, cb, extraData); } protected override void OnInit(EventArgs e) { var controllerName = _requestContext.RouteData.GetRequiredString("controller"); var controllerFactory = ControllerBuilder.Current.GetControllerFactory(); var controller = controllerFactory.CreateController(_requestContext, controllerName); if (controller == null) throw new InvalidOperationException("Could not find controller: " + controllerName); try { controller.Execute(_requestContext); } finally { controllerFactory.ReleaseController(controller); } this.Context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); } public void EndProcessRequest(IAsyncResult result) { this.AspCompatEndProcessRequest(result); } public override void ProcessRequest(HttpContext httpContext) { throw new NotSupportedException("STAThreadRouteHandler does not support ProcessRequest called (only BeginProcessRequest)"); } } This handler code figures out which controller to load and then executes the controller. MVC internally provides the information needed to route to the appropriate method and pass the right parameters. Like the Web Service handler the logic occurs in the OnInit() and performs all the processing in that part of the request. Next, we need a RouteHandler that can actually pick up this handler. Unlike the Web Service handler where we simply registered the handler, MVC requires a RouteHandler to pick up the handler. RouteHandlers look at the URL's path and based on that decide on what handler to invoke. The route handler is pretty simple - all it does is load our custom handler: public class MvcStaThreadRouteHandler : IRouteHandler { public IHttpHandler GetHttpHandler(RequestContext requestContext) { if (requestContext == null) throw new ArgumentNullException("requestContext"); return new MvcStaThreadHttpAsyncHandler(requestContext); } } At this point you can instantiate this route handler and force STA requests to MVC by specifying a route. The following sets up the ASP.NET Default Route:Route mvcRoute = new Route("{controller}/{action}/{id}", new RouteValueDictionary( new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional }), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute);   To make this code a little easier to work with and mimic the behavior of the routes.MapRoute() functionality extension method that MVC provides, here is an extension method for MapMvcStaRoute(): public static class RouteCollectionExtensions { public static void MapMvcStaRoute(this RouteCollection routeTable, string name, string url, object defaults = null) { Route mvcRoute = new Route(url, new RouteValueDictionary(defaults), new MvcStaThreadRouteHandler()); RouteTable.Routes.Add(mvcRoute); } } With this the syntax to add  route becomes a little easier and matches the MapRoute() method:RouteTable.Routes.MapMvcStaRoute( name: "Default", url: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", defaults: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } ); The nice thing about this route handler, STA Handler and extension method is that it's fully self contained. You can put all three into a single class file and stick it into your Web app, and then simply call MapMvcStaRoute() and it just works. Easy! To see whether this works create an MVC controller like this: public class ThreadTestController : Controller { public string ThreadingMode() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Try this test both with only the MapRoute() hookup in the RouteConfiguration in which case you should get MTA as the value. Then change the MapRoute() call to MapMvcStaRoute() leaving all the parameters the same and re-run the request. You now should see STA as the result. You're on your way using STA COM components reliably in ASP.NET MVC. WCF Web Services running through IIS WCF Web Services provide a more robust and wider range of services for Web Services. You can use WCF over HTTP, TCP, and Pipes, and WCF services support WS* secure services. There are many features in WCF that go way beyond what ASMX can do. But it's also a bit more complex than ASMX. As a basic rule if you need to serve straight SOAP Services over HTTP I 'd recommend sticking with the simpler ASMX services especially if COM is involved. If you need WS* support or want to serve data over non-HTTP protocols then WCF makes more sense. WCF is not my forte but I found a solution from Scott Seely on his blog that describes the progress and that seems to work well. I'm copying his code below so this STA information is all in one place and quickly explain. Scott's code basically works by creating a custom OperationBehavior which can be specified via an [STAOperation] attribute on every method. Using his attribute you end up with a class (or Interface if you separate the contract and class) that looks like this: [ServiceContract] public class WcfService { [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldMta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } // Make sure you use this custom STAOperationBehavior // attribute to force STA operation of service methods [STAOperationBehavior] [OperationContract] public string HelloWorldSta() { return Thread.CurrentThread.GetApartmentState().ToString(); } } Pretty straight forward. The latter method returns STA while the former returns MTA. To make STA work every method needs to be marked up. The implementation consists of the attribute and OperationInvoker implementation. Here are the two classes required to make this work from Scott's post:public class STAOperationBehaviorAttribute : Attribute, IOperationBehavior { public void AddBindingParameters(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Channels.BindingParameterCollection bindingParameters) { } public void ApplyClientBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.ClientOperation clientOperation) { // If this is applied on the client, well, it just doesn’t make sense. // Don’t throw in case this attribute was applied on the contract // instead of the implementation. } public void ApplyDispatchBehavior(OperationDescription operationDescription, System.ServiceModel.Dispatcher.DispatchOperation dispatchOperation) { // Change the IOperationInvoker for this operation. dispatchOperation.Invoker = new STAOperationInvoker(dispatchOperation.Invoker); } public void Validate(OperationDescription