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• Regular expression to process key value pairs

  - by user677680

  I am attempting to write a regular expression to process a string of key value(s) pairs formatted like so KEY/VALUE KEY/VALUE VALUE KEY/VALUE A key can have multiple values separated by a space. I want to match a keys values together, so the result on the above string would be VALUE VALUE VALUE VALUE I currently have the following as my regex [A-Z0-9]+/([A-Z0-9 ]+)(?:(?!^[A-Z0-9]+/)) but this returns VALUE KEY as the first result.

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• FsUnit `should equal` fails on `Some []`

  - by SHiNKiROU

  When I run this FsUnit test with NUnit 2.6.3, let f xs = Some (List.map ((+) 2) xs) [<Test>] let test() = f [] |> should equal (Some []) I get: Result Message: Expected: <Some([])> But was: <Some([])> Result StackTrace: at FsUnit.TopLevelOperators.should[a,a](FSharpFunc`2 f, a x, Object y) The test fails even though the Expected and Actual in the message are the same. What happened?

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• Problem with Javascript object and accessing property which exists

  - by Newbie

  I have something like this: var test = {}; function blah() { test[2] = 'filled'; } console.log(test); //result test -> 2:"filled" console.log(test[2]); //result undefined I don't understand why I'm getting 'undefined' in the second instance when according to the first instance, the property of that object clearly exists! Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks

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• Mistake in the Asc() VB function?

  - by Alexander

  Hello! Could you please tell why the Asc() function returns incorrect result? Dim TestChar = Chr(128) Dim CharInt = Asc(TestChar) ' this is a mistake on Windows 7 x64. Asc(TestChar) returns 136 instead of 128 I executed this code on another computer and the result was 128. Thanks.

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• "=null" and select statement!

  - by user329820

  Hi I have asked this question before in this forum and they told me that it will retun an empty result set,I want to know that if I set the column with null values it will retun an empty result set?also the ANSI_NULLS is OFF ,thanks SELECT 'A' FROM T WHERE A = NULL;

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• .Net Regex question!

  - by Tsury

  Supposed I have the following string: string str = "<tag>text</tag>"; And I would like to change 'tag' to 'newTag' so the result would be: "<newTag>text</newTag>" What is the best way to do it? I tried to search for <[/]*tag but then I don't know how to keep the optional [/] in my result...

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• process.waitFor()

  - by ashwani66476

  Hello Team, I am using the below code in my application ... Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec( "perl " + perlScript + " " + project + " " + fileName); : : : result = process.waitFor(); : : and this result gives the code 2 every time.....while running the application. what could be the reason for the "reason code" ??? Thanks In Advance

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• populate href of link for next and previous

  - by sea_1987

  Hi There, I am struggling alot with some PHP I am needing to implement a next and previous link, basically I have a search function on my site, that returns multiple results and click on a result navigates to that results page, I want to then be able to click next on that page, and be taken to the next result in the sequence that was returned by the users original search? Is this possible, and how? I have no clue.

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• How do you query a MySQL table columns highest entry and store it in a variable.

  - by user315819

  How do you query a MySQL table columns highest entry and store it in a variable. Here is what I have but it is not working. $query = "SELECT MAX(date) FROM Records WHERE ips='$currentip'"; $result = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error()); echo $result;

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• writing javascript div in html

  - by user333060

  i have put in my source code to show live twitter search result on my webpage. Although it shows the search result but when i open the source code of my webpage it don't shows the tweets text in my source code.iT DYNAMICALLY LOADS IT I GUESS. iS there a way out to fetch the content of div and write it with some functions like document.write or etc.

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• else or return?

  - by Ram

  Which one out of following two is best wrt to performance and standard practice. How does .NET internally handles these two code snippets? Code1 If(result) { process1(); } else { process2(); } Or Code 2 If(result) { process1(); return; } process2();

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• Ubuntu 10.04 not detecting multiple monitors

