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• Masters vs. PhD - long [closed]

  - by Sterling

  I'm 21 years old and a first year master's computer science student. Whether or not to continue with my PhD has been plaguing me for the past few months. I can't stop thinking about it and am extremely torn on the issue. I have read http://www.cs.unc.edu/~azuma/hitch4.html and many, many other masters vs phd articles on the web. Unfortunately, I have not yet come to a conclusion. I was hoping that I could post my ideas about the issue on here in hopes to 1) get some extra insight on the issue and 2) make sure that I am correct in my assumptions. Hopefully having people who have experience in the respective fields can tell me if I am wrong so I don't make my decision based on false ideas. Okay, to get this topic out of the way - money. Money isn't the most important thing to me, but it is still important. It's always been a goal of mine to make 6 figures, but I realize that will probably take me a long time with either path. According to most online salary calculating sites, the average starting salary for a software engineer is ~60-70k. The PhD program here is 5 years, so that's about 300k I am missing out on by not going into the workforce with a masters. I have only ever had ~1k at one time in my life so 300k is something I can't even really accurately imagine. I know that I wouldn't have at once obviously, but just to know I would be earning that is kinda crazy to me. I feel like I would be living quite comfortably by the time I'm 30 years old (but risk being too content too soon). I would definitely love to have at least a few years of my 20s to spend with that kind of money before I have a family to spend it all on. I haven't grown up very financially stable so it would be so nice to just spend some money…get a nice car, buy a new guitar or two, eat some good food, and just be financially comfortable. I have always felt like I deserved to make good money in my life, even as a kid growing up, and I just want to have it be a reality. I know that either path I take will make good money by the time I'm ~40-45 years old, but I guess I'm just sick of not making money and am getting impatient about it. However, a big idea pushing me towards a PhD is that I feel the masters path would give me a feeling of selling out if I have the capability to solve real questions in the computer science world. (pretty straight-forward - not much to elaborate on, but this is a big deal) Now onto other aspects of the decision. I originally got into computer science because of programming. I started in high school and knew very soon that it was what I wanted to do for a career. I feel like getting a masters and being a software engineer in the industry gives me much more time to program in my career. In research, I feel like I would spend more time reading, writing, trying to get grant money, etc than I would coding. A guy I work with in the lab just recently published a paper. He showed it to me and I was shocked by it. The first two pages was littered with equations and formulas. Then the next page or so was followed by more equations and formulas that he derived from the previous ones. That was his work - breaking down and creating all of these formulas for robotic arm movement. And whenever I read computer science papers, they all seem to follow this pattern. I always pictured myself coding all day long…not proving equations and things of that nature. I know that's only one part of computer science research, but that part bores me. A couple cons on each side - Phd - I don't really enjoy writing or feel like I'm that great at technical writing. Whenever I'm in groups to make something, I'm always the one who does the large majority of the work and then give it to my team members to write up a report. Presenting is different though - I don't mind presenting at all as long as I have a good grasp on what I am presenting. But writing papers seems like such a chore to me. And because of this, the "publish or perish" phrase really turns me off from research. Another bad thing - I feel like if I am doing research, most of it would be done alone. I work best in small groups. I like to have at least one person to bounce ideas off of when I am brainstorming. The idea of being a part of some small elite group to build things sounds ideal to me. So being able to work in small groups for the majority of my career is a definite plus. I don't feel like I can get this doing research. Masters - I read a lot online that most people come in as engineers and eventually move into management positions. As of now, I don't see myself wanting to be a part of management. Lets say my company wanted to make some new product or system - I would get much more pride, enjoyment, and overall satisfaction to say "I made this" rather than "I managed a group of people that made this." I want to be a big part of the development process. I want to make things. I think it would be great to be more specialized than other people. I would rather know everything about something than something about everything. I always have been that way - was a great pitcher during my baseball years, but not so good at everything else, great at certain classes in school, but not so good at others, etc. To think that my career would be the same way sounds okay to me. Getting a PhD would point me in this direction. It would be great to be some guy who is someone that people look towards and come to ask for help because of being such an important contributor to a very specific field, such as artificial neural networks or robotic haptic perception. From what I gather about the software industry, being specialized can be a very bad thing because of the speed of the new technology. I When it comes to being employed, I have pretty conservative views. I don't want to change companies every 5 years. Maybe this is something everyone wishes, but I would love to just be an important person in one company for 10+ (maybe 20-25+ if I'm lucky!) years if the working conditions were acceptable. I feel like that is more possible as a PhD though, being a professor or researcher. The more I read about people in the software industry, the more it seems like most software engineers bounce from company to company at rapid paces. Some even work like a hired gun from project to project which is NOT what I want AT ALL. But finding a place to make great and important software would be great if that actually happens in the real world. I'm a very competitive person. I thrive on competition. I don't really know why, but I have always been that way even as a kid growing up. Competition always gave me a reason to practice that little extra every night, always push my limits, etc. It seems to me like there is no competition in the research world. It seems like everyone is very relaxed as long as research is being conducted. The only competition is if someone is researching the same thing as you and its whoever can finish and publish first (but everyone seems to careful to check that circumstance). The only noticeable competition to me is just with yourself and your own discipline. I like the idea that in the industry, there is real competition between companies to put out the best product or be put out of business. I feel like this would constantly be pushing me to be better at what I do. One thing that is really pushing me towards a PhD is the lifetime of the things you make. I feel like if you make something truly innovative in the industry…just some really great new application or system…there is a shelf-life of about 5-10 years before someone just does it faster and more efficiently. But with research work, you could create an idea or algorithm that last decades. For instance, the A* search algorithm was described in 1968 and is still widely used today. That is amazing to me. In the words of Palahniuk, "The goal isn't to live forever, its to create something that will." Over anything, I just want to do something that matters. I want my work to help and progress society. Seriously, if I'm stuck programming GUIs for the next 40 years…I might shoot myself in the face. But then again, I hate the idea that less than 1% of the population will come into contact with my work and even less understand its importance. So if anything I have said is false then please inform me. If you think I come off as a masters or PhD, inform me. If you want to give me some extra insight or add on to any point I made, please do. Thank you so much to anyone for any help.