operationDescription) { if (operationDescription.SyncMethod == null) { throw new InvalidOperationException("The STAOperationBehaviorAttribute " + "only works for synchronous method invocations."); } } } public class STAOperationInvoker : IOperationInvoker { IOperationInvoker _innerInvoker; public STAOperationInvoker(IOperationInvoker invoker) { _innerInvoker = invoker; } public object[] AllocateInputs() { return _innerInvoker.AllocateInputs(); } public object Invoke(object instance, object[] inputs, out object[] outputs) { // Create a new, STA thread object[] staOutputs = null; object retval = null; Thread thread = new Thread( delegate() { retval = _innerInvoker.Invoke(instance, inputs, out staOutputs); }); thread.SetApartmentState(ApartmentState.STA); thread.Start(); thread.Join(); outputs = staOutputs; return retval; } public IAsyncResult InvokeBegin(object instance, object[] inputs, AsyncCallback callback, object state) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public object InvokeEnd(object instance, out object[] outputs, IAsyncResult result) { // We don’t handle async… throw new NotImplementedException(); } public bool IsSynchronous { get { return true; } } } The key in this setup is the Invoker and the Invoke method which creates a new thread and then fires the request on this new thread. Because this approach creates a new thread for every request it's not super efficient. There's a bunch of overhead involved in creating the thread and throwing it away after each thread, but it'll work for low volume requests and insure each thread runs in STA mode. If better performance is required it would be useful to create a custom thread manager that can pool a number of STA threads and hand off threads as needed rather than creating new threads on every request. If your Web Service needs are simple and you need only to serve standard SOAP 1.x requests, I would recommend sticking with ASMX services. It's easier to set up and work with and for STA component use it'll be significantly better performing since ASP.NET manages the STA thread pool for you rather than firing new threads for each request. One nice thing about Scotts code is though that it works in any WCF environment including self hosting. It has no dependency on ASP.NET or WebForms for that matter. STA - If you must STA components are a  pain in the ass and thankfully there isn't too much stuff out there anymore that requires it. But when you need it and you need to access STA functionality from .NET at least there are a few options available to make it happen. Each of these solutions is a bit hacky, but they work - I've used all of them in production with good results with FoxPro components. I hope compiling all of these in one place here makes it STA consumption a little bit easier. I feel your pain :-) Resources Download STA Handler Code Examples Scott Seely's original STA WCF OperationBehavior Article© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in FoxPro   ASP.NET  .NET  COM   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Concurrent Collections (1 of 3)

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again we consider some of the lesser known classes and keywords of C#.  In the next few weeks, we will discuss the concurrent collections and how they have changed the face of concurrent programming. This week’s post will begin with a general introduction and discuss the ConcurrentStack<T> and ConcurrentQueue<T>.  Then in the following post we’ll discuss the ConcurrentDictionary<T> and ConcurrentBag<T>.  Finally, we shall close on the third post with a discussion of the BlockingCollection<T>. For more of the "Little Wonders" posts, see the index here. A brief history of collections In the beginning was the .NET 1.0 Framework.  And out of this framework emerged the System.Collections namespace, and it was good.  It contained all the basic things a growing programming language needs like the ArrayList and Hashtable collections.  The main problem, of course, with these original collections is that they held items of type object which means you had to be disciplined enough to use them correctly or you could end up with runtime errors if you got an object of a type you weren't expecting. Then came .NET 2.0 and generics and our world changed forever!  With generics the C# language finally got an equivalent of the very powerful C++ templates.  As such, the System.Collections.Generic was born and we got type-safe versions of all are favorite collections.  The List<T> succeeded the ArrayList and the Dictionary<TKey,TValue> succeeded the Hashtable and so on.  The new versions of the library were not only safer because they checked types at compile-time, in many cases they were more performant as well.  So much so that it's Microsoft's recommendation that the System.Collections original collections only be used for backwards compatibility. So we as developers came to know and love the generic collections and took them into our hearts and embraced them.  The problem is, thread safety in both the original collections and the generic collections can be problematic, for very different reasons. Now, if you are only doing single-threaded development you may not care – after all, no locking is required.  Even if you do have multiple threads, if a collection is “load-once, read-many” you don’t need to do anything to protect that container from multi-threaded access, as illustrated below: 1: public static class OrderTypeTranslator 2: { 3: // because this dictionary is loaded once before it is ever accessed, we don't need to synchronize 4: // multi-threaded read access 5: private static readonly Dictionary<string, char> _translator = new Dictionary<string, char> 6: { 7: {"New", 'N'}, 8: {"Update", 'U'}, 9: {"Cancel", 'X'} 10: }; 11:  12: // the only public interface into the dictionary is for reading, so inherently thread-safe 13: public static char? Translate(string orderType) 14: { 15: char charValue; 16: if (_translator.TryGetValue(orderType, out charValue)) 17: { 18: return charValue; 19: } 20:  21: return null; 22: } 23: } Unfortunately, most of our computer science problems cannot get by with just single-threaded applications or with multi-threading in a load-once manner.  