  - by user28837

  I have 2 graphics cards, the output from the lspci: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV770 [Radeon HD 4850] 02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] I have one monitor connected to the 4850 and 2 connected to the 4350. However when I go into System Preferences Monitors the only monitor shown is the one connected to the 4850. Is there something I need to enable for it to be able to use the other card? How do I get this to work. Thanks. As per request: X.Org X Server 1.7.6 Release Date: 2010-03-17 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.24-25-server i686 Ubuntu Current Operating System: Linux jeff-desktop 2.6.32-22-generic-pae #33-Ubuntu SMP Wed Apr 28 14:57:29 UTC 2010 i686 Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-22-generic-pae root=UUID=852e1013-4ed6-40fd-a462-c29087888383 ro quiet splash Build Date: 23 April 2010 05:11:50PM xorg-server 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7 (Bryce Harrington <[email protected]>) Current version of pixman: 0.16.4 Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: Tue May 11 08:24:52 2010 (==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" (==) Using config directory: "/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d" (==) No Layout section. Using the first Screen section. (**) |-->Screen "Default Screen" (0) (**) | |-->Monitor "<default monitor>" (==) No device specified for screen "Default Screen". Using the first device section listed. (**) | |-->Device "Default Device" (==) No monitor specified for screen "Default Screen". Using a default monitor configuration. (==) Automatically adding devices (==) Automatically enabling devices (WW) The directory "/usr/share/fonts/X11/cyrillic" does not exist. Entry deleted from font path. (==) FontPath set to: /usr/share/fonts/X11/misc, /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi/:unscaled, /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi/:unscaled, /usr/share/fonts/X11/Type1, /usr/share/fonts/X11/100dpi, /usr/share/fonts/X11/75dpi, /var/lib/defoma/x-ttcidfont-conf.d/dirs/TrueType, built-ins (==) ModulePath set to "/usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules,/usr/lib/xorg/modules" (II) The server relies on udev to provide the list of input devices. If no devices become available, reconfigure udev or disable AutoAddDevices. (II) Loader magic: 0x81f0e80 (II) Module ABI versions: X.Org ANSI C Emulation: 0.4 X.Org Video Driver: 6.0 X.Org XInput driver : 7.0 X.Org Server Extension : 2.0 (++) using VT number 7 (--) PCI:*(0:1:0:0) 1002:9442:174b:e104 ATI Technologies Inc RV770 [Radeon HD 4850] rev 0, Mem @ 0xc0000000/268435456, 0xfe7e0000/65536, I/O @ 0x0000a000/256, BIOS @ 0x????????/131072 (--) PCI: (0:2:0:0) 1002:954f:1462:1618 ATI Technologies Inc RV710 [Radeon HD 4350] rev 0, Mem @ 0xd0000000/268435456, 0xfe8e0000/65536, I/O @ 0x0000b000/256, BIOS @ 0x????????/131072 (WW) Open ACPI failed (/var/run/acpid.socket) (No such file or directory) (II) "extmod" will be loaded by default. (II) "dbe" will be loaded by default. (II) "glx" will be loaded. This was enabled by default and also specified in the config file. (II) "record" will be loaded by default. (II) "dri" will be loaded by default. (II) "dri2" will be loaded by default. (II) LoadModule: "glx" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/extensions/libglx.so (II) Module glx: vendor="FireGL - ATI Technologies Inc." compiled for 7.5.0, module version = 1.0.0 (II) Loading extension GLX (II) LoadModule: "extmod" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libextmod.so (II) Module extmod: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 Module class: X.Org Server Extension ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension MIT-SCREEN-SAVER (II) Loading extension XFree86-VidModeExtension (II) Loading extension XFree86-DGA (II) Loading extension DPMS (II) Loading extension XVideo (II) Loading extension XVideo-MotionCompensation (II) Loading extension X-Resource (II) LoadModule: "dbe" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdbe.so (II) Module dbe: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 Module class: X.Org Server Extension ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension DOUBLE-BUFFER (II) LoadModule: "record" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/librecord.so (II) Module record: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.13.0 Module class: X.Org Server Extension ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension RECORD (II) LoadModule: "dri" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdri.so (II) Module dri: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension XFree86-DRI (II) LoadModule: "dri2" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/extensions/libdri2.so (II) Module dri2: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.1.0 ABI class: X.Org Server Extension, version 2.0 (II) Loading extension DRI2 (II) LoadModule: "fglrx" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/drivers/fglrx_drv.so (II) Module fglrx: vendor="FireGL - ATI Technologies Inc." compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 8.72.11 Module class: X.Org Video Driver (II) Loading sub module "fglrxdrm" (II) LoadModule: "fglrxdrm" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/linux/libfglrxdrm.so (II) Module fglrxdrm: vendor="FireGL - ATI Technologies Inc." compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 8.72.11 (II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Version Identifier:8.72.11 (II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Release Identifier: 8.723.1 (II) ATI Proprietary Linux Driver Build Date: Apr 8 2010 21:40:29 (II) Primary Device is: PCI 01@00:00:0 (WW) Falling back to old probe method for fglrx (II) Loading PCS database from /etc/ati/amdpcsdb (--) Assigning device section with no busID to primary device (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@2:0:0) found (--) Chipset Supported AMD Graphics Processor (0x9442) found (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@1:0:1) found (WW) fglrx: No matching Device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@2:0:1) found (**) ChipID override: 0x954F (**) Chipset Supported AMD Graphics Processor (0x954F) found (II) AMD Video driver is running on a device belonging to a group targeted for this release (II) AMD Video driver is signed (II) fglrx(0): pEnt->device->identifier=0x9428aa0 (II) pEnt->device->identifier=(nil) (II) fglrx(0): === [atiddxPreInit] === begin (II) Loading sub module "vgahw" (II) LoadModule: "vgahw" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libvgahw.so (II) Module vgahw: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 0.1.0 ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0 (II) fglrx(0): Creating default Display subsection in Screen section "Default Screen" for depth/fbbpp 24/32 (**) fglrx(0): Depth 24, (--) framebuffer bpp 32 (II) fglrx(0): Pixel depth = 24 bits stored in 4 bytes (32 bpp pixmaps) (==) fglrx(0): Default visual is TrueColor (==) fglrx(0): RGB weight 888 (II) fglrx(0): Using 8 bits per RGB (==) fglrx(0): Buffer Tiling is ON (II) Loading sub module "fglrxdrm" (II) LoadModule: "fglrxdrm" (II) Reloading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/linux/libfglrxdrm.so ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:1:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 10, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 10 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card1 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 10, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 10 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:1:0:0 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 11, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 11 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 (--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series" (Chipset = 0x9442) (--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x174b, PciSubDevice = 0xe104) (==) fglrx(0): board vendor info: third party graphics adapter - NOT original ATI (--) fglrx(0): Linear framebuffer (phys) at 0xc0000000 (--) fglrx(0): MMIO registers at 0xfe7e0000 (--) fglrx(0): I/O port at 0x0000a000 (==) fglrx(0): ROM-BIOS at 0x000c0000 (II) fglrx(0): AC Adapter is used (II) fglrx(0): Primary V_BIOS segment is: 0xc000 (II) Loading sub module "vbe" (II) LoadModule: "vbe" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libvbe.so (II) Module vbe: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.1.0 ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0 (II) fglrx(0): VESA BIOS detected (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE Version 3.0 (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE Total Mem: 16384 kB (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM: ATI ATOMBIOS (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Software Rev: 11.13 (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Vendor: (C) 1988-2005, ATI Technologies Inc. (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Product: RV770 (II) fglrx(0): VESA VBE OEM Product Rev: 01.00 (II) fglrx(0): ATI Video BIOS revision 9 or later detected (--) fglrx(0): Video RAM: 524288 kByte, Type: GDDR3 (II) fglrx(0): PCIE card detected (--) fglrx(0): Using per-process page tables (PPPT) as GART. (WW) fglrx(0): board is an unknown third party board, chipset is supported (--) fglrx(0): Chipset: "ATI Radeon HD 4300/4500 Series" (Chipset = 0x954f) (--) fglrx(0): (PciSubVendor = 0x1462, PciSubDevice = 0x1618) (==) fglrx(0): board vendor info: third party graphics adapter - NOT original ATI (--) fglrx(0): Linear framebuffer (phys) at 0xd0000000 (--) fglrx(0): MMIO registers at 0xfe8e0000 (--) fglrx(0): I/O port at 0x0000b000 (==) fglrx(0): ROM-BIOS at 0x000c0000 (II) fglrx(0): AC Adapter is used (II) fglrx(0): Invalid ATI BIOS from int10, the adapter is not VGA-enabled (II) fglrx(0): ATI Video BIOS revision 9 or later detected (--) fglrx(0): Video RAM: 524288 kByte, Type: DDR2 (II) fglrx(0): PCIE card detected (--) fglrx(0): Using per-process page tables (PPPT) as GART. (WW) fglrx(0): board is an unknown third party board, chipset is supported (II) fglrx(0): Using adapter: 1:0.0. (II) fglrx(0): [FB] MC range(MCFBBase = 0xf00000000, MCFBSize = 0x20000000) (II) fglrx(0): Interrupt handler installed at IRQ 31. (II) fglrx(0): Using adapter: 2:0.0. (II) fglrx(0): [FB] MC range(MCFBBase = 0xf00000000, MCFBSize = 0x20000000) (II) fglrx(0): RandR 1.2 support is enabled! (II) fglrx(0): RandR 1.2 rotation support is enabled! (==) fglrx(0): Center Mode is disabled (II) Loading sub module "fb" (II) LoadModule: "fb" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libfb.so (II) Module fb: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.0.0 ABI class: X.Org ANSI C Emulation, version 0.4 (II) Loading sub module "ddc" (II) LoadModule: "ddc" (II) Module "ddc" already built-in (II) fglrx(0): Finished Initialize PPLIB! (II) Loading sub module "ddc" (II) LoadModule: "ddc" (II) Module "ddc" already built-in (II) fglrx(0): Connected Display0: DFP on external TMDS [tmds2] (II) fglrx(0): Display0 EDID data --------------------------- (II) fglrx(0): Manufacturer: DEL Model: a038 Serial#: 810829397 (II) fglrx(0): Year: 2008 Week: 51 (II) fglrx(0): EDID Version: 1.3 (II) fglrx(0): Digital Display Input (II) fglrx(0): Max Image Size [cm]: horiz.: 53 vert.: 30 (II) fglrx(0): Gamma: 2.20 (II) fglrx(0): DPMS capabilities: StandBy Suspend Off (II) fglrx(0): Supported color encodings: RGB 4:4:4 YCrCb 4:4:4 (II) fglrx(0): Default color space is primary color space (II) fglrx(0): First detailed timing is preferred mode (II) fglrx(0): redX: 0.640 redY: 0.330 greenX: 0.300 greenY: 0.600 (II) fglrx(0): blueX: 0.150 blueY: 0.060 whiteX: 0.312 whiteY: 0.329 (II) fglrx(0): Supported established timings: (II) fglrx(0): 720x400@70Hz (II) fglrx(0): 640x480@60Hz (II) fglrx(0): 640x480@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): 800x600@60Hz (II) fglrx(0): 800x600@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): 1024x768@60Hz (II) fglrx(0): 1024x768@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): 1280x1024@75Hz (II) fglrx(0): Manufacturer's mask: 0 (II) fglrx(0): Supported standard timings: (II) fglrx(0): #0: hsize: 1152 vsize 864 refresh: 75 vid: 20337 (II) fglrx(0): #1: hsize: 1280 vsize 1024 refresh: 60 vid: 32897 (II) fglrx(0): #2: hsize: 1920 vsize 1080 refresh: 60 vid: 49361 (II) fglrx(0): Supported detailed timing: (II) fglrx(0): clock: 148.5 MHz Image Size: 531 x 298 mm (II) fglrx(0): h_active: 1920 h_sync: 2008 h_sync_end 2052 h_blank_end 2200 h_border: 0 (II) fglrx(0): v_active: 1080 v_sync: 1084 v_sync_end 1089 v_blanking: 1125 v_border: 0 (II) fglrx(0): Serial No: Y183D8CF0TFU (II) fglrx(0): Monitor name: DELL S2409W (II) fglrx(0): Ranges: V min: 50 V max: 76 Hz, H min: 30 H max: 83 kHz, PixClock max 170 MHz (II) fglrx(0): EDID (in hex): (II) fglrx(0): 00ffffffffffff0010ac38a055465430 (II) fglrx(0): 3312010380351e78eeee91a3544c9926 (II) fglrx(0): 0f5054a54b00714f8180d1c001010101 (II) fglrx(0): 010101010101023a801871382d40582c (II) fglrx(0): 4500132a2100001e000000ff00593138 (II) fglrx(0): 3344384346305446550a000000fc0044 (II) fglrx(0): 454c4c205332343039570a20000000fd (II) fglrx(0): 00324c1e5311000a2020202020200059 (II) fglrx(0): End of Display0 EDID data -------------------- (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP2 has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP_EXTTMDS has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT1 has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT2 has no monitor section (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP2 disconnected (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP_EXTTMDS connected (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT1 disconnected (II) fglrx(0): Output CRT2 disconnected (II) fglrx(0): Using exact sizes for initial modes (II) fglrx(0): Output DFP_EXTTMDS using initial mode 1920x1080 (II) fglrx(0): DPI set to (96, 96) (II) fglrx(0): Adapter ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series has 2 configurable heads and 1 displays connected. (==) fglrx(0): QBS disabled (==) fglrx(0): PseudoColor visuals disabled (II) Loading sub module "ramdac" (II) LoadModule: "ramdac" (II) Module "ramdac" already built-in (==) fglrx(0): NoAccel = NO (==) fglrx(0): NoDRI = NO (==) fglrx(0): Capabilities: 0x00000000 (==) fglrx(0): CapabilitiesEx: 0x00000000 (==) fglrx(0): OpenGL ClientDriverName: "fglrx_dri.so" (==) fglrx(0): UseFastTLS=0 (==) fglrx(0): BlockSignalsOnLock=1 (--) Depth 24 pixmap format is 32 bpp (II) Loading extension ATIFGLRXDRI (II) fglrx(0): doing swlDriScreenInit (II) fglrx(0): swlDriScreenInit for fglrx driver ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:1:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 17, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 17 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card1 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 17, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 17 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:1:0:0 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] DRM interface version 1.0 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] created "fglrx" driver at busid "PCI:1:0:0" (II) fglrx(0): [uki] added 8192 byte SAREA at 0x2000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] mapped SAREA 0x2000 to 0xb6996000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] framebuffer handle = 0x3000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] added 1 reserved context for kernel (II) fglrx(0): swlDriScreenInit done (II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module Version Information: (II) fglrx(0): Name: fglrx (II) fglrx(0): Version: 8.72.11 (II) fglrx(0): Date: Apr 8 2010 (II) fglrx(0): Desc: ATI FireGL DRM kernel module (II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module version matches driver. (II) fglrx(0): Kernel Module Build Time Information: (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel UTS_RELEASE: 2.6.32-22-generic-pae (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel MODVERSIONS: yes (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel __SMP__: yes (II) fglrx(0): Build-Kernel PAGE_SIZE: 0x1000 (II) fglrx(0): [uki] register handle = 0x00004000 (II) fglrx(0): DRI initialization successfull! (II) fglrx(0): FBADPhys: 0xf00000000 FBMappedSize: 0x01068000 (II) fglrx(0): FBMM initialized for area (0,0)-(1920,2240) (II) fglrx(0): FBMM auto alloc for area (0,0)-(1920,1920) (front color buffer - assumption) (II) fglrx(0): Largest offscreen area available: 1920 x 320 (==) fglrx(0): Backing store disabled (II) Loading extension FGLRXEXTENSION (==) fglrx(0): DPMS enabled (II) fglrx(0): Initialized in-driver Xinerama extension (**) fglrx(0): Textured Video is enabled. (II) LoadModule: "glesx" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/glesx.so (II) Module glesx: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 1.0.0 (II) Loading extension GLESX (II) Loading sub module "xaa" (II) LoadModule: "xaa" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libxaa.so (II) Module xaa: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 1.2.1 ABI class: X.Org Video Driver, version 6.0 (II) fglrx(0): GLESX enableFlags = 94 (II) fglrx(0): Using XFree86 Acceleration Architecture (XAA) Screen to screen bit blits Solid filled rectangles Solid Horizontal and Vertical Lines Driver provided ScreenToScreenBitBlt replacement Driver provided FillSolidRects replacement (II) fglrx(0): GLESX is enabled (II) LoadModule: "amdxmm" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/extra-modules/modules/amdxmm.so (II) Module amdxmm: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.1, module version = 1.0.0 (II) Loading extension AMDXVOPL (II) fglrx(0): UVD2 feature is available (II) fglrx(0): Enable composite support successfully (II) fglrx(0): X context handle = 0x1 (II) fglrx(0): [DRI] installation complete (==) fglrx(0): Silken mouse enabled (==) fglrx(0): Using HW cursor of display infrastructure! (II) fglrx(0): Disabling in-server RandR and enabling in-driver RandR 1.2. (--) RandR disabled (II) Found 2 VGA devices: arbiter wrapping enabled (II) Initializing built-in extension Generic Event Extension (II) Initializing built-in extension SHAPE (II) Initializing built-in extension MIT-SHM (II) Initializing built-in extension XInputExtension (II) Initializing built-in extension XTEST (II) Initializing built-in extension BIG-REQUESTS (II) Initializing built-in extension SYNC (II) Initializing built-in extension XKEYBOARD (II) Initializing built-in extension XC-MISC (II) Initializing built-in extension SECURITY (II) Initializing built-in extension XINERAMA (II) Initializing built-in extension XFIXES (II) Initializing built-in extension RENDER (II) Initializing built-in extension RANDR (II) Initializing built-in extension COMPOSITE (II) Initializing built-in extension DAMAGE ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiDynamicMajor: found major device number 251 ukiOpenByBusid: Searching for BusID PCI:1:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card0 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 18, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 18 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:2:0:0 ukiOpenDevice: node name is /dev/ati/card1 ukiOpenDevice: open result is 18, (OK) ukiOpenByBusid: ukiOpenMinor returns 18 ukiOpenByBusid: ukiGetBusid reports PCI:1:0:0 (II) AIGLX: Loaded and initialized /usr/lib/dri/fglrx_dri.so (II) GLX: Initialized DRI GL provider for screen 0 (II) fglrx(0): Enable the clock gating! (II) fglrx(0): Setting screen physical size to 507 x 285 (II) XKB: reuse xkmfile /var/lib/xkb/server-B20D7FC79C7F597315E3E501AEF10E0D866E8E92.xkm (II) config/udev: Adding input device Power Button (/dev/input/event1) (**) Power Button: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (II) LoadModule: "evdev" (II) Loading /usr/lib/xorg/modules/input/evdev_drv.so (II) Module evdev: vendor="X.Org Foundation" compiled for 1.7.6, module version = 2.3.2 Module class: X.Org XInput Driver ABI class: X.Org XInput driver, version 7.0 (**) Power Button: always reports core events (**) Power Button: Device: "/dev/input/event1" (II) Power Button: Found keys (II) Power Button: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Power Button" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device Power Button (/dev/input/event0) (**) Power Button: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) Power Button: always reports core events (**) Power Button: Device: "/dev/input/event0" (II) Power Button: Found keys (II) Power Button: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Power Button" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse (/dev/input/event3) (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Applying InputClass "evdev pointer catchall" (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: always reports core events (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Device: "/dev/input/event3" (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found 12 mouse buttons (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found scroll wheel(s) (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found relative axes (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Found x and y relative axes (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: Configuring as mouse (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 (**) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200 (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse" (type: MOUSE) (II) Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse: initialized for relative axes. (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB-PS/2 Optical Mouse (/dev/input/mouse1) (II) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring) (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard (/dev/input/event4) (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: always reports core events (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Device: "/dev/input/event4" (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Found keys (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard (/dev/input/event5) (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: always reports core events (**) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Device: "/dev/input/event5" (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Found keys (II) Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Logitech USB Multimedia Keyboard" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device KEYBOARD (/dev/input/event6) (**) KEYBOARD: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) KEYBOARD: always reports core events (**) KEYBOARD: Device: "/dev/input/event6" (II) KEYBOARD: Found keys (II) KEYBOARD: Configuring as keyboard (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "KEYBOARD" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (II) config/udev: Adding input device KEYBOARD (/dev/input/event7) (**) KEYBOARD: Applying InputClass "evdev keyboard catchall" (**) KEYBOARD: always reports core events (**) KEYBOARD: Device: "/dev/input/event7" (II) KEYBOARD: Found 14 mouse buttons (II) KEYBOARD: Found scroll wheel(s) (II) KEYBOARD: Found relative axes (II) KEYBOARD: Found keys (II) KEYBOARD: Configuring as mouse (II) KEYBOARD: Configuring as keyboard (**) KEYBOARD: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 (**) KEYBOARD: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200 (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "KEYBOARD" (type: KEYBOARD) (**) Option "xkb_rules" "evdev" (**) Option "xkb_model" "pc105" (**) Option "xkb_layout" "us" (EE) KEYBOARD: failed to initialize for relative axes. (II) config/udev: Adding input device KEYBOARD (/dev/input/mouse2) (II) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring) (II) config/udev: Adding input device Macintosh mouse button emulation (/dev/input/event2) (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Applying InputClass "evdev pointer catchall" (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: always reports core events (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Device: "/dev/input/event2" (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found 3 mouse buttons (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found relative axes (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Found x and y relative axes (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: Configuring as mouse (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: YAxisMapping: buttons 4 and 5 (**) Macintosh mouse button emulation: EmulateWheelButton: 4, EmulateWheelInertia: 10, EmulateWheelTimeout: 200 (II) XINPUT: Adding extended input device "Macintosh mouse button emulation" (type: MOUSE) (II) Macintosh mouse button emulation: initialized for relative axes. (II) config/udev: Adding input device Macintosh mouse button emulation (/dev/input/mouse0) (II) No input driver/identifier specified (ignoring) (II) fglrx(0): Restoring Recent Mode via PCS is not supported in RANDR 1.2 capable environments

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• A free standing ASP.NET Pager Web Control