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• Looking into the jQuery LazyLoad Plugin

  - by nikolaosk

  I have been using JQuery for a couple of years now and it has helped me to solve many problems on the client side of web development.  You can find all my posts about JQuery in this link. In this post I will be providing you with a hands-on example on the JQuery LazyLoad Plugin.If you want you can have a look at this post, where I describe the JQuery Cycle Plugin.You can find another post of mine talking about the JQuery Carousel Lite Plugin here. Another post of mine regarding the JQuery Image Zoom Plugin can be found here. You can have a look at the JQuery Overlays Plugin here . There are times when when I am asked to create a very long page with lots of images.My first thought is to enable paging on the proposed page. Imagine that we have 60 images on a page. There are performance concerns when we have so many images on a page. Paging can solve that problem if I am allowed to place only 5 images on a page.Sometimes the customer does not like the idea of the paging.Believe it or not some people find the idea of paging not attractive at all.In that case I need a way to only load the initial set of images and as the user scrolls down the page to load the rest.So as someone scrolls down new requests are made to the server and more images are fetched. I can accomplish that with the jQuery LazyLoad Plugin.This is just a plugin that delays loading of images in long web pages.The images that are outside of the viewport (visible part of web page) won't be loaded before the user scrolls to them. Using jQuery LazyLoad Plugin on long web pages containing many large images makes the page load faster. In this hands-on example I will be using Expression Web 4.0.This application is not a free application. You can use any HTML editor you like. You can use Visual Studio 2012 Express edition. You can download it here.  You can download this plugin from this link. I launch Expression Web 4.0 and then I type the following HTML markup (I am using HTML 5)<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en">  <head>    <title>Liverpool Legends</title>    <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.8.3.min.js"></script>        <script type="text/javascript" src="jquery.lazyload.min.js" ></script></head>  <body>    <header>                <h1>Liverpool Legends</h1>    </header>        <div id="main">             <img src="barnes.JPG" width="800" height="1100" /><p />        <img src="dalglish.JPG" width="800" height="1100" /><p />                <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="fans.JPG" width="1200" height="900" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="lfc.JPG" width="1000" height="700" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="Liverpool-players.JPG" width="1100" height="900" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="steven_gerrard.JPG" width="1110" height="1000" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="robbie.JPG" width="1200" height="1000" /><p />          </div>            <footer>        <p>All Rights Reserved</p>      </footer>                    <script type="text/javascript">                $(function () {                    $("img.LiverpoolImage").lazyload();                });        </script>     </body>  </html> This is a very simple markup. I have  added references to the JQuery library (current version is 1.8.3) and the JQuery LazyLoad Plugin. Firstly, I add two images         <img src="barnes.JPG" width="800" height="1100" /><p />        <img src="dalglish.JPG" width="800" height="1100" /><p />  that will load immediately as soon as the page loads. Then I add the images that will not load unless they become active in the viewport. I have all my img tags pointing the src attribute towards a placeholder image. I’m using a blank 1×1 px grey image,loader.gif.The five images that will load as the user scrolls down the page follow.         <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="fans.JPG" width="1200" height="900" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="lfc.JPG" width="1000" height="700" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="Liverpool-players.JPG" width="1100" height="900" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="steven_gerrard.JPG" width="1110" height="1000" /><p />        <img class="LiverpoolImage" src="loader.gif" data-original="robbie.JPG" width="1200" height="1000" /><p /> Then we need to rename the image src to point towards the proper image placeholder. The full image URL goes into the data-original attribute.The Javascript code that makes it all happen follows. We need to make a call to the JQuery LazyLoad Plugin. We add the script just before we close the body element.         <script type="text/javascript">                $(function () {                    $("img.LiverpoolImage").lazyload();                });        </script>We can change the code above to incorporate some effects.          <script type="text/javascript">  $("img.LiverpoolImage").lazyload({    effect: "fadeIn"  });    </script> That is all I need to write to achieve lazy loading. It it true that you can do so much with less!!I view my simple page in Internet Explorer 10 and it works as expected. I have tested this simple solution in all major browsers and it works fine. You can test it yourself and see the results in your favorite browser. Hope it helps!!!