Looking at  today's trends, it's clear to see that computers are not so much getting faster because of faster processor speeds -- we've nearly reached the limits we can push through with today's technologies -- but more because we're adding more cores to the boxes.  With this new hardware paradigm, it is even more important to use multi-threaded applications to take full advantage of parallel processing to achieve higher application speeds. So let's look at how to use collections in a thread-safe manner. Using historical collections in a concurrent fashion The early .NET collections (System.Collections) had a Synchronized() static method that could be used to wrap the early collections to make them completely thread-safe.  This paradigm was dropped in the generic collections (System.Collections.Generic) because having a synchronized wrapper resulted in atomic locks for all operations, which could prove overkill in many multithreading situations.  Thus the paradigm shifted to having the user of the collection specify their own locking, usually with an external object: 1: public class OrderAggregator 2: { 3: private static readonly Dictionary<string, List<Order>> _orders = new Dictionary<string, List<Order>>(); 4: private static readonly _orderLock = new object(); 5:  6: public void Add(string accountNumber, Order newOrder) 7: { 8: List<Order> ordersForAccount; 9:  10: // a complex operation like this should all be protected 11: lock (_orderLock) 12: { 13: if (!_orders.TryGetValue(accountNumber, out ordersForAccount)) 14: { 15: _orders.Add(accountNumber, ordersForAccount = new List<Order>()); 16: } 17:  18: ordersForAccount.Add(newOrder); 19: } 20: } 21: } Notice how we’re performing several operations on the dictionary under one lock.  With the Synchronized() static methods of the early collections, you wouldn’t be able to specify this level of locking (a more macro-level).  So in the generic collections, it was decided that if a user needed synchronization, they could implement their own locking scheme instead so that they could provide synchronization as needed. The need for better concurrent access to collections Here’s the problem: it’s relatively easy to write a collection that locks itself down completely for access, but anything more complex than that can be difficult and error-prone to write, and much less to make it perform efficiently!  For example, what if you have a Dictionary that has frequent reads but in-frequent updates?  Do you want to lock down the entire Dictionary for every access?  This would be overkill and would prevent concurrent reads.  In such cases you could use something like a ReaderWriterLockSlim which allows for multiple readers in a lock, and then once a writer grabs the lock it blocks all further readers until the writer is done (in a nutshell).  This is all very complex stuff to consider. Fortunately, this is where the Concurrent Collections come in.  The Parallel Computing Platform team at Microsoft went through great pains to determine how to make a set of concurrent collections that would have the best performance characteristics for general case multi-threaded use. Now, as in all things involving threading, you should always make sure you evaluate all your container options based on the particular usage scenario and the degree of parallelism you wish to acheive. This article should not be taken to understand that these collections are always supperior to the generic collections. Each fills a particular need for a particular situation. Understanding what each container is optimized for is key to the success of your application whether it be single-threaded or multi-threaded. General points to consider with the concurrent collections The MSDN points out that the concurrent collections all support the ICollection interface. However, since the collections are already synchronized, the IsSynchronized property always returns false, and SyncRoot always returns null.  Thus you should not attempt to use these properties for synchronization purposes. Note that since the concurrent collections also may have different operations than the traditional data structures you may be used to.  Now you may ask why they did this, but it was done out of necessity to keep operations safe and atomic.  For example, in order to do a Pop() on a stack you have to know the stack is non-empty, but between the time you check the stack’s IsEmpty property and then do the Pop() another thread may have come in and made the stack empty!  This is why some of the traditional operations have been changed to make them safe for concurrent use. In addition, some properties and methods in the concurrent collections achieve concurrency by creating a snapshot of the collection, which means that some operations that were traditionally O(1) may now be O(n) in the concurrent models.  I’ll try to point these out as we talk about each collection so you can be aware of any potential performance impacts.  Finally, all the concurrent containers are safe for enumeration even while being modified, but some of the containers support this in different ways (snapshot vs. dirty iteration).  Once again I’ll highlight how thread-safe enumeration works for each collection. ConcurrentStack<T>: The thread-safe LIFO container The ConcurrentStack<T> is the thread-safe counterpart to the System.Collections.Generic.Stack<T>, which as you may remember is your standard last-in-first-out container.  If you think of algorithms that favor stack usage (for example, depth-first searches of graphs and trees) then you can see how using a thread-safe stack would be of benefit. The ConcurrentStack<T> achieves thread-safe access by using System.Threading.Interlocked operations.  This means that the multi-threaded access to the stack requires no traditional locking and is very, very fast! For the most part, the ConcurrentStack<T> behaves like it’s Stack<T> counterpart with a few differences: Pop() was removed in favor of TryPop() Returns true if an item existed and was popped and false if empty. PushRange() and TryPopRange() were added Allows you to push multiple items and pop multiple items atomically. Count takes a snapshot of the stack and then counts the items. This means it is a O(n) operation, if you just want to check for an empty stack, call IsEmpty instead which is O(1). ToArray() and GetEnumerator() both also take snapshots. This means that iteration over a stack will give you a static view at the time of the call and will not reflect updates. Pushing on a ConcurrentStack<T> works just like you’d expect except for the aforementioned PushRange() method that was added to allow you to push a range of items concurrently. 