  - by Rick Strahl

  Paging in ASP.NET has been relatively easy with stock controls supporting basic paging functionality. However, recently I built an MVC application and one of the things I ran into was that I HAD TO build manual paging support into a few of my pages. Dealing with list controls and rendering markup is easy enough, but doing paging is a little more involved. I ended up with a small but flexible component that can be dropped anywhere. As it turns out the task of creating a semi-generic Pager control for MVC was fairly easily. Now I’m back to working in Web Forms and thought to myself that the way I created the pager in MVC actually would also work in ASP.NET – in fact quite a bit easier since the whole thing can be conveniently wrapped up into an easily reusable control. A standalone pager would provider easier reuse in various pages and a more consistent pager display regardless of what kind of 'control’ the pager is associated with. Why a Pager Control? At first blush it might sound silly to create a new pager control – after all Web Forms has pretty decent paging support, doesn’t it? Well, sort of. Yes the GridView control has automatic paging built in and the ListView control has the related DataPager control. The built in ASP.NET paging has several issues though: Postback and JavaScript requirements If you look at paging links in ASP.NET they are always postback links with javascript:__doPostback() calls that go back to the server. While that works fine and actually has some benefit like the fact that paging saves changes to the page and post them back, it’s not very SEO friendly. Basically if you use javascript based navigation nosearch engine will follow the paging links which effectively cuts off list content on the first page. The DataPager control does support GET based links via the QueryStringParameter property, but the control is effectively tied to the ListView control (which is the only control that implements IPageableItemContainer). DataSource Controls required for Efficient Data Paging Retrieval The only way you can get paging to work efficiently where only the few records you display on the page are queried for and retrieved from the database you have to use a DataSource control - only the Linq and Entity DataSource controls  support this natively. While you can retrieve this data yourself manually, there’s no way to just assign the page number and render the pager based on this custom subset. Other than that default paging requires a full resultset for ASP.NET to filter the data and display only a subset which can be very resource intensive and wasteful if you’re dealing with largish resultsets (although I’m a firm believer in returning actually usable sets :-}). If you use your own business layer that doesn’t fit an ObjectDataSource you’re SOL. That’s a real shame too because with LINQ based querying it’s real easy to retrieve a subset of data that is just the data you want to display but the native Pager functionality doesn’t support just setting properties to display just the subset AFAIK. DataPager is not Free Standing The DataPager control is the closest thing to a decent Pager implementation that ASP.NET has, but alas it’s not a free standing component – it works off a related control and the only one that it effectively supports from the stock ASP.NET controls is the ListView control. This means you can’t use the same data pager formatting for a grid and a list view or vice versa and you’re always tied to the control. Paging Events In order to handle paging you have to deal with paging events. The events fire at specific time instances in the page pipeline and because of this you often have to handle data binding in a way to work around the paging events or else end up double binding your data sources based on paging. Yuk. Styling The GridView pager is a royal pain to beat into submission for styled rendering. The DataPager control has many more options and template layout and it renders somewhat cleaner, but it too is not exactly easy to get a decent display for. Not a Generic Solution The problem with the ASP.NET controls too is that it’s not generic. GridView, DataGrid use their own internal paging, ListView can use a DataPager and if you want to manually create data layout – well you’re on your own. IOW, depending on what you use you likely have very different looking Paging experiences. So, I figured I’ve struggled with this once too many and finally sat down and built a Pager control. The Pager Control My goal was to create a totally free standing control that has no dependencies on other controls and certainly no requirements for using DataSource controls. The idea is that you should be able to use this pager control without any sort of data requirements at all – you should just be able to set properties and be able to display a pager. The Pager control I ended up with has the following features: Completely free standing Pager control – no control or data dependencies Complete manual control – Pager can render without any data dependency Easy to use: Only need to set PageSize, ActivePage and TotalItems Supports optional filtering of IQueryable for efficient queries and Pager rendering Supports optional full set filtering of IEnumerable<T> and DataTable Page links are plain HTTP GET href Links Control automatically picks up Page links on the URL and assigns them (automatic page detection no page index changing events to hookup) Full CSS Styling support On the downside there’s no templating support for the control so the layout of the pager is relatively fixed. All elements however are stylable and there are options to control the text, and layout options such as whether to display first and last pages and the previous/next buttons and so on. To give you an idea what the pager looks like, here are two differently styled examples (all via CSS):   The markup for these two pagers looks like this: <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPager" PageSize="5" PageLinkCssClass="gridpagerbutton" SelectedPageCssClass="gridpagerbutton-selected" PagesTextCssClass="gridpagertext" CssClass="gridpager" RenderContainerDiv="true" ContainerDivCssClass="gridpagercontainer" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" PagesText="Item Pages:" NextText="next" PreviousText="previous" /> <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPager2" PageSize="5" RenderContainerDiv="true" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> The latter example uses default style settings so it there’s not much to set. The first example on the other hand explicitly assigns custom styles and overrides a few of the formatting options. Styling The styling is based on a number of CSS classes of which the the main pager, pagerbutton and pagerbutton-selected classes are the important ones. Other styles like pagerbutton-next/prev/first/last are based on the pagerbutton style. The default styling shown for the red outlined pager looks like this: .pagercontainer { margin: 20px 0; background: whitesmoke; padding: 5px; } .pager { float: right; font-size: 10pt; text-align: left; } .pagerbutton,.pagerbutton-selected,.pagertext { display: block; float: left; text-align: center; border: solid 2px maroon; min-width: 18px; margin-left: 3px; text-decoration: none; padding: 4px; } .pagerbutton-selected { font-size: 130%; font-weight: bold; color: maroon; border-width: 0px; background: khaki; } .pagerbutton-first { margin-right: 12px; } .pagerbutton-last,.pagerbutton-prev { margin-left: 12px; } .pagertext { border: none; margin-left: 30px; font-weight: bold; } .pagerbutton a { text-decoration: none; } .pagerbutton:hover { background-color: maroon; color: cornsilk; } .pagerbutton-prev { background-image: url(images/prev.png); background-position: 2px center; background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 35px; padding-left: 20px; } .pagerbutton-next { background-image: url(images/next.png); background-position: 40px center; background-repeat: no-repeat; width: 35px; padding-right: 20px; margin-right: 0px; } Yup that’s a lot of styling settings although not all of them are required. The key ones are pagerbutton, pager and pager selection. The others (which are implicitly created by the control based on the pagerbutton style) are for custom markup of the ‘special’ buttons. In my apps I tend to have two kinds of pages: Those that are associated with typical ‘grid’ displays that display purely tabular data and those that have a more looser list like layout. The two pagers shown above represent these two views and the pager and gridpager styles in my standard style sheet reflect these two styles. Configuring the Pager with Code Finally lets look at what it takes to hook up the pager. As mentioned in the highlights the Pager control is completely independent of other controls so if you just want to display a pager on its own it’s as simple as dropping the control and assigning the PageSize, ActivePage and either TotalPages or TotalItems. So for this markup: <ww:Pager runat="server" id="ItemPagerManual" PageSize="5" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> I can use code as simple as: ItemPagerManual.PageSize = 3; ItemPagerManual.ActivePage = 4;ItemPagerManual.TotalItems = 20; Note that ActivePage is not required - it will automatically use any Page=x query string value and assign it, although you can override it as I did above. TotalItems can be any value that you retrieve from a result set or manually assign as I did above. A more realistic scenario based on a LINQ to SQL IQueryable result is even easier. In this example, I have a UserControl that contains a ListView control that renders IQueryable data. I use a User Control here because there are different views the user can choose from with each view being a different user control. This incidentally also highlights one of the nice features of the pager: Because the pager is independent of the control I can put the pager on the host page instead of into each of the user controls. IOW, there’s only one Pager control, but there are potentially many user controls/listviews that hold the actual display data. The following code demonstrates how to use the Pager with an IQueryable that loads only the records it displays: protected voidPage_Load(objectsender, EventArgs e) {     Category = Request.Params["Category"] ?? string.Empty;     IQueryable<wws_Item> ItemList = ItemRepository.GetItemsByCategory(Category);     // Update the page and filter the list down     ItemList = ItemPager.FilterIQueryable<wws_Item>(ItemList); // Render user control with a list view Control ulItemList = LoadControl("~/usercontrols/" + App.Configuration.ItemListType + ".ascx"); ((IInventoryItemListControl)ulItemList).InventoryItemList = ItemList; phItemList.Controls.Add(ulItemList); // placeholder } The code uses a business object to retrieve Items by category as an IQueryable which means that the result is only an expression tree that hasn’t execute SQL yet and can be further filtered. I then pass this IQueryable to the FilterIQueryable() helper method of the control which does two main things: Filters the IQueryable to retrieve only the data displayed on the active page Sets the Totaltems property and calculates TotalPages on the Pager and that’s it! When the Pager renders it uses those values, plus the PageSize and ActivePage properties to render the Pager. In addition to IQueryable there are also filter methods for IEnumerable<T> and DataTable, but these versions just filter the data by removing rows/items from the entire already retrieved data. Output Generated and Paging Links The output generated creates pager links as plain href links. Here’s what the output looks like: <div id="ItemPager" class="pagercontainer"> <div class="pager"> <span class="pagertext">Pages: </span><a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=1" class="pagerbutton" />1</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=2" class="pagerbutton" />2</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=3" class="pagerbutton" />3</a> <span class="pagerbutton-selected">4</span> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=5" class="pagerbutton" />5</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=6" class="pagerbutton" />6</a> <a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=20" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-last" />20</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=3" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-prev" />Prev</a>&nbsp;<a href="http://localhost/WestWindWebStore/itemlist.aspx?Page=5" class="pagerbutton pagerbutton-next" />Next</a></div> <br clear="all" /> </div> </div> The links point back to the current page and simply append a Page= page link into the page. When the page gets reloaded with the new page number the pager automatically detects the page number and automatically assigns the ActivePage property which results in the appropriate page to be displayed. The code shown in the previous section is all that’s needed to handle paging. Note that HTTP GET based paging is different than the Postback paging ASP.NET uses by default. Postback paging preserves modified page content when clicking on pager buttons, but this control will simply load a new page – no page preservation at this time. The advantage of not using Postback paging is that the URLs generated are plain HTML links that a search engine can follow where __doPostback() links are not. Pager with a Grid The pager also works in combination with grid controls so it’s easy to bypass the grid control’s paging features if desired. In the following example I use a gridView control and binds it to a DataTable result which is also filterable by the Pager control. The very basic plain vanilla ASP.NET grid markup looks like this: <div style="width: 600px; margin: 0 auto;padding: 20px; "> <asp:DataGrid runat="server" AutoGenerateColumns="True" ID="gdItems" CssClass="blackborder" style="width: 600px;"> <AlternatingItemStyle CssClass="gridalternate" /> <HeaderStyle CssClass="gridheader" /> </asp:DataGrid> <ww:Pager runat="server" ID="Pager" CssClass="gridpager" ContainerDivCssClass="gridpagercontainer" PageLinkCssClass="gridpagerbutton" SelectedPageCssClass="gridpagerbutton-selected" PageSize="8" RenderContainerDiv="true" MaxPagesToDisplay="6" /> </div> and looks like this when rendered: using custom set of CSS styles. The code behind for this code is also very simple: protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e) { string category = Request.Params["category"] ?? ""; busItem itemRep = WebStoreFactory.GetItem(); var items = itemRep.GetItemsByCategory(category) .Select(itm => new {Sku = itm.Sku, Description = itm.Description}); // run query into a DataTable for demonstration DataTable dt = itemRep.Converter.ToDataTable(items,"TItems"); // Remove all items not on the current page dt = Pager.FilterDataTable(dt,0); // bind and display gdItems.DataSource = dt; gdItems.DataBind(); } A little contrived I suppose since the list could already be bound from the list of elements, but this is to demonstrate that you can also bind against a DataTable if your business layer returns those. Unfortunately there’s no way to filter a DataReader as it’s a one way forward only reader and the reader is required by the DataSource to perform the bindings.  However, you can still use a DataReader as long as your business logic filters the data prior to rendering and provides a total item count (most likely as a second query). Control Creation The control itself is a pretty brute force ASP.NET control. Nothing clever about this other than some basic rendering logic and some simple calculations and update routines to determine which buttons need to be shown. You can take a look at the full code from the West Wind Web Toolkit’s Repository (note there are a few dependencies). To give you an idea how the control works here is the Render() method: /// <summary> /// overridden to handle custom pager rendering for runtime and design time /// </summary> /// <param name="writer"></param> protected override void Render(HtmlTextWriter writer) { base.Render(writer); if (TotalPages == 0 && TotalItems > 0) TotalPages = CalculateTotalPagesFromTotalItems(); if (DesignMode) TotalPages = 10; // don't render pager if there's only one page if (TotalPages < 2) return; if (RenderContainerDiv) { if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(ContainerDivCssClass)) writer.AddAttribute("class", ContainerDivCssClass); writer.RenderBeginTag("div"); } // main pager wrapper writer.WriteBeginTag("div"); writer.AddAttribute("id", this.ClientID); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(CssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", this.CssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar + "\r\n"); // Pages Text writer.WriteBeginTag("span"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PagesTextCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PagesTextCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar); writer.Write(this.PagesText); writer.WriteEndTag("span"); // if the base url is empty use the current URL FixupBaseUrl(); // set _startPage and _endPage ConfigurePagesToRender(); // write out first page link if (ShowFirstAndLastPageLinks && _startPage != 1) { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-first"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write("1"); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); writer.Write("&nbsp;"); } // write out all the page links for (int i = _startPage; i < _endPage + 1; i++) { if (i == ActivePage) { writer.WriteBeginTag("span"); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(SelectedPageCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", SelectedPageCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.TagRightChar); writer.Write(i.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("span"); } else { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, i.ToString()).TrimEnd('&'); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(i.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } writer.Write("\r\n"); } // write out last page link if (ShowFirstAndLastPageLinks && _endPage < TotalPages) { writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, TotalPages.ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-last"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(TotalPages.ToString()); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } // Previous link if (ShowPreviousNextLinks && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(PreviousText) && ActivePage > 1) { writer.Write("&nbsp;"); writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (ActivePage - 1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-prev"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(PreviousText); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } // Next link if (ShowPreviousNextLinks && !string.IsNullOrEmpty(NextText) && ActivePage < TotalPages) { writer.Write("&nbsp;"); writer.WriteBeginTag("a"); string pageUrl = StringUtils.SetUrlEncodedKey(BaseUrl, QueryStringPageField, (ActivePage + 1).ToString()); writer.WriteAttribute("href", pageUrl); if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(PageLinkCssClass)) writer.WriteAttribute("class", PageLinkCssClass + " " + PageLinkCssClass + "-next"); writer.Write(HtmlTextWriter.SelfClosingTagEnd); writer.Write(NextText); writer.WriteEndTag("a"); } writer.WriteEndTag("div"); if (RenderContainerDiv) { if (RenderContainerDivBreak) writer.Write("<br clear=\"all\" />\r\n"); writer.WriteEndTag("div"); } } As I said pretty much brute force rendering based on the control’s property settings of which there are quite a few: You can also see the pager in the designer above. unfortunately the VS designer (both 2010 and 2008) fails to render the float: left CSS styles properly and starts wrapping after margins are applied in the special buttons. Not a big deal since VS does at least respect the spacing (the floated elements overlay). Then again I’m not using the designer anyway :-}. Filtering Data What makes the Pager easy to use is the filter methods built into the control. While this functionality is clearly not the most politically correct design choice as it violates separation of concerns, it’s very useful for typical pager operation. While I actually have filter methods that do something similar in my business layer, having it exposed on the control makes the control a lot more useful for typical databinding scenarios. Of course these methods are optional – if you have a business layer that can provide filtered page queries for you can use that instead and assign the TotalItems property manually. There are three filter method types available for IQueryable, IEnumerable and for DataTable which tend to be the most common use cases in my apps old and new. The IQueryable version is pretty simple as it can simply rely on on .Skip() and .Take() with LINQ: /// <summary> /// <summary> /// Queries the database for the ActivePage applied manually /// or from the Request["page"] variable. This routine /// figures out and sets TotalPages, ActivePage and /// returns a filtered subset IQueryable that contains /// only the items from the ActivePage. /// </summary> /// <param name="query"></param> /// <param name="activePage"> /// The page you want to display. Sets the ActivePage property when passed. /// Pass 0 or smaller to use ActivePage setting. /// </param> /// <returns></returns> public IQueryable<T> FilterIQueryable<T>(IQueryable<T> query, int activePage) where T : class, new() { ActivePage = activePage < 1 ? ActivePage : activePage; if (ActivePage < 1) ActivePage = 1; TotalItems = query.Count(); if (TotalItems <= PageSize) { ActivePage = 1; TotalPages = 1; return query; } int skip = ActivePage - 1; if (skip > 0) query = query.Skip(skip * PageSize); _TotalPages = CalculateTotalPagesFromTotalItems(); return query.Take(PageSize); } The IEnumerable<T> version simply  converts the IEnumerable to an IQuerable and calls back into this method for filtering. The DataTable version requires a little more work to manually parse and filter records (I didn’t want to add the Linq DataSetExtensions assembly just for this): /// <summary> /// Filters a data table for an ActivePage. /// /// Note: Modifies the data set permanently by remove DataRows /// </summary> /// <param name="dt">Full result DataTable</param> /// <param name="activePage">Page to display. 0 to use ActivePage property </param> /// <returns></returns> public DataTable FilterDataTable(DataTable dt, int activePage) { ActivePage = activePage < 1 ? ActivePage : activePage; if (ActivePage < 1) ActivePage = 1; TotalItems = dt.Rows.Count; if (TotalItems <= PageSize) { ActivePage = 1; TotalPages = 1; return dt; } int skip = ActivePage - 1; if (skip > 0) { for (int i = 0; i < skip * PageSize; i++ ) dt.Rows.RemoveAt(0); } while(dt.Rows.Count > PageSize) dt.Rows.RemoveAt(PageSize); return dt; } Using the Pager Control The pager as it is is a first cut I built a couple of weeks ago and since then have been tweaking a little as part of an internal project I’m working on. I’ve replaced a bunch of pagers on various older pages with this pager without any issues and have what now feels like a more consistent user interface where paging looks and feels the same across different controls. As a bonus I’m only loading the data from the database that I need to display a single page. With the preset class tags applied too adding a pager is now as easy as dropping the control and adding the style sheet for styling to be consistent – no fuss, no muss. Schweet. Hopefully some of you may find this as useful as I have or at least as a baseline to build ontop of… Resources The Pager is part of the West Wind Web & Ajax Toolkit Pager.cs Source Code (some toolkit dependencies) Westwind.css base stylesheet with .pager and .gridpager styles Pager Example Page © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2010Posted in ASP.NET  