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• Are your personal insecurities screwing up your internal communications?

  - by Lucy Boyes

  I do some internal comms as part of my job. Quite a lot of it involves talking to people about stuff. I’m spending the next couple of weeks talking to lots of people about internal comms itself, because we haven’t done a lot of audience/user feedback gathering, and it turns out that if you talk to people about how they feel and what they think, you get some pretty interesting insights (and an idea of what to do next that isn’t just based on guesswork and generalising from self). Three things keep coming up from talking to people about what we suck at  in terms of internal comms. And, as far as I can tell, they’re all examples where personal insecurity on the part of the person doing the communicating makes the experience much worse for the people on the receiving end. 1. Spending time telling people how you’re going to do something, not what you’re doing and why Imagine you’ve got to give an update to a lot of people who don’t work in your area or department but do have an interest in what you’re doing (either because they want to know because they’re curious or because they need to know because it’s going to affect their work too). You don’t want to look bad at your job. You want to make them think you’ve got it covered – ideally because you do*. And you want to reassure them that there’s lots of exciting work going on in your area to make [insert thing of choice] happen to [insert thing of choice] so that [insert group of people] will be happy. That’s great! You’re doing a good job and you want to tell people about it. This is good comms stuff right here. However, you’re slightly afraid you might secretly be stupid or lazy or incompetent. And you’re exponentially more afraid that the people you’re talking to might think you’re stupid or lazy or incompetent. Or pointless. Or not-adding-value. Or whatever the thing that’s the worst possible thing to be in your company is. So you open by mentioning all the stuff you’re going to do, spending five minutes or so making sure that everyone knows that you’re DOING lots of STUFF. And the you talk for the rest of the time about HOW you’re going to do the stuff, because that way everyone will know that you’ve thought about this really hard and done tons of planning and had lots of great ideas about process and that you’ve got this one down. That’s the stuff you’ve got to say, right? To prove you’re not fundamentally worthless as a human being? Well, maybe. But probably not. See, the people who need to know how you’re going to do the stuff are the people doing the stuff. And those are the people in your area who you’ve (hopefully-please-for-the-love-of-everything-holy) already talked to in depth about how you’re going to do the thing (because else how could they help do it?). They are the only people who need to know the how**. It’s the difference between strategy and tactics. The people outside of your bubble of stuff-doing need to know the strategy – what it is that you’re doing, why, where you’re going with it, etc. The people on the ground with you need the strategy and the tactics, because else they won’t know how to do the stuff. But the outside people don’t really need the tactics at all. Don’t bother with the how unless your audience needs it. They probably don’t. It might make you feel better about yourself, but it’s much more likely that Bob and Jane are thinking about how long this meeting has gone on for already than how personally impressive and definitely-not-an-idiot you are for knowing how you’re going to do some work. Feeling marginally better about yourself (but, let’s face it, still insecure as heck) is not worth the cost, which in this case is the alienation of your audience. 2. Talking for too long about stuff This is kinda the same problem as the previous problem, only much less specific, and I’ve more or less covered why it’s bad already. Basic motivation: to make people think you’re not an idiot. What you do: talk for a very long time about what you’re doing so as to make it sound like you know what you’re doing and lots about it. What your audience wants: the shortest meaningful update. Some of this is a kill your darlings problem – the stuff you’re doing that seems really nifty to you seems really nifty to you, and thus you want to share it with everyone to show that you’re a smart person who thinks up nifty things to do. The downside to this is that it’s mostly only interesting to you – if other people don’t need to know, they likely also don’t care. Think about how you feel when someone is talking a lot to you about a lot of stuff that they’re doing which is at best tangentially interesting and/or relevant. You’re probably not thinking that they’re really smart and clearly know what they’re doing (unless they’re talking a lot and being really engaging about it, which is not the same as talking a lot). You’re probably thinking about something totally unrelated to the thing they’re talking about. Or the fact that you’re