1: var stack = new ConcurrentStack<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to stack is much the same as before 4: stack.Push("First"); 5:  6: // but you can also push multiple items in one atomic operation (no interleaves) 7: stack.PushRange(new [] { "Second", "Third", "Fourth" }); For looking at the top item of the stack (without removing it) the Peek() method has been removed in favor of a TryPeek().  This is because in order to do a peek the stack must be non-empty, but between the time you check for empty and the time you execute the peek the stack contents may have changed.  Thus the TryPeek() was created to be an atomic check for empty, and then peek if not empty: 1: // to look at top item of stack without removing it, can use TryPeek. 2: // Note that there is no Peek(), this is because you need to check for empty first. TryPeek does. 3: string item; 4: if (stack.TryPeek(out item)) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("Top item was " + item); 7: } 8: else 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("Stack was empty."); 11: } Finally, to remove items from the stack, we have the TryPop() for single, and TryPopRange() for multiple items.  Just like the TryPeek(), these operations replace Pop() since we need to ensure atomically that the stack is non-empty before we pop from it: 1: // to remove items, use TryPop or TryPopRange to get multiple items atomically (no interleaves) 2: if (stack.TryPop(out item)) 3: { 4: Console.WriteLine("Popped " + item); 5: } 6:  7: // TryPopRange will only pop up to the number of spaces in the array, the actual number popped is returned. 8: var poppedItems = new string[2]; 9: int numPopped = stack.TryPopRange(poppedItems); 10:  11: foreach (var theItem in poppedItems.Take(numPopped)) 12: { 13: Console.WriteLine("Popped " + theItem); 14: } Finally, note that as stated before, GetEnumerator() and ToArray() gets a snapshot of the data at the time of the call.  That means if you are enumerating the stack you will get a snapshot of the stack at the time of the call.  This is illustrated below: 1: var stack = new ConcurrentStack<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to stack is much the same as before 4: stack.Push("First"); 5:  6: var results = stack.GetEnumerator(); 7:  8: // but you can also push multiple items in one atomic operation (no interleaves) 9: stack.PushRange(new [] { "Second", "Third", "Fourth" }); 10:  11: while(results.MoveNext()) 12: { 13: Console.WriteLine("Stack only has: " + results.Current); 14: } The only item that will be printed out in the above code is "First" because the snapshot was taken before the other items were added. This may sound like an issue, but it’s really for safety and is more correct.  You don’t want to enumerate a stack and have half a view of the stack before an update and half a view of the stack after an update, after all.  In addition, note that this is still thread-safe, whereas iterating through a non-concurrent collection while updating it in the old collections would cause an exception. ConcurrentQueue<T>: The thread-safe FIFO container The ConcurrentQueue<T> is the thread-safe counterpart of the System.Collections.Generic.Queue<T> class.  The concurrent queue uses an underlying list of small arrays and lock-free System.Threading.Interlocked operations on the head and tail arrays.  Once again, this allows us to do thread-safe operations without the need for heavy locks! The ConcurrentQueue<T> (like the ConcurrentStack<T>) has some departures from the non-concurrent counterpart.  Most notably: Dequeue() was removed in favor of TryDequeue(). Returns true if an item existed and was dequeued and false if empty. Count does not take a snapshot It subtracts the head and tail index to get the count.  This results overall in a O(1) complexity which is quite good.  It’s still recommended, however, that for empty checks you call IsEmpty instead of comparing Count to zero. ToArray() and GetEnumerator() both take snapshots. This means that iteration over a queue will give you a static view at the time of the call and will not reflect updates. The Enqueue() method on the ConcurrentQueue<T> works much the same as the generic Queue<T>: 1: var queue = new ConcurrentQueue<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to queue is much the same as before 4: queue.Enqueue("First"); 5: queue.Enqueue("Second"); 6: queue.Enqueue("Third"); For front item access, the TryPeek() method must be used to attempt to see the first item if the queue.  There is no Peek() method since, as you’ll remember, we can only peek on a non-empty queue, so we must have an atomic TryPeek() that checks for empty and then returns the first item if the queue is non-empty. 1: // to look at first item in queue without removing it, can use TryPeek. 2: // Note that there is no Peek(), this is because you need to check for empty first. TryPeek does. 3: string item; 4: if (queue.TryPeek(out item)) 5: { 6: Console.WriteLine("First item was " + item); 7: } 8: else 9: { 10: Console.WriteLine("Queue was empty."); 11: } Then, to remove items you use TryDequeue().  Once again this is for the same reason we have TryPeek() and not Peek(): 1: // to remove items, use TryDequeue. If queue is empty returns false. 2: if (queue.TryDequeue(out item)) 3: { 4: Console.WriteLine("Dequeued first item " + item); 5: } Just like the concurrent stack, the ConcurrentQueue<T> takes a snapshot when you call ToArray() or GetEnumerator() which means that subsequent updates to the queue will not be seen when you iterate over the results.  Thus once again the code below will only show the first item, since the other items were added after the snapshot. 1: var queue = new ConcurrentQueue<string>(); 2:  3: // adding to queue is much the same as before 4: queue.Enqueue("First"); 5:  6: var iterator = queue.GetEnumerator(); 7:  8: queue.Enqueue("Second"); 9: queue.Enqueue("Third"); 10:  11: // only shows First 12: while (iterator.MoveNext()) 13: { 14: Console.WriteLine("Dequeued item " + iterator.Current); 15: } Using collections concurrently You’ll notice in the examples above I stuck to using single-threaded examples so as to make them deterministic and the results obvious.  