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• Parallelism in .NET – Part 16, Creating Tasks via a TaskFactory

  - by Reed

  The Task class in the Task Parallel Library supplies a large set of features.  However, when creating the task, and assigning it to a TaskScheduler, and starting the Task, there are quite a few steps involved.  This gets even more cumbersome when multiple tasks are involved.  Each task must be constructed, duplicating any options required, then started individually, potentially on a specific scheduler.  At first glance, this makes the new Task class seem like more work than ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem in .NET 3.5. In order to simplify this process, and make Tasks simple to use in simple cases, without sacrificing their power and flexibility, the Task Parallel Library added a new class: TaskFactory. The TaskFactory class is intended to “Provide support for creating and scheduling Task objects.”  Its entire purpose is to simplify development when working with Task instances.  The Task class provides access to the default TaskFactory via the Task.Factory static property.  By default, TaskFactory uses the default TaskScheduler to schedule tasks on a ThreadPool thread.  By using Task.Factory, we can automatically create and start a task in a single “fire and forget” manner, similar to how we did with ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem: Task.Factory.StartNew(() => this.ExecuteBackgroundWork(myData) ); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This provides us with the same level of simplicity we had with ThreadPool.QueueUserWorkItem, but even more power.  For example, we can now easily wait on the task: // Start our task on a background thread var task = Task.Factory.StartNew(() => this.ExecuteBackgroundWork(myData) ); // Do other work on the main thread, // while the task above executes in the background this.ExecuteWorkSynchronously(); // Wait for the background task to finish task.Wait(); TaskFactory simplifies creation and startup of simple background tasks dramatically. In addition to using the default TaskFactory, it’s often useful to construct a custom TaskFactory.  The TaskFactory class includes an entire set of constructors which allow you to specify the default configuration for every Task instance created by that factory.  This is particularly useful when using a custom TaskScheduler.  For example, look at the sample code for starting a task on the UI thread in Part 15: // Given the following, constructed on the UI thread // TaskScheduler uiScheduler = TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext(); // When inside a background task, we can do string status = GetUpdatedStatus(); (new Task(() => { statusLabel.Text = status; })) .Start(uiScheduler); This is actually quite a bit more complicated than necessary.  When we create the uiScheduler instance, we can use that to construct a TaskFactory that will automatically schedule tasks on the UI thread.  To do that, we’d create the following on our main thread, prior to constructing our background tasks: // Construct a task scheduler from the current SynchronizationContext (UI thread) var uiScheduler = TaskScheduler.FromCurrentSynchronizationContext(); // Construct a new TaskFactory using our UI scheduler var uiTaskFactory = new TaskFactory(uiScheduler); If we do this, when we’re on a background thread, we can use this new TaskFactory to marshal a Task back onto the UI thread.  Our previous code simplifies to: // When inside a background task, we can do string status = GetUpdatedStatus(); // Update our UI uiTaskFactory.StartNew( () => statusLabel.Text = status); Notice how much simpler this becomes!  By taking advantage of the convenience provided by a custom TaskFactory, we can now marshal to set data on the UI thread in a single, clear line of code!

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• Using an alternate search platform in Commerce Server 2009

  - by Lewis Benge

  Although Microsoft Commerce Server 2009's architecture is built upon Microsoft SQL Server, and has the full power of the SQL Full Text Indexing Search Platform, there are time however when you may require a richer or alternate search platform. One of these scenarios if when you want to implement a faceted (refinement) search into your site, which provides dynamic refinements based on the search results dataset. Faceted search is becoming popular in most online retail environments as a way of providing an enhanced user experience when browsing a larger catalogue. This is powerful for two reasons, firstly with a traditional search it is down to a user to think of a search term suitable for the product they are trying to find. This typically will not return similar products or help in any way to refine a larger dataset. Faceted searches on the other hand provide a comprehensive list of product properties, grouped together by similarity to help the user narrow down the results returned, as the user progressively restricts the search criteria by selecting additional criteria to search again, these facets needs to continually refresh. The whole experience allows users to explore alternate brands, price-ranges, or find products they hadn't initially thought of or where looking for in a bid to enhance cross sell in the retail environment. The second advantage of this type of search from a business perspective is also to harvest the search result to start to profile your user. Even though anonymous users may routinely visit your site, and will not necessarily register or complete a transaction to build up marketing data- profiling, you can still achieve the same result by recording search facets used within the search sequence. Below is a faceted search scenario generated from eBay using the search term "server". By creating a search profile of clicking through Computer & Networking -> Servers -> Dell - > New and recording this information against my user profile you can start to predict with a lot more certainty what types of products I am interested in. This will allow you to apply shopping-cart analysis against your search data and provide great cross-sale or advertising opportunity, or personalise the user experience based on your prediction of what the user may be interested in. This type of search is extremely beneficial in e-Commerce environments but achieving it out of the box with Commerce Server and SQL Full Text indexing can be challenging. In many deployments it is often easier to use an alternate search platform such as Microsoft's FAST, Apache SOLR, or Endecca, however you still want these products to integrate natively into Commerce Server to ensure that up-to-date inventory information is presented, profile information is generated, and you provide a consistant API. To do so we make the most of the Commerce Server extensibilty points called operation sequence components. In this example I will be talking about Apache Solr hosted on Apache Tomcat, in this specific example I have used the SolrNet C# library to interface to the Java platform. Also I am not going to talk about Solr configuration of indexing – but in a production envionrment this would typically happen by using Powershell to call the Commerce Server management webservice to export your catalog as XML, apply an XSLT transform to the file to make it conform to SOLR and use a simple HTTP Post to send it to the search enginge for indexing. Essentially a sequance component is a step in a serial workflow used to call a data repository (which in most cases is usually the Commerce Server pipelines or databases) and map to and from a Commerce Entity object whilst enforcing any business rules. So the first step in the process is to add a new class library to your existing Commerce Server site. You will need to use a new library as Sequence Components will need to be strongly named to be deployed. Once you are inside of your new project, add a new class file and add a reference to the Microsoft.Commerce.Providers, Microsoft.Commerce.Contracts and the Microsoft.Commerce.Broker assemblies. Now make your new class derive from the base object Microsoft.Commerce.Providers.Components.OperationSequanceComponent and overide the ExecuteQueryMethod. Your screen will then look something similar ot this: As all we are doing on this component is conducting a search we are only interested in the ExecuteQuery method. This method accepts three arguments, queryOperation, operationCache, and response. The queryOperation will be the object in which we receive our search parameters, the cache allows access to the Commerce Server cache allowing us to store regulary accessed information, and the response object is the object which we will return the result of our search upon. Inside this method is simply where we are going to inject our logic for our third party search platform. As I am not going to explain the inner-workings of actually making a SOLR call, I'll simply provide the sample code here. I would highly recommend however looking at the SolrNet wiki as they have some great explinations of how the API works. What you will find however is that there are some further extensions required when attempting to integrate a custom search provider. Firstly you out of the box the CommerceQueryOperation you will receive into the method when conducting a search against a catalog is specifically geared towards a SQL Full Text Search with properties such as a Where clause. To make the operation you receive more relevant you will need to create another class, this time derived from Microsoft.Commerce.Contract.Messages.CommerceSearchCriteria and within this you need to detail the properties you will require to allow you to submit as parameters to the SOLR search API. My exmaple looks like this: [DataContract(Namespace = "http://schemas.microsoft.com/microsoft-multi-channel-commerce-foundation/types/2008/03")] public class CommerceCatalogSolrSearch : CommerceSearchCriteria { private Dictionary<string, string> _facetQueries;   public CommerceCatalogSolrSearch() { _facetQueries = new Dictionary<String, String>();   }     public Dictionary<String, String> FacetQueries { get { return _facetQueries; } set { _facetQueries = value; } }   public String SearchPhrase{ get; set; } public int PageIndex { get; set; } public int PageSize { get; set; } public IEnumerable<String> Facets { get; set; }   public string Sort { get; set; }   public new int FirstItemIndex { get { return (PageIndex-1)*PageSize; } }   public int LastItemIndex { get { return FirstItemIndex + PageSize; } } }  To allow you to construct a CommerceQueryOperation call within the API you will also need to construct another class to derived from Microsoft.Commerce.Common.MessageBuilders.CommerceSearchCriteriaBuilder and is simply used to construct an instance of the CommerceQueryOperation you have just created and expose the properties you want set. My Message builder looks like this: public class CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder : CommerceSearchCriteriaBuilder { private CommerceCatalogSolrSearch _solrSearch;   public CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder() { _solrSearch = new CommerceCatalogSolrSearch(); }   public String SearchPhrase { get { return _solrSearch.SearchPhrase; } set { _solrSearch.SearchPhrase = value; } }   public int PageIndex { get { return _solrSearch.PageIndex; } set { _solrSearch.PageIndex = value; } }   public int PageSize { get { return _solrSearch.PageSize; } set { _solrSearch.PageSize = value; } }   public Dictionary<String,String> FacetQueries { get { return _solrSearch.FacetQueries; } set { _solrSearch.FacetQueries = value; } }   public String[] Facets { get { return _solrSearch.Facets.ToArray(); } set { _solrSearch.Facets = value; } } public override CommerceSearchCriteria ToSearchCriteria() { return _solrSearch; } }  Once you have these two classes in place you can now safely cast the CommerceOperation you receive as an argument of the overidden ExecuteQuery method in the SequenceComponent to the CommerceCatalogSolrSearch operation you have just created, e.g. public CommerceCatalogSolrSearch TryGetSearchCriteria(CommerceOperation operation) { var searchCriteria = operation as CommerceQueryOperation; if (searchCriteria == null) throw new Exception("No search criteria present");   var local = (CommerceCatalogSolrSearch) searchCriteria.SearchCriteria; if (local == null) throw new Exception("Unexpected Search Criteria in Operation");   return local; }  Now you have all of your search parameters present, you can go off an call the external search platform API. You will of-course get proprietry objects returned, so the next step in the process is to convert the results being returned back into CommerceEntities. You do this via another extensibility point within the Commerce Server API called translatators. Translators are another separate class, this time derived inheriting the interface Microsoft.Commerce.Providers.Translators.IToCommerceEntityTranslator . As you can imaginge this interface is specific for the conversion of the object TO a CommerceEntity, you will need to implement a separate interface if you also need to go in the opposite direction. If you implement the required method for the interace you will get a single translate method which has a source onkect, destination CommerceEntity, and a collection of properties as arguments. For simplicity sake in this example I have hard-coded the mappings, however best practice would dictate you map the objects using your metadatadefintions.xml file . Once complete your translator would look something like the following: public class SolrEntityTranslator : IToCommerceEntityTranslator { #region IToCommerceEntityTranslator Members   public void Translate(object source, CommerceEntity destinationCommerceEntity, CommercePropertyCollection propertiesToReturn) { if (source.GetType().Equals(typeof (SearchProduct))) { var searchResult = (SearchProduct) source;   destinationCommerceEntity.Id = searchResult.ProductId; destinationCommerceEntity.SetPropertyValue("DisplayName", searchResult.Title); destinationCommerceEntity.ModelName = "Product";   } }  Once you have a translator in place you can then safely map the results of your search platform into Commerce Entities and attach them on to the CommerceResponse object in a fashion similar to this: foreach (SearchProduct result in matchingProducts) { var destinationEntity = new CommerceEntity(_returnModelName);   Translator.ToCommerceEntity(result, destinationEntity, _queryOperation.Model.Properties); response.CommerceEntities.Add(destinationEntity); }  In SOLR I actually have two objects being returned – a product, and a collection of facets so I have an additional translator for facet (which maps to a custom facet CommerceEntity) and my facet response from SOLR is passed into the Translator helper class seperatley. When all of this is pieced together you have sucessfully completed the extensiblity point coding. You would have created a new OperationSequanceComponent, a custom SearchCritiera object and message builder class, and translators to convert the objects into Commerce Entities. Now you simply need to configure them, and can start calling them in your code. Make sure you sign you assembly, compile it and identiy its signature. Next you need to put this a reference of your new assembly into the Channel.Config configuration file replacing that of the existing SQL Full Text component: You will also need to add your translators to the Translators node of your Channel.Config too: Lastly add any custom CommerceEntities you have developed to your MetaDataDefintions.xml file. Your configuration is now complete, and you should now be able to happily make a call to the Commerce Foundation API, which will act as a proxy to your third party search platform and return back CommerceEntities of your search results. If you require data to be enriched, or logged, or any other logic applied then simply add further sequence components into the OperationSequence (obviously keeping the search response first) to the node of your Channel.Config file. Now to call your code you simply request it as per any other CommerceQuery operation, but taking into account you may be receiving multiple types of CommerceEntity returned: public KeyValuePair<FacetCollection ,List<Product>> DoFacetedProductQuerySearch(string searchPhrase, string orderKey, string sortOrder, int recordIndex, int recordsPerPage, Dictionary<string, string> facetQueries, out int totalItemCount) { var products = new List<Product>(); var query = new CommerceQuery<CatalogEntity, CommerceCatalogSolrSearchBuilder>();   query.SearchCriteria.PageIndex = recordIndex; query.SearchCriteria.PageSize = recordsPerPage; query.SearchCriteria.SearchPhrase = searchPhrase; query.SearchCriteria.FacetQueries = facetQueries;     totalItemCount = 0; CommerceResponse response = SiteContext.ProcessRequest(query.ToRequest()); var queryResponse = response.OperationResponses[0] as CommerceQueryOperationResponse;   // No results. Return the empty list if (queryResponse != null && queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Count == 0) return new KeyValuePair<FacetCollection, List<Product>>();   totalItemCount = (int)queryResponse.TotalItemCount;   // Prepare a multi-operation to retrieve the product variants var multiOperation = new CommerceMultiOperation();     //Add products to results foreach (Product product in queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Where(x => x.ModelName == "Product")) { var productQuery = new CommerceQuery<Product>(Product.ModelNameDefinition); productQuery.SearchCriteria.Model.Id = product.Id; productQuery.SearchCriteria.Model.CatalogId = product.CatalogId;   var variantQuery = new CommerceQueryRelatedItem<Variant>(Product.RelationshipName.Variants);   productQuery.RelatedOperations.Add(variantQuery);   multiOperation.Add(productQuery); }   CommerceResponse variantsResponse = SiteContext.ProcessRequest(multiOperation.ToRequest()); foreach (CommerceQueryOperationResponse queryOpResponse in variantsResponse.OperationResponses) { if (queryOpResponse.CommerceEntities.Count() > 0) products.Add(queryOpResponse.CommerceEntities[0]); }   //Get facet collection FacetCollection facetCollection = queryResponse.CommerceEntities.Where(x => x.ModelName == "FacetCollection").FirstOrDefault();     return new KeyValuePair<FacetCollection, List<Product>>(facetCollection, products); }    ..And that is it – simply a few classes and some configuration will allow you to extend the Commerce Server query operations to call a third party search platform, whilst still maintaing a unifed API in the remainder of your code. This logic stands for any extensibility within CommerceServer, which requires excution in a serial fashioon such as call to LOB systems or web service to validate or enrich data. Feel free to use this example on other applications, and if you have any questions please feel free to e-mail and I'll help out where I can!