bored. You might even – and this is the opposite of what they’re hoping to achieve by talking a lot about stuff – be thinking they’re kind of an idiot. There’s another huge advantage to paring down what you’re trying to say to the barest possible points – it clarifies your thinking. The lightning talk format, as well as other formats which limit the time and/or number of slides you have to say a thing, are really good for doing this. It’s incredibly likely that your audience in this case (the people who need to know some things about your thing but not all the things about your thing) will get everything they need to know from five minutes of you talking about it, especially if trying to condense ALL THE THINGS into a five-minute talk has helped you get clear in your own mind what you’re doing, what you’re trying to say about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. The bonus of this is that by being clear in your thoughts and in what you say, and in not taking up lots of people’s time to tell them stuff they don’t really need to know, you actually come across as much, much smarter than the person who talks for half an hour or more about things that are semi-relevant at best. 3. Waiting until you’ve got every detail sorted before announcing a big change to the people affected by it This is the worst crime on the list. It’s also human nature. Announcing uncertainty – that something important is going to happen (big reorganisation, product getting canned, etc.) but you’re not quite sure what or when or how yet – is scary. There are risks to it. Uncertainty makes people anxious. It might even paralyse them. You can’t run a business while you’re figuring out what to do if you’ve paralysed everyone with fear over what the future might bring. And you’re scared that they might think you’re not the right person to be in charge of [thing] if you don’t even know what you’re doing with it. Best not to say anything until you know exactly what’s going to happen and you can reassure them all, right? Nope. The people who are going to be affected by whatever it is that you don’t quite know all the details of yet aren’t stupid***. You wouldn’t have hired them if they were. They know something’s up because you’ve got your guilty face on and you keep pulling people into meeting rooms and looking vaguely worried. Here’s the deal: it’s a lot less stressful for everyone (including you) if you’re up front from the beginning. We took this approach during a recent company-wide reorganisation and got really positive feedback. People would much, much rather be told that something is going to happen but you’re not entirely sure what it is yet than have you wait until it’s all fixed up and then fait accompli the heck out of them. They will tell you this themselves if you ask them. And here’s why: by waiting until you know exactly what’s going on to communicate, you remove any agency that the people that the thing is going to happen to might otherwise have had. I know you’re scared that they might get scared – and that’s natural and kind of admirable – but it’s also patronising and infantilising. Ask someone whether they’d rather work on a project which has an openly uncertain future from the beginning, or one where everything’s great until it gets shut down with no forewarning, and very few people are going to tell you they’d prefer the latter. Uncertainty is humanising. It’s you admitting that you don’t have all the answers, which is great, because no one does. It allows you to be consultative – you can actually ask other people what they think and how they feel and what they’d like to do and what they think you should do, and they’ll thank you for it and feel listened to and respected as people and colleagues. Which is a really good reason to start talking to them about what’s going on as soon as you know something’s going on yourself. All of the above assumes you actually care about talking to the people who work with you and for you, and that you’d like to do the right thing by them. If that’s not the case, you can cheerfully disregard the advice here, but if it is, you might want to think about the ways above – and the inevitable countless other ways – that making internal communication about you and not about your audience could actually be doing the people you’re trying to communicate with a huge disservice. So take a deep breath and talk. For five minutes or so. About the important things. Not the other things. As soon as you possibly can. And you’ll be fine.   *Of course you do. You’re good at your job. Don’t worry. **This might not always be true, but it is most of the time. Other people who need to know the how will either be people who you’ve already identified as needing-to-know and thus part of the same set as the people in you’re area you’ve already discussed this with, or else they’ll ask you. But don’t bring this stuff up unless someone asks for it, because most of the people in the audience really don’t care and you’re wasting their time. ***I mean, they might be. But let’s give them the benefit of the doubt and assume they’re not.