Of course, if we used these collections in a truly multi-threaded way the results would be less deterministic, but would still be thread-safe and with no locking on your part required! For example, say you have an order processor that takes an IEnumerable<Order> and handles each other in a multi-threaded fashion, then groups the responses together in a concurrent collection for aggregation.  This can be done easily with the TPL’s Parallel.ForEach(): 1: public static IEnumerable<OrderResult> ProcessOrders(IEnumerable<Order> orderList) 2: { 3: var proxy = new OrderProxy(); 4: var results = new ConcurrentQueue<OrderResult>(); 5:  6: // notice that we can process all these in parallel and put the results 7: // into our concurrent collection without needing any external locking! 8: Parallel.ForEach(orderList, 9: order => 10: { 11: var result = proxy.PlaceOrder(order); 12:  13: results.Enqueue(result); 14: }); 15:  16: return results; 17: } Summary Obviously, if you do not need multi-threaded safety, you don’t need to use these collections, but when you do need multi-threaded collections these are just the ticket! The plethora of features (I always think of the movie The Three Amigos when I say plethora) built into these containers and the amazing way they acheive thread-safe access in an efficient manner is wonderful to behold. Stay tuned next week where we’ll continue our discussion with the ConcurrentBag<T> and the ConcurrentDictionary<TKey,TValue>. For some excellent information on the performance of the concurrent collections and how they perform compared to a traditional brute-force locking strategy, see this wonderful whitepaper by the Microsoft Parallel Computing Platform team here.   Tweet Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Concurrent Collections,Collections,Multi-Threading,Little Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,James Michael Hare

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• Issue 15: Oracle Exadata Marketing Campaigns

  - by rituchhibber

       PARTNER FOCUS Oracle ExadataMarketing Campaign Steve McNickleVP Europe, cVidya Steve McNickle is VP Europe for cVidya, an innovative provider of revenue intelligence solutions for telecom, media and entertainment service providers including AT&T, BT, Deutsche Telecom and Vodafone. The company's product portfolio helps operators and service providers maximise margins, improve customer experience and optimise ecosystem relationships through revenue assurance, fraud and security management, sales performance management, pricing analytics, and inter-carrier services. cVidya has partnered with Oracle for more than a decade. RESOURCES -- Oracle PartnerNetwork (OPN) Oracle Exastack Program Oracle Exastack Optimized Oracle Exastack Labs and Enablement Resources Oracle Engineered Systems Oracle Communications cVidya SUBSCRIBE FEEDBACK PREVIOUS ISSUES Are you ready for Oracle OpenWorld this October? -- -- Please could you tell us a little about cVidya's partnering history with Oracle, and expand on your Oracle Exastack accreditations? "cVidya was established just over ten years ago and we've had a strong relationship with Oracle almost since the very beginning. Through our Revenue Intelligence work with some of the world's largest service providers we collect tremendous amounts of information, amounting to billions of records per day. We help our clients to collect, store and analyse that data to ensure that their end customers are getting the best levels of service, are billed correctly, and are happy that they are on the correct price plan. We have been an Oracle Gold level partner for seven years, and crucially just two months ago we were also accredited as Oracle Exastack Optimized for MoneyMap, our core Revenue Assurance solution. Very soon we also expect to be Oracle Exastack Optimized DRMap, our Data Retention solution." What unique capabilities and customer benefits does Oracle Exastack add to your applications? "Oracle Exastack enables us to deliver radical benefits to our customers. A typical mobile operator in the UK might handle between 500 million and two billion call data record details daily. Each transaction needs to be validated, billed correctly and fraud checked. Because of the enormous volumes involved, our clients demand scalable infrastructure that allows them to efficiently acquire, store and process all that data within controlled cost, space and environmental constraints. We have proved that the Oracle Exadata system can process data up to seven times faster and load it as much as 20 times faster than other standard best-of-breed server approaches. With the Oracle Exadata Database Machine they can reduce their datacentre equipment from say, the six or seven cabinets that they needed in the past, down to just one. This dramatic simplification delivers incredible value to the customer by cutting down enormously on all of their significant cost, space, energy, cooling and maintenance overheads." "The Oracle Exastack Program has given our clients the ability to switch their focus from reactive to proactive. Traditionally they may have spent 80 percent of their day processing, and just 20 percent enabling end customers to see advanced analytics, and avoiding issues before they occur. With our solutions and Oracle Exadata they can now switch that balance around entirely, resulting not only in reduced revenue leakage, but a far higher focus on proactive leakage prevention. How has the Oracle Exastack Program transformed your customer business? "We can already see the impact. Oracle solutions allow our delivery teams to achieve successful deployments, happy customers and self-satisfaction, and the power of Oracle's Exa solutions is easy to measure in terms of their transformational ability. We gained our first sale into a major European telco by demonstrating the major performance gains that would transform their business. Clients can measure the ease of organisational change, the early prevention of business issues, the reduction in manpower required to provide protection and coverage across all