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• String Format for DateTime in C#

  - by SAMIR BHOGAYTA

  String Format for DateTime [C#] This example shows how to format DateTime using String.Format method. All formatting can be done also using DateTime.ToString method. Custom DateTime Formatting There are following custom format specifiers y (year), M (month), d (day), h (hour 12), H (hour 24), m (minute), s (second), f (second fraction), F (second fraction, trailing zeroes are trimmed), t (P.M or A.M) and z (time zone). Following examples demonstrate how are the format specifiers rewritten to the output. [C#] // create date time 2008-03-09 16:05:07.123 DateTime dt = new DateTime(2008, 3, 9, 16, 5, 7, 123); String.Format("{0:y yy yyy yyyy}", dt); // "8 08 008 2008" year String.Format("{0:M MM MMM MMMM}", dt); // "3 03 Mar March" month String.Format("{0:d dd ddd dddd}", dt); // "9 09 Sun Sunday" day String.Format("{0:h hh H HH}", dt); // "4 04 16 16" hour 12/24 String.Format("{0:m mm}", dt); // "5 05" minute String.Format("{0:s ss}", dt); // "7 07" second String.Format("{0:f ff fff ffff}", dt); // "1 12 123 1230" sec.fraction String.Format("{0:F FF FFF FFFF}", dt); // "1 12 123 123" without zeroes String.Format("{0:t tt}", dt); // "P PM" A.M. or P.M. String.Format("{0:z zz zzz}", dt); // "-6 -06 -06:00" time zone You can use also date separator / (slash) and time sepatator : (colon). These characters will be rewritten to characters defined in the current DateTimeForma­tInfo.DateSepa­rator and DateTimeForma­tInfo.TimeSepa­rator. [C#] // date separator in german culture is "." (so "/" changes to ".") String.Format("{0:d/M/yyyy HH:mm:ss}", dt); // "9/3/2008 16:05:07" - english (en-US) String.Format("{0:d/M/yyyy HH:mm:ss}", dt); // "9.3.2008 16:05:07" - german (de-DE) Here are some examples of custom date and time formatting: [C#] // month/day numbers without/with leading zeroes String.Format("{0:M/d/yyyy}", dt); // "3/9/2008" String.Format("{0:MM/dd/yyyy}", dt); // "03/09/2008" // day/month names String.Format("{0:ddd, MMM d, yyyy}", dt); // "Sun, Mar 9, 2008" String.Format("{0:dddd, MMMM d, yyyy}", dt); // "Sunday, March 9, 2008" // two/four digit year String.Format("{0:MM/dd/yy}", dt); // "03/09/08" String.Format("{0:MM/dd/yyyy}", dt); // "03/09/2008" Standard DateTime Formatting In DateTimeForma­tInfo there are defined standard patterns for the current culture. For example property ShortTimePattern is string that contains value h:mm tt for en-US culture and value HH:mm for de-DE culture. Following table shows patterns defined in DateTimeForma­tInfo and their values for en-US culture. First column contains format specifiers for the String.Format method. Specifier DateTimeFormatInfo property Pattern value (for en-US culture) t ShortTimePattern h:mm tt d ShortDatePattern M/d/yyyy T LongTimePattern h:mm:ss tt D LongDatePattern dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy f (combination of D and t) dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy h:mm tt F FullDateTimePattern dddd, MMMM dd, yyyy h:mm:ss tt g (combination of d and t) M/d/yyyy h:mm tt G (combination of d and T) M/d/yyyy h:mm:ss tt m, M MonthDayPattern MMMM dd y, Y YearMonthPattern MMMM, yyyy r, R RFC1123Pattern ddd, dd MMM yyyy HH':'mm':'ss 'GMT' (*) s SortableDateTi­mePattern yyyy'-'MM'-'dd'T'HH':'mm':'ss (*) u UniversalSorta­bleDateTimePat­tern yyyy'-'MM'-'dd HH':'mm':'ss'Z' (*) (*) = culture independent Following examples show usage of standard format specifiers in String.Format method and the resulting output. [C#] String.Format("{0:t}", dt); // "4:05 PM" ShortTime String.Format("{0:d}", dt); // "3/9/2008" ShortDate String.Format("{0:T}", dt); // "4:05:07 PM" LongTime String.Format("{0:D}", dt); // "Sunday, March 09, 2008" LongDate String.Format("{0:f}", dt); // "Sunday, March 09, 2008 4:05 PM" LongDate+ShortTime String.Format("{0:F}", dt); // "Sunday, March 09, 2008 4:05:07 PM" FullDateTime String.Format("{0:g}", dt); // "3/9/2008 4:05 PM" ShortDate+ShortTime String.Format("{0:G}", dt); // "3/9/2008 4:05:07 PM" ShortDate+LongTime String.Format("{0:m}", dt); // "March 09" MonthDay String.Format("{0:y}", dt); // "March, 2008" YearMonth String.Format("{0:r}", dt); // "Sun, 09 Mar 2008 16:05:07 GMT" RFC1123 String.Format("{0:s}", dt); // "2008-03-09T16:05:07" SortableDateTime String.Format("{0:u}", dt); // "2008-03-09 16:05:07Z" UniversalSortableDateTime

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• Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script

  In the series the following parts have been published Part 1: Introduction Part 2: Add arguments and variables Part 3: Use more complex arguments Part 4: Create your own activity Part 5: Increase AssemblyVersion Part 6: Use custom type for an argument Part 7: How is the custom assembly found Part 8: Send information to the build log Part 9: Impersonate activities (run under other credentials) Part 10: Include Version Number in the Build Number Part 11: Speed up opening my build process template Part 12: How to debug my custom activities Part 13: Get control over the Build Output Part 14: Execute a PowerShell script Part 15: Fail a build based on the exit code of a console application With PowerShell you can add powerful scripting to your build to for example execute a deployment. If you want more information on PowerShell, please refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa973757.aspx For this example we will create a simple PowerShell script that prints “Hello world!”. To create the script, create a new text file and name it “HelloWorld.ps1”. Add to the contents of the script: Write-Host “Hello World!” To test the script do the following: Open the command prompt To run the script you must change the execution policy. To do this execute in the command prompt: powershell set-executionpolicy remotesigned Now go to the directory where you have saved the PowerShell script Execute the following command powershell .\HelloWorld.ps1 In this example I use a relative path, but when the path to the PowerShell script contains spaces, you need to change the syntax to powershell "& '<full path to script>' " for example: powershell "& ‘C:\sources\Build Customization\SolutionToBuild\PowerShell Scripts\HellloWorld.ps1’ " In this blog post, I create a new solution and that solution includes also this PowerShell script. I want to create an argument on the Build Process Template that holds the path to the PowerShell script. In the Build Process Template I will add an InvokeProcess activity to execute the PowerShell command. This InvokeProcess activity needs the location of the script as an argument for the PowerShell command. Since you don’t know the full path at the build server of this script, you can either specify in the argument the relative path of the script, but it is hard to find out what the relative path is. I prefer to specify the location of the script in source control and then convert that server path to a local path. To do this conversion you can use the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity. So to complete the task, open the Build Process Template CustomTemplate.xaml that we created in earlier parts, follow the following steps Add a new argument called “DeploymentScript” and set the appropriate settings in the metadata. See Part 2: Add arguments and variables  for more information. Scroll down beneath the TryCatch activity called “Try Compile, Test, and Associate Changesets and Work Items” Add a new If activity and set the condition to "Not String.IsNullOrEmpty(DeploymentScript)" to ensure it will only run when the argument is passed. Add in the Then branch of the If activity a new Sequence activity and rename it to “Start deployment” Click on the activity and add a new variable called DeploymentScriptFilename (scoped to the “Start deployment” Sequence Add a ConvertWorkspaceItem activity on the “Start deployment” Sequence Add a InvokeProcess activity beneath the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity in the “Start deployment” Sequence Click on the ConvertWorkspaceItem activity and change the properties DisplayName = Convert deployment script filename Input = DeploymentScript Result = DeploymentScriptFilename Workspace = Workspace Click on the InvokeProcess activity and change the properties Arguments = String.Format(" ""& '{0}' "" ", DeploymentScriptFilename) DisplayName = Execute deployment script FileName = "PowerShell" To see results from the powershell command drop a WriteBuildMessage activity on the "Handle Standard Output" and pass the stdOutput variable to the Message property. Do the same for a WriteBuildError activity on the "Handle Error Output" To publish it, check in the Build Process Template This leads to the following result We now go to the build definition that depends on the template and set the path of the deployment script to the server path to the HelloWorld.ps1. (If you want to see the result of the PowerShell script, change the Logging verbosity to Detailed or Diagnostic). Save and run the build. A lot of the deployment scripts you have will have some kind of arguments (like username / password or environment variables) that you want to define in the Build Definition. To make the PowerShell configurable, you can follow the following steps. Create a new script and give it the name "HelloWho.ps1". In the contents of the file add the following lines: param (         $person     ) $message = [System.String]::Format(“Hello {0}!", $person) Write-Host $message When you now run the script on the command prompt, you will see the following So lets change the Build Process Template to accept one parameter for the deployment script. You can of course make it configurable to add a for-loop that reads through a collection of parameters but that is out of scope of this blog post. Add a new Argument called DeploymentScriptParameter In the InvokeProcess activity where the PowerShell command is executed, modify the Arguments property to String.Format(" ""& '{0}' '{1}' "" ", DeploymentScriptFilename, DeploymentScriptParameter) Check in the Build Process Template Now modify the build definition and set the Parameter of the deployment to any value and run the build. You can download the full solution at BuildProcess.zip. It will include the sources of every part and will continue to evolve.