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• Navigation in Win8 Metro Style applications

  - by Dennis Vroegop

  In Windows 8, Touch is, as they say, a first class citizen. Now, to be honest: they also said that in Windows 7. However in Win8 this is actually true. Applications are meant to be used by touch. Yes, you can still use mouse, keyboard and pen and your apps should take that into account but touch is where you should focus on initially. Will all users have touch enabled devices? No, not in the first place. I don’t think touchscreens will be on every device sold next year. But in 5 years? Who knows? Don’t forget: if your app is successful it will be around for a long time and by that time touchscreens will be everywhere. Another reason to embrace touch is that it’s easier to develop a touch-oriented app and then to make sure that keyboard, nouse and pen work as doing it the other way around. Porting a mouse-based application to a touch based application almost never works. The reverse gives you much more chances for success. That being said, there are some things that you need to think about. Most people have more than one finger, while most users only use one mouse at the time. Still, most touch-developers translate their mouse-knowledge to the touch and think they did a good job. Martin Tirion from Microsoft said that since Touch is a new language people face the same challenges they do when learning a new real spoken language. The first thing people try when learning a new language is simply replace the words in their native language to the newly learned words. At first they don’t care about grammar. To a native speaker of that other language this sounds all wrong but they still will be able to understand what the intention was. If you don’t believe me: try Google translate to translate something for you from your language to another and then back and see what happens. The same thing happens with Touch. Most developers translate a mouse-click into a tap-event and think they’re done. Well matey, you’re not done. Not by far. There are things you can do with a mouse that you cannot do with touch. Think hover. A mouse has the ability to ‘slide’ over UI elements. Touch doesn’t (I know: with Pen you can do this but I’m talking about actual fingers here). A touch is either there or it isn’t. And right-click? Forget about it. A click is a click.  Yes, you have more than one finger but the machine doesn’t know which finger you use… The other way around is also true. Like I said: most users only have one mouse but they are likely to have more than one finger. So how do we take that into account? Thinking about this is really worth the time: you might come up with some surprisingly good ideas! Still: don’t forget that not every user has touch-enabled hardware so make sure your app is useable for both groups. Keep this in mind: we’re going to need it later on! Now. Apps should be easy to use. You don’t want your user to read through pages and pages of documentation before they can use the app. Imagine that spotter next to an airfield suddenly seeing a prototype of a Concorde 2 landing on the nearby runway. He probably wants to enter that information in our app NOW and not after he’s taken a 3 day course. Even if he still has to download the app, install it for the first time and then run it he should be on his way immediately. At least, fast enough to note down the details of that unique, rare and possibly exciting sighting he just did. So.. How do we do this? Well, I am not talking about games here. Games are in a league of their own. They fall outside the scope of the apps I am describing. But all the others can roughly be characterized as being one of two flavors: the navigation is either flat or hierarchical. That’s it. And if it’s hierarchical it’s no more than three levels deep. Not more. Your users will get lost otherwise and we don’t want that. Flat is simple. Just imagine we have one screen that is as high as our physical screen is and as wide as you need it to be. Don’t worry if it doesn’t fit on the screen: people can scroll to the right and left. Don’t combine up/down and left/right scrolling: it’s confusing. Next to that, since most users will hold their device in landscape mode it’s very natural to scroll horizontal. So let’s use that when we have a flat model. The same applies to the hierarchical model. Try to have at most three levels. If you need more space, find a way to group the items in such a way that you can fit it in three, very wide lanes. At the highest level we have the so called hub level. This is the entry point of the app and as such it should give the user an immediate feeling of what the app is all about. If your app has categories if items then you might show these categories here. And while you’re at it: also show 2 or 3 of the items itself here to give the user a taste of what lies beneath. If the user selects a category you go to the section part. Here you show several sections (again, go as wide as you need) with again some detail examples. After that: the details layer shows each item. By giving some samples of the underlaying layer you achieve several things: you make the layer attractive by showing several different things, you show some highlights so the user sees actual content and you provide a shortcut to the layers underneath. The image below is borrowed from the http://design.windows.com website which has tons and tons of examples: For our app we’ll use this layout. So what will we show? Well, let’s see what sorts of features our app has to offer. I’ll repeat them here: Note planes Add pictures of that plane Notify friends of new spots Share new spots on social media Write down arrival times Write down departure times Write down the runway they take I am sure you can think of some more items but for now we'll use these. In the hub we’ll show something that represents “Spots”, “Friends”, “Social”. Apparently we have an inner list of spotter-friends that are in the app, while we also have to whole world in social. In the layer below we show something else, depending on what the user choose. When they choose “Spots” we’ll display the last spots, last spots by our friends (so we can actually jump from this category to the one next to it) and so on. When they choose a “spot” (or press the + icon in the App bar, which I’ll talk about next time) they go to the lowest and final level that shows details about that spot, including a picture, date and time and the notes belonging to that entry. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to organize your app this way. If you don’t have enough room in these three layers you probably could easily get away with grouping items. Take a look at our hub: we have three completely different things in one place. If you still can’t fit it all in in a logical and consistent way, chances are you are trying to do too much in this app. Go back to your mission statement, determine if it is specific enough and if your feature list helps that statement or makes it unclear. Go ahead. Give it a go! Next time we’ll talk about the look and feel, the charms and the app-bar….