their products and services, plus of course end customer satisfaction. If customers know that that service is provided accurately and that their bills are calculated correctly, then over time this satisfaction can be attributed to revenue intelligence and the underlying systems which provide it. Combine this with the further integration we have with the other layers of the Oracle stack, including the telecommunications offerings such as NCC, OCDM and BRM, and the result is even greater customer value—not to mention the increased speed to market and the reduced project risk." What does the Oracle Exastack community bring to cVidya, both in terms of general benefits, and also tangible new opportunities and partnerships? "A great deal. We have participated in the Oracle Exastack community heavily over the past year, and have had lots of meetings with Oracle and our peers around the globe. It brings us into contact with like-minded, innovative partners, who like us are not happy to just stand still and want to take fresh technology to their customer base in order to gain enhanced value. We identified three new partnerships in each of two recent meetings, and hope these will open up new opportunities, not only in areas that exactly match where we operate today, but also in some new associative areas that will expand our reach into new business sectors. Notably, thanks to the Exastack community we were invited on stage at last year's Oracle OpenWorld conference. Appearing so publically with Oracle senior VP Judson Althoff elevated awareness and visibility of cVidya and has enabled us to participate in a number of other events with Oracle over the past eight months. We've been involved in speaking opportunities, forums and exhibitions, providing us with invaluable opportunities that we wouldn't otherwise have got close to." How has Exastack differentiated cVidya as an ISV, and helped you to evolve your business to the next level? "When we are selling to our core customer base of Tier 1 telecommunications providers, we know that they want more than just software. They want an enduring partnership that will last many years, they want innovation, and a forward thinking partner who knows how to guide them on where they need to be to meet market demand three, five or seven years down the line. Membership of respected global bodies, such as the Telemanagement Forum enables us to lead standard adherence in our area of business, giving us a lot of credibility, but Oracle is also involved in this forum with its own telecommunications portfolio, strengthening our position still further. When we approach CEOs, CTOs and CIOs at the very largest Tier 1 operators, not only can we easily show them that our technology is fantastic, we can also talk about our strong partnership with Oracle, and our joint embracing of today's standards and tomorrow's innovation." Where would you like cVidya to be in one year's time? "We want to get all of our relevant products Oracle Exastack Optimized. Our MoneyMap Revenue Assurance solution is already Exastack Optimised, our DRMAP Data Retention Solution should be Exastack Optimised within the next month, and our FraudView Fraud Management solution within the next two to three months. We'd then like to extend our Oracle accreditation out to include other members of the Oracle Engineered Systems family. We are moving into the 'Big Data' space, and so we're obviously very keen to work closely with Oracle to conduct pilots, map new technologies onto Oracle Big Data platforms, and embrace and measure the benefits of other Oracle systems, namely Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud, the Oracle Exalytics In-Memory Machine and the Oracle SPARC SuperCluster. We would also like to examine how the Oracle Database Appliance might benefit our Tier 2 service provider customers. Finally, we'd also like to continue working with the Oracle Communications Global Business Unit (CGBU), furthering our integration with Oracle billing products so that we are able to quickly deploy fraud solutions into Oracle's Engineered System stack, give operational benefits to our clients that are pre-integrated, more cost-effective, and can be rapidly deployed rapidly and producing benefits in three months, not nine months." Chris Baker ,Senior Vice President, Oracle Worldwide ISV-OEM-Java Sales Chris Baker is the Global Head of ISV/OEM Sales responsible for working with ISV/OEM partners to maximise Oracle's business through those partners, whilst maximising those partners' business to their end users. Chris works with partners, customers, innovators, investors and employees to develop innovative business solutions using Oracle products, services and skills. Firstly, could you please explain Oracle's current strategy for ISV partners, globally and in EMEA? "Oracle customers use independent software vendor (ISV) applications to run their businesses. They use them to generate revenue and to fulfil obligations to their own customers. Our strategy is very straight-forward. We want all of our ISV partners and OEMs to concentrate on the things that they do the best – building applications to meet the unique industry and functional requirements of their customer. We want to ensure that we deliver a best in class application platform so the ISV is free to concentrate their effort on their application functionality and user experience We invest over four billion dollars in research and development every year, and we want our ISVs to benefit from all of that investment in operating systems, virtualisation, databases, middleware, engineered systems, and other hardware. By doing this, we help them to reduce their costs, gain more consistency and agility for quicker implementations, and also rapidly differentiate themselves from other application vendors. It's all about simplification because we believe that around 25 to 30 percent of the development costs incurred by many ISVs are caused by customising infrastructure and have nothing to do with their applications. Our strategy is to enable our ISV partners to standardise their application platform using engineered architecture, so they can write once to the Oracle stack and deploy seamlessly in the cloud, on-premise, or in hybrid deployments. It's really important that architecture