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• Microsoft Declares the Future of ASP.NET is Web API

  - by sbwalker

  Sitting on a plane on my way home from Tech Ed 2012 in Orlando, I thought it would be a good time to jot down some key takeaways from this year’s conference. Some of these items I have known since the Microsoft MVP Summit which occurred in Redmond in late February ( but due to NDA restrictions I could not share them with the developer community at large ) and some of them are a result of insightful conversations with a wide variety of industry insiders and Microsoft employees at the conference. First, let’s travel back in time 4 years to the Microsoft MVP Summit in 2008. Microsoft was facing some heat from market newcomer Ruby on Rails and responded with a new web development framework of its own, ASP.NET MVC. At the Summit they estimated that MVC would only be applicable for ~10% of all new web development projects. Based on that prediction I questioned why they were investing such considerable resources for such a relative edge case, but my guess is that they felt it was an important edge case at the time as some of the more vocal .NET evangelists as well as some very high profile start-ups ( ie. Twitter ) had publicly announced their intent to use Rails. Microsoft made a lot of noise about MVC. In fact, they focused so much of their messaging and marketing hype around MVC that it appeared that WebForms was essentially dead. Yes, it may have been true that Microsoft continued to invest in WebForms, but from an outside perspective it really appeared that MVC was the only framework getting any real attention. As a result, MVC started to gain market share. An inside source at Microsoft told me that MVC usage has grown at a rate of about 5% per year and now sits at ~30%. Essentially by focusing so much marketing effort on MVC, Microsoft actually created a larger market demand for it.  This is because in the Microsoft ecosystem there is somewhat of a bandwagon mentality amongst developers. If Microsoft spends a lot of time talking about a specific technology, developers get the perception that it must be really important. So rather than choosing the right tool for the job, they often choose the tool with the most marketing hype and then try to sell it to the customer. In 2010, I blogged about the fact that MVC did not make any business sense for the DotNetNuke platform. This was because our ecosystem relied on third party extensions which were dependent on the WebForms model. If we migrated the core to MVC it would mean that all of the third party extensions would no longer be compatible, which would be an irresponsible business decision for us to make at the expense of our users and customers. However, this did not stop the debate from continuing to occur in our ecosystem. Clearly some developers had drunk Microsoft’s Kool-Aid about MVC and were of the mindset, to paraphrase an old Scottish saying, “If its not MVC, it’s crap”. Now, this is a rather ignorant position to take as most of the benefits of MVC can be achieved in WebForms with solid architecture and responsible coding practices. Clean separation of concerns, unit testing, and direct control over page output are all possible in the WebForms model – it just requires diligence and discipline. So over the past few years some horror stories have begun to bubble to the surface of software development projects focused on ground-up rewrites of web applications for the sole purpose of migrating from WebForms to MVC. These large scale rewrites were typically initiated by engineering teams with only a single argument driving the business decision, that Microsoft was promoting MVC as “the future”. These ill-fated rewrites offered no benefit to end users or customers and in fact resulted in a less stable, less scalable and more complicated systems – basically taking one step forward and two full steps back. A case in point is the announcement earlier this week that a popular open source .NET CMS provider has decided to pull the plug on their new MVC product which has been under active development for more than 18 months and revert back to WebForms. The availability of multiple server-side development models has deeply fragmented the Microsoft developer community. Some folks like to compare it to the age-old VB vs. C# language debate. However, the VB vs. C# language debate was ultimately more of a religious war because at least the two dominant programming languages were compatible with one another and could be used interchangeably. The issue with WebForms vs. MVC is much more challenging. This is because the messaging from Microsoft has positioned the two solutions as being incompatible with one another and as a result web developers feel like they are forced to choose one path or another. Yes, it is true that it has always been technically possible to use WebForms and MVC in the same project, but the tooling support has always made this feel “dirty”. The fragmentation has also made it difficult to attract newcomers as the perceived barrier to entry for learning ASP.NET has become higher. As a result many new software developers entering the market are gravitating to environments where the development model seems more simple and intuitive ( ie. PHP or Ruby ). At the same time that the Web Platform team was busy promoting ASP.NET MVC, the Microsoft Office team has been promoting Sharepoint as a platform for building internal enterprise web applications. Sharepoint has great penetration in the enterprise and over time has been enhanced with improved extensibility capabilities for software developers. But, like many other mature enterprise ASP.NET web applications, it is built on the WebForms development model. Similar to DotNetNuke, Sharepoint leverages a rich third party ecosystem for both generic web controls and more specialized WebParts – both of which rely on WebForms. So basically this resulted in a situation where the Web Platform group had headed off in one direction and the Office team had gone in another direction, and the end customer was stuck in the middle trying to figure out what to do with their existing investments in Microsoft technology. It really emphasized the perception that the left hand was not speaking to the right hand, as strategically speaking there did not seem to be any high level plan from Microsoft to ensure consistency and continuity across the different product lines. With the introduction of ASP.NET MVC, it also made some of the third party control vendors scratch their heads, and wonder what the heck Microsoft was thinking. The original value proposition of ASP.NET over Classic ASP was the ability for web developers to emulate the highly productive desktop development model by using abstract components for creating rich, interactive web interfaces. Web control vendors like Telerik, Infragistics, DevExpress, and ComponentArt had all built sizable businesses offering powerful user interface components to WebForms developers. And even after MVC was introduced these vendors continued to improve their products, offering greater productivity and a superior user experience via AJAX to what was possible in MVC. And since many developers were comfortable and satisfied with these third party solutions, the demand remained strong and the third party web control market continued to prosper despite the availability of MVC. While all of this was going on in the Microsoft ecosystem, there has also been a fundamental shift in the general software development industry. Driven by the explosion of Internet-enabled devices, the focus has now centered on service-oriented architecture (SOA). Service-oriented architecture is all about defining a public API for your product that any client can consume; whether it’s a native application running on a smart phone or tablet, a web browser taking advantage of HTML5 and Javascript, or a rich desktop application running on a PC. REST-based services which utilize the less verbose characteristics of JSON as a transport mechanism, have become the preferred approach over older, more bloated SOAP-based techniques. SOA also has the benefit of producing a cross-platform API, as every major technology stack is able to interact with standard REST-based web services. And for web applications, more and more developers are turning to robust Javascript libraries like JQuery and Knockout for browser-based client-side development techniques for calling web services and rendering content to end users. In fact, traditional server-side page rendering has largely fallen out of favor, resulting in decreased demand for server-side frameworks like Ruby on Rails, WebForms, and (gasp) MVC. In response to these new industry trends, Microsoft did what it always does – it immediately poured some resources into developing a solution which will ensure they remain relevant and competitive in the web space. This work culminated in a new framework which was branded as Web API. It is convention-based and designed to embrace native HTTP standards without copious layers of abstraction. This framework is designed to be the ultimate replacement for both the REST aspects of WCF and ASP.NET MVC Web Services. And since it was developed out of band with a dependency only on ASP.NET 4.0, it means that it can be used immediately in a variety of production scenarios. So at Tech Ed 2012 it was made abundantly clear in numerous sessions that Microsoft views Web API as the “Future of ASP.NET”. In fact, one Microsoft PM even went as far as to say that if we look 3-4 years into the future, that all ASP.NET web applications will be developed using the Web API approach. This is a fairly bold prediction and clearly telegraphs where Microsoft plans to allocate its resources going forward. Currently Web API is being delivered as part of the MVC4 package, but this is only temporary for the sake of convenience. It also sounds like there are still internal discussions going on in terms of how to brand the various aspects of ASP.NET going forward – perhaps the moniker of “ASP.NET Web Stack” coined a couple years ago by Scott Hanselman and utilized as part of the open source release of ASP.NET bits on Codeplex a few months back will eventually stick. Web API is being positioned as the unification of ASP.NET – the glue that is able to pull this fragmented mess back together again. The  “One ASP.NET” strategy will promote the use of all frameworks - WebForms, MVC, and Web API, even within the same web project. Basically the message is utilize the appropriate aspects of each framework to solve your business problems. Instead of navigating developers to a fork in the road, the plan is to educate them that “hybrid” applications are a great strategy for delivering solutions to customers. In addition, the service-oriented approach coupled with client-side development promoted by Web API can effectively be used in both WebForms and MVC applications. So this means it is also relevant to application platforms like DotNetNuke and Sharepoint, which means that it starts to create a unified development strategy across all ASP.NET product lines once again. And so what about MVC? There have actually been rumors floated that MVC has reached a stage of maturity where, similar to WebForms, it will be treated more as a maintenance product line going forward ( MVC4 may in fact be the last significant iteration of this framework ). This may sound alarming to some folks who have recently adopted MVC but it really shouldn’t, as both WebForms and MVC will continue to play a vital role in delivering solutions to customers. They will just not be the primary area where Microsoft is spending the majority of its R&D resources. That distinction will obviously go to Web API. And when the question comes up of why not enhance MVC to make it work with Web API, you must take a step back and look at this from the higher level to see that it really makes no sense. MVC is a server-side page compositing framework; whereas, Web API promotes client-side page compositing with a heavy focus on web services. In order to make MVC work well with Web API, would require a complete rewrite of MVC and at the end of the day, there would be no upgrade path for existing MVC applications. So it really does not make much business sense. So what does this have to do with DotNetNuke? Well, around 8-12 months ago we recognized the software industry trends towards web services and client-side development. We decided to utilize a “hybrid” model which would provide compatibility for existing modules while at the same time provide a bridge for developers who wanted to utilize more modern web techniques. Customers who like the productivity and familiarity of WebForms can continue to build custom modules using the traditional approach. However, in DotNetNuke 6.2 we also introduced a new Service Framework which is actually built on top of MVC2 ( we chose to leverage MVC because it had the most intuitive, light-weight REST implementation in the .NET stack ). The Services Framework allowed us to build some rich interactive features in DotNetNuke 6.2, including the Messaging and Notification Center and Activity Feed. But based on where we know Microsoft is heading, it makes sense for the next major version of DotNetNuke ( which is expected to be released in Q4 2012 ) to migrate from MVC2 to Web API. This will likely result in some breaking changes in the Services Framework but we feel it is the best approach for ensuring the platform remains highly modern and relevant. The fact that our development strategy is perfectly aligned with the “One ASP.NET” strategy from Microsoft means that our customers and developer community can be confident in their current and future investments in the DotNetNuke platform.

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• UserAppDataPath in WPF

  - by psheriff

  In Windows Forms applications you were able to get to your user's roaming profile directory very easily using the Application.UserAppDataPath property. This folder allows you to store information for your program in a custom folder specifically for your program. The format of this directory looks like this: C:\Users\YOUR NAME\AppData\Roaming\COMPANY NAME\APPLICATION NAME\APPLICATION VERSION For example, on my Windows 7 64-bit system, this folder would look like this for a Windows Forms Application: C:\Users\PSheriff\AppData\Roaming\PDSA, Inc.\WindowsFormsApplication1\1.0.0.0 For some reason Microsoft did not expose this property from the Application object of WPF applications. I guess they think that we don't need this property in WPF? Well, sometimes we still do need to get at this folder. You have two choices on how to retrieve this property. Add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll to your WPF application and use this property directly. Or, you can write your own method to build the same path. If you add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll you will need to use System.Windows.Forms.Application.UserAppDataPath to access this property. Create a GetUserAppDataPath Method in WPF If you want to build this path you can do so with just a few method calls in WPF using Reflection. The code below shows this fairly simple method to retrieve the same folder as shown above. C#using System.Reflection; public string GetUserAppDataPath(){  string path = string.Empty;  Assembly assm;  Type at;  object[] r;   // Get the .EXE assembly  assm = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly();  // Get a 'Type' of the AssemblyCompanyAttribute  at = typeof(AssemblyCompanyAttribute);  // Get a collection of custom attributes from the .EXE assembly  r = assm.GetCustomAttributes(at, false);  // Get the Company Attribute  AssemblyCompanyAttribute ct =                 ((AssemblyCompanyAttribute)(r[0]));  // Build the User App Data Path  path = Environment.GetFolderPath(              Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData);  path += @"\" + ct.Company;  path += @"\" + assm.GetName().Version.ToString();   return path;} Visual BasicPublic Function GetUserAppDataPath() As String  Dim path As String = String.Empty  Dim assm As Assembly  Dim at As Type  Dim r As Object()   ' Get the .EXE assembly  assm = Assembly.GetEntryAssembly()  ' Get a 'Type' of the AssemblyCompanyAttribute  at = GetType(AssemblyCompanyAttribute)  ' Get a collection of custom attributes from the .EXE assembly  r = assm.GetCustomAttributes(at, False)  ' Get the Company Attribute  Dim ct As AssemblyCompanyAttribute = _                 DirectCast(r(0), AssemblyCompanyAttribute)  ' Build the User App Data Path  path = Environment.GetFolderPath( _                 Environment.SpecialFolder.ApplicationData)  path &= "\" & ct.Company  path &= "\" & assm.GetName().Version.ToString()   Return pathEnd Function Summary Getting the User Application Data Path folder in WPF is fairly simple with just a few method calls using Reflection. Of course, there is absolutely no reason you cannot just add a reference to the System.Windows.Forms.dll to your WPF application and use that Application object. After all, System.Windows.Forms.dll is a part of the .NET Framework and can be used from WPF with no issues at all. NOTE: Visit http://www.pdsa.com/downloads to get more tips and tricks like this one. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **We frequently offer a FREE gift for readers of my blog. Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for your FREE gift!

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• A Quick Primer on SharePoint Customization

  - by PeterBrunone

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} This one goes out to all the people who have been asked to change the way a SharePoint site looks.  Management wants to know how long it will take, and you can whip that out by tomorrow, right?  If you don't have time to prepare a treatise on what's involved, or if you just want to lend some extra weight to your case by quoting a blogger who was an MVP for seven years, then dive right in; this post is for you. There are three main components of SharePoint visual customization:   1)       Theme – A theme encompasses all the standardized text formatting and coloring (borders, fonts, etc), including the background images of various sections. All told, there could be around 50 images involved, and a few hundred CSS (style) classes.  Installing a theme once it’s been created is no great feat.  Given the number of pieces, of course, creating a new theme could take anywhere from a day to a week… once decisions have been made about the desired appearance. 2)      Master Page – A master page provides the framework for page layout.  This includes all the top and side menus, where content shows up, et cetera.  Master pages have been around for a long time in ASP.NET (Microsoft’s web development platform), and they do require some .NET programming knowledge.  Beyond that, in SharePoint, there are a few dozen controls which the system expects find on a given page.  They’re not all used at once, but if they’re not there when they’re needed, chaos ensues.  Estimating a custom master page is difficult, as it depends on the level of customization.  I’ve been on projects where I was brought in simply to fix some problems and add a few finishing touches, and it took 2-3 weeks.  Master page customization requires a large amount of testing time to make sure that the HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and control placement all work well together. 3)      Individual page layout – Each page (ideally) uses a master page for its template, but within the content areas defined by the master page, web parts can be added, removed, and configured from within the browser.  The wireframe that Brent provided could most likely be completed simply by manipulating the content on the home page in this fashion, and we had allowed about a day of effort for the task.  If needed, further functionality can be provided by an experienced ASP.NET developer; custom forms are a common example.  This of course is a bit more in-depth than simple content manipulation and could take several days per page (or more; there’s really no way to quantify this without a set of requirements).   That’s basically it.  To recap:  Fonts and coloring are done with themes, and can take anywhere from a day to a week to create (not counting creative time); required technical skills include HTML, CSS, and image manipulation.  Templated layout is done with master pages, and generally requires a developer familiar with both ASP.NET and SharePoint in particular; it can have far-reaching consequences depending on the complexity of the changes, and could add weeks or months to a project.  Page layout can be as simple as content manipulation in the web browser, taking a few hours per page, or it can involve more detail, like custom forms, and can require programming expertise and significantly more development time.