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 12, 2014

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 12, 2014Popular ReleasesLuna ORM - Data Layer Code Generator for Vb.Net and C#: Luna 4.14.6.7: Newer version, better LunaEngine with many new feature. Any class implements IDisposable.StackBuilder: StackBuilder 1.0.21.0: *Issue #9 : Take weight of case into account while searching optimal case... *Issue #10 : Changing direction of last layer to use remaining space while stacking a palette... *Issue #11 : New URL for AutoUpdater section in app.config... First working version of INTEX Corp Plugin...QuickMon: Version 3.15: This release expand on 'Presets' - now called Templates. A complete Template editor has been added so you can manage templates(edit, save, import and export). Existing agent configs can be saved as a template for reuse as well. Additionally a few other fixes were done as well. 1. Fixed Registry collector - allow 'blank' key value (<default> values) 2. Default Monitor pack history size is now 100 3. qmp file extension is now the defaultCommand Line Media Controller: v1.0.0.0: Initial ReleaseVidCoder: 1.5.23 Beta: Added first translations for 1.5. Includes new languages Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese Simplified and Czech. Many of these translations are still incomplete: you can help out on Crowdin. Added an option to pass through an input track if it matches the output codec. Updated HandBrake core to SVN 6209. Fixed crash on AAC passthrough. Fixed x264 settings getting set incorrectly when reverting from a preset with the Advanced tab. Fixed occasional crash when calculating remaining time. ...PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit: PowerShell App Deployment Toolkit v3.1.4: Added New-Folder and Remove-Folder functions (Thanks to SueH) Added NoWait parameter to Execute-Process Added the ability for Deploy-Application.exe to point to a different .ps1 file by specifying it on the command-line Added checks to Deploy-Application.exe to verify the AppDeployToolkit folder exists Added PSAppDeployToolkit icon to Deploy-Application.exe Fixed issue where hang could occur if file version was null when using Get-FileVersion Improved exception handling and loggin...CS-Script Source: Release v3.8.1: Improved ConfigConsole AdvancedShell extensions support cs-script.7z - CS-Script Suite (binaries, documentation, samples) cs-script.ExtensionPack.7z - CS-Script Extension Pack (additional binaries and samples) cs-scriptDocs.7z - CS-Script DocumentationProligence Orchard PowerShell: OrchardPs 0.2: Version 0.2, build 5273 Major Features: Support for Orchard 1.7 and 1.8 Support for managing Orchard themes Added new cmdlets: Get-OrchardFeature, Get-Tenant, Enable-Tenant, Disable-Tenant, Get-OrchardTheme, Enable-OrchardTheme Minor Features: Added 'gopc' alias for Get-OrchardPsCommand cmdlet Hidden 'Configuration' node in Orchard VFS, as it is not yet implemented Bug Fixes: Fixed signatures for *.ps1xml files 'FromAllTenants' switch no longer fails on tenants which are not running ...BugNET Issue Tracker: BugNET 1.6: Version 1.6 is a major upgrade to the latest frameworks and components by Microsoft. It includes a major UI overhaul using the bootstrap framework to have a modern, mobile friendly and easily customized layout. Upgrade to .NET 4.5 ASP.NET social auth Add script bundling and optimization Improvements for mobile devices Bootstrap (UI overhaul) Rewritten / friendly URL's Please read