is the same in order to keep cost and time overheads at a minimum, so we provide standardisation and an environment that enables our ISVs to concentrate on the core business that makes them the most money and brings them success." How do you believe this strategy is helping the ISVs to work hand-in-hand with Oracle to ensure that end customers get the industry-leading solutions that they need? "We work with our ISVs not just to help them be successful, but also to help them market themselves. We have something called the 'Oracle Exastack Ready Program', which enables ISVs to publicise themselves as 'Ready' to run the core software platforms that run on Oracle's engineered systems including Exadata and Exalogic. So, for example, they can become 'Database Ready' which means that they use the latest version of Oracle Database and therefore can run their application without modification on Exadata or the Oracle Database Appliance. Alternatively, they can become WebLogic Ready, Oracle Linux Ready and Oracle Solaris Ready which means they run on the latest release and therefore can run their application, with no new porting work, on Oracle Exalogic. Those 'Ready' logos are important in helping ISVs advertise to their customers that they are using the latest technologies which have been fully tested. We now also have Exadata Ready and Exalogic Ready programmes which allow ISVs to promote the certification of their applications on these platforms. This highlights these partners to Oracle customers as having solutions that run fluently on the Oracle Exadata Database Machine, the Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud or one of our other engineered systems. This makes it easy for customers to identify solutions and provides ISVs with an avenue to connect with Oracle customers who are rapidly adopting engineered systems. We have also taken this programme to the next level in the shape of 'Oracle Exastack Optimized' for partners whose applications run best on the Oracle stack and have invested the time to fully optimise application performance. We ensure that Exastack Optimized partner status is promoted and supported by press releases, and we help our ISVs go to market and differentiate themselves through the use our technology and the standardisation it delivers. To date we have had several hundred organisations successfully work through our Exastack Optimized programme." How does Oracle's strategy of offering pre-integrated open platform software and hardware allow ISVs to bring their products to market more quickly? "One of the problems for many ISVs is that they have to think very carefully about the technology on which their solutions will be deployed, particularly in the cloud or hosted environments. They have to think hard about how they secure these environments, whether the concern is, for example, middleware, identity management, or securing personal data. If they don't use the technology that we build-in to our products to help them to fulfil these roles, they then have to build it themselves. This takes time, requires testing, and must be maintained. By taking advantage of our technology, partners will now know that they have a standard platform. They will know that they can confidently talk about implementation being the same every time they do it. Very large ISV applications could once take a year or two to be implemented at an on-premise environment. But it wasn't just the configuration of the application that took the time, it was actually the infrastructure - the different hardware configurations, operating systems and configurations of databases and middleware. Now we strongly believe that it's all about standardisation and repeatability. It's about making sure that our partners can do it once and are then able to roll it out many different times using standard componentry." What actions would you recommend for existing ISV partners that are looking to do more business with Oracle and its customer base, not only to maximise benefits, but also to maximise partner relationships? "My team, around the world and in the EMEA region, is available and ready to talk to any of our ISVs and to explore the possibilities together. We run programmes like 'Excite' and 'Insight' to help us to understand how we can help ISVs with architecture and widen their environments. But we also want to work with, and look at, new opportunities - for example, the Machine-to-Machine (M2M) market or 'The Internet of Things'. Over the next few years, many millions, indeed billions of devices will be collecting massive amounts of data and communicating it back to the central systems where ISVs will be running their applications. The only way that our partners will be able to provide a single vendor 'end-to-end' solution is to use Oracle integrated systems at the back end and Java on the 'smart' devices collecting the data – a complete solution from device to data centre. So there are huge opportunities to work closely with our ISVs, using Oracle's complete M2M platform, to provide the infrastructure that enables them to extract maximum value from the data collected. If any partners don't know where to start or who to contact, then they can contact me directly at [email protected] or indeed any of our teams across the EMEA region. We want to work with ISVs to help them to be as successful as they possibly can through simplification and speed to market, and we also want all of the top ISVs in the world based on Oracle." What opportunities are immediately opened to new ISV partners joining the OPN? "As you know OPN is very, very important. New members will discover a huge amount of content that instantly becomes accessible to them. They can access a wealth of no-cost training and enablement materials to build their expertise in Oracle technology. They can download Oracle software and use it for development projects. They can help themselves become more competent by becoming part of a true community and uncovering new opportunities by working with Oracle and their peers in the Oracle Partner Network. As well as publishing massive amounts of information on OPN, we also hold our global Oracle OpenWorld event, at which partners play a huge role. This takes place at the end of September and the beginning of October in San