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• Understanding the value of Customer Experience & Loyalty for the Telecommunications Industry

  - by raul.goycoolea

  Worried by economic woes and market forces, especially in mature markets, communications service providers (CSPs) increasingly focus on improving customer experience. In fact, it seems difficult to find a major message by a C-level executive in the developed world that does not include something on "meeting and exceeding customers' needs". Frequently in customer satisfaction studies by prominent firms, CSPs fall short of the leadership demonstrated by other industries that take customer-centric approaches to their bottom-line strategies. Consider the following:Despite the continued impact of global economic crisis, in July 2010, Apple Computer posted record revenue and net quarterly profit. Those who attribute the results primarily to the iPhone 4 launch should note that Apple also shipped around 30% more Macintosh computers than the same period the previous year. Even sales of the iPod line increased by 8% in a highly commoditized, shrinking media player market. Finally, Apple began selling iPads during the quarter, with total sales of more than 3 million units. What does Apple have that the others lack? Well, some great products (and services) to be sure, but it also excels at customer service and support, marketing, and distribution, and has one of the strongest brands globally. Its products are useful, simple to use, easy to acquire and augment, high quality, and considered very cool. They also evoke such an emotional response from many of Apple's customers, which they turn up their noses at competitive products.In other words, Apple appears to have mastered virtually every aspect of customer experience and the resultant loyalty of its customer base - even in difficult financial times. Through that unwavering customer focus, Apple continues to drive its revenues and profits to new heights. Other customer loyalty leaders like Wal-Mart, Google, Toyota and Honda are also doing well by focusing on customer experience as an essential driver of profitability. Service providers should note this performance and ask themselves how they might leverage the same principles to increase their own profitability. After all, that is what customer experience and loyalty are all about: profitability.To successfully manage all the critical touch points of customer experience, CSPs must shun the one-size-fits-all approach. They can no longer afford to view customer service fundamentally as an act of altruism - which mentality dates back to the industry's civil service days, when CSPs were typically government organizations that were critical to economic development and public safety.As regulators and public officials have pushed, and continue to push, service providers to new heights of reliability - using incentives and punishments - most CSPs already have some of the fundamental building blocks of customer service in place. Yet despite that history and experience, service providers still lag other industries in providing what is seen as good customer service.As we observed in the TMF's 2009 Insights Research report, Customer Experience Management: Driving Loyalty & Profitability there has been resurgence in interest by CSPs. More and more of them have stated ambitions to catch up other industries, and they are realizing that good customer service is a powerful strategy for increasing business performance and profitability, not an act of good will.CSPs are recognizing the connection between customer experience and profitability, as demonstrated in many studies. For example, according to research by Bain & Company, a 5 percent improvement in customer retention rates can yield as much as a 75 percent increase in profits for companies across a range of industries.After decades of customer experience strategy formulation, Bain partner and business author, Frederick Reichheld, considers "would you recommend us to a friend?" as the ultimate question for a customer. How many times have you or your friends recommended an iPod, iPhone or a Mac? What do your children recommend to their peers? Their peers to them?There are certain steps service providers have to take to create more personalized relationships with their customers, as well as reduce churn and increase profitability, all while becoming leaner and more agile. First, they have to define customer experience, we define it as the result of the sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings arising from interactions and relationships between customers and their service provider(s). Virtually every customer touch point - whether directly or indirectly linked to service providers and their partners - contributes to customer perception, satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately profitability. Gaining leadership in customer experience and satisfaction will not be a simple task, as it is affected by virtually every customer-facing aspect of the service provider, and in turn impacts the service provider deeply - especially on the all-important bottom line. The scope of issues affecting customer experience is complex and dynamic.With new services, devices and applications extending the basis of customer experience to domains beyond the direct control of the service provider, it is likely to increase in complexity and dynamism.Customer loyalty = increased profitsAs stated earlier, customer experience programs are not fundamentally altruistic exercises, but a strategic means of improving competitiveness and profitability in the short and long term. Loyalty is essential to deriving long term profits from customers.Some of the earliest loyalty programs date back to the 1930s, when packaged goods companies offered embedded coupons for rewards to buyers, and eventually retail chains began offering reward programs to frequent shoppers. These programs continued for decades but were leapfrogged in the 1980s by more aggressive programs from the airlines.This movement was led by American Airlines, which launched the first full-scale loyalty marketing program of the modern era with the AAdvantage frequent flyer scheme. It was the first to reward frequent fliers with notional air miles that could be accumulated and later redeemed for free travel. Figure 1: Opportunities example of Customer loyalty driven profitOther airlines and travel providers were quick to grasp the incredible value of providing customers with an incentive to use their company exclusively. Within a few years, dozens of travel industry companies launched similar initiatives and now loyalty programs are achieving near-ubiquity in many service industries, especially those in which it is difficult to differentiate offerings by product attributes.The belief is that increased profitability will result from customer retention efforts because:•    The cost of acquisition occurs only at the beginning of a relationship: the longer the relationship, the lower the amortized cost;•    Account maintenance costs decline as a percentage of total costs, or as a percentage of revenue, over the lifetime of the relationship;•    Long term customers tend to be less inclined to switch and less price sensitive which can result in stable unit sales volume and increases in dollar-sales volume;•    Long term customers may initiate word-of-mouth promotions and referrals, which cost the company nothing and arguably are the most effective form of advertising;•    Long-term customers are more likely to buy ancillary products and higher margin supplemental products;•    Long term customers tend to be satisfied with their relationship with the company and are less likely to switch to competitors, making market entry or competitors gaining market share difficult;•    Regular customers tend to be less expensive to service, as they are familiar with the processes involved, require less 'education', and are consistent in their order placement;•    Increased customer retention and loyalty makes the employees' jobs easier and more satisfying. In turn, happy employees feed back into higher customer satisfaction in a virtuous circle. Figure 2: The virtuous circle of customer loyaltyFigure 2 represents a high-level example of a virtuous cycle driven by customer satisfaction and loyalty, depicting how superiority in product and service offerings, as well as strong customer support by competent employees, lead to higher sales and ultimately profitability. As stated above, this is not a new concept, but succeeding with it is difficult. It has eluded many a company driven to achieve profitability goals. Of course, for this circle to be virtuous, the customer relationship(s) must be profitable.Trying to maintain the loyalty of unprofitable customers is not a viable business strategy. It is, therefore, important that marketers can assess the profitability of each customer (or customer segment), and either improve or terminate relationships that are not profitable. This means each customer's 'relationship costs' must be understood and compared to their 'relationship revenue'. Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the most commonly used metric here, as it is generally accepted as a representation of exactly how much each customer is worth in monetary terms, and therefore a determinant of exactly how much a service provider should be willing to spend to acquire or retain that customer.CLV models make several simplifying assumptions and often involve the following inputs:•    Churn rate represents the percentage of customers who end their relationship with a company in a given period;•    Retention rate is calculated by subtracting the churn rate percentage from 100;•    Period/horizon equates to the units of time into which a customer relationship can be divided for analysis. A year is the most commonly used period for this purpose. Customer lifetime value is a multi-period calculation, often projecting three to seven years into the future. In practice, analysis beyond this point is viewed as too speculative to be reliable. The model horizon is the number of periods used in the calculation;•    Periodic revenue is the amount of revenue collected from a customer in a given period (though this is often extended across multiple periods into the future to understand lifetime value), such as usage revenue, revenues anticipated from cross and upselling, and often some weighting for referrals by a loyal customer to others; •    Retention cost describes the amount of money the service provider must spend, in a given period, to retain an existing customer. Again, this is often forecast across multiple periods. Retention costs include customer support, billing, promotional incentives and so on;•    Discount rate means the cost of capital used to discount future revenue from a customer. Discounting is an advanced method used in more sophisticated CLV calculations;•    Profit margin is the projected profit as a percentage of revenue for the period. This may be reflected as a percentage of gross or net profit. Again, this is generally projected across the model horizon to understand lifetime value.A strong focus on managing these inputs can help service providers realize stronger customer relationships and profits, but there are some obstacles to overcome in achieving accurate calculations of CLV, such as the complexity of allocating costs across the customer base. There are many costs that serve all customers which must be properly allocated across the base, and often a simple proportional allocation across the whole base or a segment may not accurately reflect the true cost of serving that customer;  This is made worse by the fragmentation of customer information, which is likely to be across a variety of product or operations groups, and may be difficult to aggregate due to different representations.In addition, there is the complexity of account relationships and structures to take into consideration. Complex account structures may not be understood or properly represented. For example, a profitable customer may have a separate account for a second home or another family member, which may appear to be unprofitable. If the service provider cannot relate the two accounts, CLV is not properly represented and any resultant cancellation of the apparently unprofitable account may result in the customer churning from the profitable one.In summary, if service providers are to realize strong customer relationships and their attendant profits, there must be a very strong focus on data management. This needs to be coupled with analytics that help business managers and those who work in customer-facing functions offer highly personalized solutions to customers, while maintaining profitability for the service provider. It's clear that acquiring new customers is expensive. Advertising costs, campaign management expenses, promotional service pricing and discounting, and equipment subsidies make a serious dent in a new customer's profitability. That is especially true given the rising subsidies for Smartphone users, which service providers hope will result in greater profits from profits from data services profitability in future.  The situation is made worse by falling prices and greater competition in mature markets.Customer acquisition through industry consolidation isn't cheap either. A North American service provider spent about $2,000 per subscriber in its acquisition of a smaller company earlier this year. While this has allowed it to leapfrog to become the largest mobile service provider in the country, it required a total investment of more than $28 billion (including assumption of the acquiree's debt).While many operating cost synergies clearly made this deal more attractive to the acquiring company, this is certainly an expensive way to acquire customers: the cost per subscriber in this case is not out of line with the prices others have paid for acquisitions.While growth by acquisition certainly increases overall revenues, it often creates tremendous challenges for profitability. Organic growth through increased customer loyalty and retention is a more effective driver of profit, as well as a stronger predictor of future profitability. Service providers, especially those in mature markets, are increasingly recognizing this and taking steps toward a creating a more personalized, flexible and satisfying experience for their customers.In summary, the clearest path to profitability for companies in virtually all industries is through customer retention and maximization of lifetime value. Service providers would do well to recognize this and focus attention on profitable customer relationships.

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• TLS (STARTTLS) Failure After 10.6 Upgrade to Open Directory Master

  - by Thomas Kishel

  Hello, Environment: Mac OS X 10.6.3 install/import of a MacOS X 10.5.8 Open Directory Master server. After that upgrade, LDAP+TLS fails on our MacOS X 10.5, 10.6, CentOS, Debian, and FreeBSD clients (Apache2 and PAM). Testing using ldapsearch: ldapsearch -ZZ -H ldap://gnome.darkhorse.com -v -x -b "dc=darkhorse,dc=com" '(uid=donaldr)' uid ... fails with: ldap_start_tls: Protocol error (2) Testing adding "-d 9" fails with: res_errno: 2, res_error: <unsupported extended operation>, res_matched: <> Testing without requiring STARTTLS or with LDAPS: ldapsearch -H ldap://gnome.darkhorse.com -v -x -b "dc=darkhorse,dc=com" '(uid=donaldr)' uid ldapsearch -H ldaps://gnome.darkhorse.com -v -x -b "dc=darkhorse,dc=com" '(uid=donaldr)' uid ... succeeds with: # donaldr, users, darkhorse.com dn: uid=donaldr,cn=users,dc=darkhorse,dc=com uid: donaldr # search result search: 2 result: 0 Success # numResponses: 2 # numEntries: 1 result: 0 Success (We are specifying "TLS_REQCERT never" in /etc/openldap/ldap.conf) Testing with openssl: openssl s_client -connect gnome.darkhorse.com:636 -showcerts -state ... succeeds: CONNECTED(00000003) SSL_connect:before/connect initialization SSL_connect:SSLv2/v3 write client hello A SSL_connect:SSLv3 read server hello A depth=1 /C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=Dark Horse Network/CN=DHC MIS Department verify error:num=19:self signed certificate in certificate chain verify return:0 SSL_connect:SSLv3 read server certificate A SSL_connect:SSLv3 read server done A SSL_connect:SSLv3 write client key exchange A SSL_connect:SSLv3 write change cipher spec A SSL_connect:SSLv3 write finished A SSL_connect:SSLv3 flush data SSL_connect:SSLv3 read finished A --- Certificate chain 0 s:/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=MIS/CN=gnome.darkhorse.com i:/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=Dark Horse Network/CN=DHC MIS Department 1 s:/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=Dark Horse Network/CN=DHC MIS Department i:/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=Dark Horse Network/CN=DHC MIS Department --- Server certificate -----BEGIN CERTIFICATE----- <deleted for brevity> -----END CERTIFICATE----- subject=/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=MIS/CN=gnome.darkhorse.com issuer=/C=US/ST=Oregon/L=Milwaukie/O=Dark Horse Comics, Inc./OU=Dark Horse Network/CN=DHC MIS Department --- No client certificate CA names sent --- SSL handshake has read 2640 bytes and written 325 bytes --- New, TLSv1/SSLv3, Cipher is AES256-SHA Server public key is 1024 bit Compression: NONE Expansion: NONE SSL-Session: Protocol : TLSv1 Cipher : AES256-SHA Session-ID: D3F9536D3C64BAAB9424193F81F09D5C53B7D8E7CB5A9000C58E43285D983851 Session-ID-ctx: Master-Key: E224CC065924DDA6FABB89DBCC3E6BF89BEF6C0BD6E5D0B3C79E7DE927D6E97BF12219053BA2BB5B96EA2F6A44E934D3 Key-Arg : None Start Time: 1271202435 Timeout : 300 (sec) Verify return code: 0 (ok) So we believe that the slapd daemon is reading our certificate and writing it to LDAP clients. Apple Server Admin adds ProgramArguments ("-h ldaps:///") to /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.openldap.slapd.plist and TLSCertificateFile, TLSCertificateKeyFile, TLSCACertificateFile, and TLSCertificatePassphraseTool to /etc/openldap/slapd_macosxserver.conf when enabling SSL in the LDAP section of the Open Directory service. While that appears enough for LDAPS, it appears that this is not enough for TLS. Comparing our 10.6 and 10.5 slapd.conf and slapd_macosxserver.conf configuration files yields no clues. Replacing our certificate (generated with a self-signed ca) with an Apple Server Admin generated self signed certificate results in no change in ldapsearch results. Setting -d to 256 in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.openldap.slapd.plist logs: 4/13/10 5:23:35 PM org.openldap.slapd[82162] conn=384 op=0 EXT oid=1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.20037 4/13/10 5:23:35 PM org.openldap.slapd[82162] conn=384 op=0 do_extended: unsupported operation "1.3.6.1.4.1.1466.20037" 4/13/10 5:23:35 PM org.openldap.slapd[82162] conn=384 op=0 RESULT tag=120 err=2 text=unsupported extended operation Any debugging advice much appreciated. -- Tom Kishel