Francisco. Attending ISV partners have an unrivalled opportunity to contribute to elements such as the OpenWorld / OPN Exchange, at which they can talk to other partners and really begin thinking about how they can move their businesses on and play key roles in a very large ecosystem which revolves around technology and standardisation." Finally, are there any other messages that you would like to share with the Oracle ISV community? "The crucial message that I always like to reinforce is architecture, architecture and architecture! The key opportunities that ISVs have today revolve around standardising their architectures so that they can confidently think: “I will I be able to do exactly the same thing whenever a customer is looking to deploy on-premise, hosted or in the cloud”. The right architecture is critical to being competitive and to really start changing the game. We want to help our ISV partners to do just that; to establish standard architecture and to seize the opportunities it opens up for them. New market opportunities like M2M are enormous - just look at how many devices are all around you right now. We can help our partners to interface with these devices more effectively while thinking about their entire ecosystem, rather than just the piece that they have traditionally focused upon. With standardised architecture, we can help people dramatically improve their speed, reach, agility and delivery of enhanced customer satisfaction and value all the way from the Java side to their centralised systems. All Oracle ISV partners must take advantage of these opportunities, which is why Oracle will continue to invest in and support them." -- Gergely Strbik is Oracle Hardware and Software Product Manager for Avnet in Hungary. Avnet Technology Solutions is an OracleValue Added Distributor focused on the development of the existing Oracle channel. This includes the recruitment and enablement of Oracle partners as well as driving deeper adoption of Oracle's technology and application products within the IT channel. "The main business benefits of ODA for our customers and partners are scalability, flexibility, a great price point for the high performance delivered, and the easily configurable embedded Linux operating system. People welcome a lower point of entry and the ability to grow capacity on demand as their business expands." "Marketing and selling the ODA requires another way of thinking because it is an appliance. We have to transform the ways in which our partners and customers think from buying hardware and software independently to buying complete solutions. Successful early adopters and satisfied customer reactions will certainly help us to sell the ODA. We will have more experience with the product after the first deliveries and installations—end users need to see the power and benefits for themselves." "Our typical ODA customers will be those looking for complete solutions from a single reseller partner who is also able to manage the appliance. They will have enjoyed using Oracle Database but now want a new product that is able to unlock new levels of performance. A higher proportion of potential customers will come from our existing Oracle base, with around 30% from new business, but we intend to evangelise the ODA on the market to see how we can change this balance as all our customers adjust to the concept of 'Hardware and Software, Engineered to Work Together'. -- Back to the welcome page

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• How to get full query string parameters not UrlDecoded

  - by developerit

  Introduction While developing Developer IT’s website, we came across a problem when the user search keywords containing special character like the plus ‘+’ char. We found it while looking for C++ in our search engine. The request parameter output in ASP.NET was “c “. I found it strange that it removed the ‘++’ and replaced it with a space… Analysis After a bit of Googling and Reflection, it turns out that ASP.NET calls UrlDecode on each parameters retreived by the Request(“item”) method. The Request.Params property is affected by this two since it mashes all QueryString, Forms and other collections into a single one. Workaround Finally, I solve the puzzle usign the Request.RawUrl property and parsing it with the same RegEx I use in my url re-writter. The RawUrl not affected by anything. As its name say it, it’s raw. Published on http://www.developerit.com/

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• Dell PowerEdge R720xd stuck in BIOS

  - by G_P

  I have a Dell PowerEdge R720xd that gets stuck in the BIOS when booting. It successfully gets past the "configuring memory" and "configuring iDRAC" screens, but once it shows the "CPLD version : 103" with the various management engine versions/patches, it just hangs. No errors messages are displayed. This started happening when we tried adding additional RAM to the machine. Since then, we tried re-seating the new memory which resulted in the same issue. Then, we took out all the new memory, and the problem persists. We have also tried pressing F2 to get into System Setup, but it just indicates "Entering System Setup" and hangs at the same point. Has anybody seen this issue before or have any ideas on what to try next? UPDATE After troubleshooting and trying to isolate the issue (stripping things down to a single CPU and single DIMM, same problem, swapping to the other CPU and a different DIMM, same problem), Dell support will be coming out to swap the system board.

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• DVR_PLAYER.exe reports Remote200.ocx is missing?

  - by Kalamane

  I have a program called DVR_PLAYER that is downloaded from a home security camera web interface. The web interface saves surveillance footage in the form of proprietary .drv files. I am unable to use the program to view the files on the cd on any machine that isn't the original machine I downloaded the files from. Every time I try to open it up it says, " Remote200.ocx not installed or it couldn't be installed. Please check user privilege." I need other machines to be able to open and view the footage I've downloaded using this program so that I can hand it in to the local police. Any ideas?

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