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• Windows 7 doesn't boot after Ubuntu install

  - by Omu

  I had windows 7 installed on my pc, then I installed Ubuntu 10.10/ During the installation process I have chosen to manually set my partitions: I set a 10GB drive for ubuntu root 1GB drive for swap and for boot drive I've chosen the one used by windows 7 Now I can boot ubuntu, I have the windows 7 option in the boot list, but when I choose Windows 7, it shows me a black screen for a second and returns back to boot screen. Boot Info Script 0.55 dated February 15th, 2010 ============================= Boot Info Summary: ============================== = Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda sda1: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Grub 2 Boot sector info: Grub 2 is installed in the boot sector of sda1 and looks at sector 304908237 of the same hard drive for core.img, but core.img can not be found at this location. No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows 7 Boot files/dirs: /bootmgr /Boot/BCD /Windows/System32/winload.exe sda2: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows XP Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files/dirs: sda3: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: Extended Partition Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: sda5: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: Operating System: Ubuntu 10.10 Boot files/dirs: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab /boot/grub/core.img sda4: _________________________________________________________________________ File system: swap Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: =========================== Drive/Partition Info: ============================= Drive: sda ___________________ _____________________________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders, total 312581808 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start End Size Id System /dev/sda1 * 63 62,894,474 62,894,412 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda2 62,894,478 291,579,749 228,685,272 7 HPFS/NTFS /dev/sda3 291,579,811 309,157,937 17,578,127 5 Extended /dev/sda5 291,579,813 309,157,937 17,578,125 83 Linux /dev/sda4 309,159,936 312,580,095 3,420,160 82 Linux swap / Solaris blkid -c /dev/null: ____________________________________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/sda1 1266BB2766BB0A8D ntfs /dev/sda2 BEDBF1147C76F703 ntfs DATA /dev/sda3: PTTYPE="dos" /dev/sda4 dd38226d-c7c9-4ae5-a726-6d18d34a22e4 swap /dev/sda5 e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 ext4 /dev/sda: PTTYPE="dos" ============================ "mount | grep ^/dev output: =========================== Device Mount_Point Type Options /dev/sda5 / ext4 (rw,errors=remount-ro,commit=0) =========================== sda5/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ### if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then set have_grubenv=true load_env fi set default="0" if [ "${prev_saved_entry}" ]; then set saved_entry="${prev_saved_entry}" save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then saved_entry="${chosen}" save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n "${have_grubenv}" ]; then if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } function load_video { insmod vbe insmod vga } insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=640x480 load_video insmod gfxterm fi terminal_output gfxterm insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 set locale_dir=($root)/boot/grub/locale set lang=en insmod gettext if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then set timeout=-1 else set timeout=10 fi ### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray ### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.35-22-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic root=UUID=e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 ro quiet splash initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 2.6.35-22-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 echo 'Loading Linux 2.6.35-22-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic root=UUID=e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 ro single echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic } ### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### END /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin } menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set e1dafd1c-f855-406b-8f9a-f9d527c70255 linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8 } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda1)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ntfs set root='(hd0,msdos1)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set 1266bb2766bb0a8d chainloader +1 } ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### # This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the # menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change # the 'exec tail' line above. ### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### if [ -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then source $prefix/custom.cfg; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### =============================== sda5/etc/fstab: =============================== # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid -o value -s UUID' to print the universally unique identifier # for a device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name # devices that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 /dev/sda5 / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # swap was on /dev/sda4 during installation UUID=dd38226d-c7c9-4ae5-a726-6d18d34a22e4 none swap sw 0 0 =================== sda5: Location of files loaded by Grub: =================== 156.1GB: boot/grub/core.img 156.3GB: boot/grub/grub.cfg 149.9GB: boot/initrd.img-2.6.35-22-generic 156.3GB: boot/vmlinuz-2.6.35-22-generic 149.9GB: initrd.img 156.3GB: vmlinuz

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• Switching the layout in Orchard CMS

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  The UI composition in Orchard is extremely flexible, thanks in no small part to the usage of dynamic Clay shapes. Every notable UI construct in Orchard is built as a shape that other parts of the system can then party on and modify any way they want. Case in point today: modifying the layout (which is a shape) on the fly to provide custom page structures for different parts of the site. This might actually end up being built-in Orchard 1.0 but for the moment it’s not in there. Plus, it’s quite interesting to see how it’s done. We are going to build a little extension that allows for specialized layouts in addition to the default layout.cshtml that Orchard understands out of the box. The extension will add the possibility to add the module name (or, in MVC terms, area name) to the template name, or module and controller names, or module, controller and action names. For example, the home page is served by the HomePage module, so with this extension you’ll be able to add an optional layout-homepage.cshtml file to your theme to specialize the look of the home page while leaving all other pages using the regular layout.cshtml. I decided to implement this sample as a theme with code. This way, the new overrides are only enabled as the theme is activated, which makes a lot of sense as this is going to be where you’ll be creating those additional layouts. The first thing I did was to create my own theme, derived from the default TheThemeMachine with this command: codegen theme CustomLayoutMachine /CreateProject:true /IncludeInSolution:true /BasedOn:TheThemeMachine .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: 12px; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Once that was done, I worked around a known bug and moved the new project from the Modules solution folder into Themes (the code was already physically in the right place, this is just about Visual Studio editing). The CreateProject flag in the command-line created a project file for us in the theme’s folder. This is only necessary if you want to run code outside of views from that theme. The code that we want to add is the following LayoutFilter.cs: using System.Linq; using System.Web.Mvc; using System.Web.Routing; using Orchard; using Orchard.Mvc.Filters; namespace CustomLayoutMachine.Filters { public class LayoutFilter : FilterProvider, IResultFilter { private readonly IWorkContextAccessor _wca; public LayoutFilter(IWorkContextAccessor wca) { _wca = wca; } public void OnResultExecuting(ResultExecutingContext filterContext) { var workContext = _wca.GetContext(); var routeValues = filterContext.RouteData.Values; workContext.Layout.Metadata.Alternates.Add( BuildShapeName(routeValues, "area")); workContext.Layout.Metadata.Alternates.Add( BuildShapeName(routeValues, "area", "controller")); workContext.Layout.Metadata.Alternates.Add( BuildShapeName(routeValues, "area", "controller", "action")); } public void OnResultExecuted(ResultExecutedContext filterContext) { } private static string BuildShapeName( RouteValueDictionary values, params string[] names) { return "Layout__" + string.Join("__", names.Select(s => ((string)values[s] ?? "").Replace(".", "_"))); } } } This filter is intercepting ResultExecuting, which is going to provide a context object out of which we can extract the route data. We are also injecting an IWorkContextAccessor dependency that will give us access to the current Layout object, so that we can add alternate shape names to its metadata. We are adding three possible shape names to the default, with different combinations of area, controller and action names. For example, a request to a blog post is going to be routed to the “Orchard.Blogs” module’s “BlogPost” controller’s “Item” action. Our filters will then add the following shape names to the default “Layout”: Layout__Orchard_Blogs Layout__Orchard_Blogs__BlogPost Layout__Orchard_Blogs__BlogPost__Item Those template names get mapped into the following file names by the system (assuming the Razor view engine): Layout-Orchard_Blogs.cshtml Layout-Orchard_Blogs-BlogPost.cshtml Layout-Orchard_Blogs-BlogPost-Item.cshtml This works for any module/controller/action of course, but in the sample I created Layout-HomePage.cshtml (a specific layout for the home page), Layout-Orchard_Blogs.cshtml (a layout for all the blog views) and Layout-Orchard_Blogs-BlogPost-Item.cshtml (a layout that is specific to blog posts). Of course, this is just an example, and this kind of dynamic extension of shapes that you didn’t even create in the first place is highly encouraged in Orchard. You don’t have to do it from a filter, we only did it this way because that was a good place where we could get the context that we needed. And of course, you can base your alternate shape names on something completely different from route values if you want. For example, you might want to create your own part that modifies the layout for a specific content item, or you might want to do it based on the raw URL (like it’s done in widget rules) or who knows what crazy custom rule. The point of all this is to show that extending or modifying shapes is easy, and the layout just happens to be a shape. In other words, you can do whatever you want. Ain’t that nice? The custom theme can be found here: Orchard.Theme.CustomLayoutMachine.1.0.nupkg Many thanks to Louis, who showed me how to do this.

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• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Handler Factories

  - by Ricardo Peres

  An handler factory is the class that implements IHttpHandlerFactory and is responsible for instantiating an handler (IHttpHandler) that will process the current request. This is true for all kinds of web requests, whether they are for ASPX pages, ASMX/SVC web services, ASHX/AXD handlers, or any other kind of file. Also used for restricting access for certain file types, such as Config, Csproj, etc. Handler factories are registered on the global Web.config file, normally located at %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework<x64>\vXXXX\Config for a given path and request type (GET, POST, HEAD, etc). This goes on section <httpHandlers>. You would create a custom handler factory for a number of reasons, let me list just two: A centralized place for using dependency injection; Also a centralized place for invoking custom methods or performing some kind of validation on all pages. Let’s see an example using Unity for injecting dependencies into a page, suppose we have this on Global.asax.cs: 1: public class Global : HttpApplication 2: { 3: internal static readonly IUnityContainer Unity = new UnityContainer(); 4: 5: void Application_Start(Object sender, EventArgs e) 6: { 7: Unity.RegisterType<IFunctionality, ConcreteFunctionality>(); 8: } 9: } We instantiate Unity and register a concrete implementation for an interface, this could/should probably go in the Web.config file. Forget about its actual definition, it’s not important. Then, we create a custom handler factory: 1: public class UnityPageHandlerFactory : PageHandlerFactory 2: { 3: public override IHttpHandler GetHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, String virtualPath, String path) 4: { 5: IHttpHandler handler = base.GetHandler(context, requestType, virtualPath, path); 6: 7: //one scenario: inject dependencies 8: Global.Unity.BuildUp(handler.GetType(), handler, String.Empty); 9:  10: return (handler); 11: } 12: } It inherits from PageHandlerFactory, which is .NET’s included factory for building regular ASPX pages. We override the GetHandler method and issue a call to the BuildUp method, which will inject required dependencies, if any exist. An example page with dependencies might be: 1: public class SomePage : Page 2: { 3: [Dependency] 4: public IFunctionality Functionality 5: { 6: get; 7: set; 8: } 9: } Notice the DependencyAttribute, it is used by Unity to identify properties that require dependency injection. When BuildUp is called, the Functionality property (or any other properties with the DependencyAttribute attribute) will receive the concrete implementation associated with it’s type, as registered on Unity. Another example, checking a page for authorization. Let’s define an interface first: 1: public interface IRestricted 2: { 3: Boolean Check(HttpContext ctx); 4: } An a page implementing that interface: 1: public class RestrictedPage : Page, IRestricted 2: { 3: public Boolean Check(HttpContext ctx) 4: { 5: //check the context and return a value 6: return ...; 7: } 8: } For this, we would use an handler factory such as this: 1: public class RestrictedPageHandlerFactory : PageHandlerFactory 2: { 3: private static readonly IHttpHandler forbidden = new UnauthorizedHandler(); 4:  5: public override IHttpHandler GetHandler(HttpContext context, String requestType, String virtualPath, String path) 6: { 7: IHttpHandler handler = base.GetHandler(context, requestType, virtualPath, path); 8: 9: if (handler is IRestricted) 10: { 11: if ((handler as IRestricted).Check(context) == false) 12: { 13: return (forbidden); 14: } 15: } 16:  17: return (handler); 18: } 19: } 20:  21: public class UnauthorizedHandler : IHttpHandler 22: { 23: #region IHttpHandler Members 24:  25: public Boolean IsReusable 26: { 27: get { return (true); } 28: } 29:  30: public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) 31: { 32: context.Response.StatusCode = (Int32) HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized; 33: context.Response.ContentType = "text/plain"; 34: context.Response.Write(context.Response.Status); 35: context.Response.Flush(); 36: context.Response.Close(); 37: context.ApplicationInstance.CompleteRequest(); 38: } 39:  40: #endregion 41: } The UnauthorizedHandler is an example of an IHttpHandler that merely returns an error code to the client, but does not cause redirection to the login page, it is included merely as an example. One thing we must keep in mind is, there can be only one handler factory registered for a given path/request type (verb) tuple. A typical registration would be: 1: <httpHandlers> 2: <remove path="*.aspx" verb="*"/> 3: <add path="*.aspx" verb="*" type="MyNamespace.MyHandlerFactory, MyAssembly"/> 4: </httpHandlers> First we remove the previous registration for ASPX files, and then we register our own. And that’s it. A very useful mechanism which I use lots of times.

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