our release notes for BugNET 1.6: http://blog.bugnetproject.com/2014/06/08/bugnet-1-6-and-bugnet-pro-1...CppWindowsAPI: Library Build 20140608 [3.0]: There are many changes since the older versions before v3.0. Portable to the VS2013. Note that there is something still needed to implement so the relative components have been removed from this release, which will be re-implemented into the future releases. md5: 49bf91dbe4e47dee24d1f62a0b482334 sha-1: 4eabffc1b00557cdf8e83df18ac247e230f4c1d0 md5: 4a63a4923c23bcd821e7411453779086 sha-1: 1bb8549b92c8d791346cfe7efcdaeaa37098591d md5: 371026dfcac75e33f331430cf2c65415 sha-1: 7b8a155f30206f...SFDL.NET: SFDL.NET (2.2.9.3): Changelog: Retry Bugfix (Error Counter wurde nicht korrekt zurückgesetzt) Neue Einstellung: Retry Wartezeit ist nun EinstellbarLoad Runner - Distributed HTTP Pressure Test Tool: Load Runner 1.2: 1. added support for distributed load test (read documentation for details) 2. added detail documentationbabelua: 1.5.7.0: V1.5.7.0 - 2014.6.6Stability improvement: use "lua scripts folder" as lua search path when debugging;MyBB: MyBB 1.6.13 Türkçe Kurulum Paketi: MyBB 1.6.13 - Resmi Tam Türkçe UTF-8 Sifir Kurulum Paketi Rar Pass - Sifresi: mybb.com.tr Yayinci site: http://www.mybb.com.tr Orjinal indirme adresi: http://download.mybb.com.tr Destek 1: http://destek.mybb.com.tr/showthread.php?tid=12326 Destek 2: http://tr.mybbdepo.com/mybb-1-6-13-turkce-sifir-kurulum-paketi-konusu.html Dosya: MyBB1613KurulumPaketiTR.rar MD5: d2745b79aa8cc5f8cc09e8a91b50d3cc SHA-1: 6fbb8e611e6d78f8cd3d88d7a773edc67ecc2a3e Ekleyen: XpSerkan MCTR TEAM - Gururla Sunar.SEToolbox: SEToolbox 01.033.007 Release 1: Fixed breaking changes in Space Engineers in latest update. Installation of this version will replace older version.Virto Commerce Enterprise Open Source eCommerce Platform (asp.net mvc): Virto Commerce 1.10: Virto Commerce Community Edition version 1.10. To install the SDK package, please refer to SDK getting started documentation To configure source code package, please refer to Source code getting started documentation This release includes bug fixes and improvements (including Commerce Manager localization and https support). More details about this release can be found on our blog at http://blog.virtocommerce.com.Fantom - Expression Based Dynamic Language Manager: Fantom Binary and Test Web Site: The first version of FantomDLL. Download binary and sample site for testing.Back Up Your SharePoint: SPSBackUP 0.1: Supports SharePoint 2010 and 2013 All settings with xml input file Clean backup history Notifications by mail Log script results in rtf fileNPOI: NPOI 2.1: Assembly Version: 2.1.0 New Features a. XSSFSheet.CopySheet b. Excel2Html for XSSF c. insert picture in word 2007 d. Implement IfError function in formula engine Bug Fixes a. fix conditional formatting issue b. fix ctFont order issue c. fix vertical alignment issue in XSSF d. add IndexedColors to NPOI.SS.UserModel e. fix decimal point issue in non-English culture f. fix SetMargin issue in XSSF g.fix multiple images insert issue in XSSF h.fix rich text style missing issue in XSSF i. fix cell...Media Player (Technology Area): Media Player 0.3 (Codname Kalo): Themes are included, along with a picture viewer. This does not require 0.2 to be installedNew ProjectsAddress Auto lookup For MS CRM 2013: Address Lookup to find correct addresses in less time.Aspose for Spring.Java: Aspose for Spring Java provides source code and detailed usage instructions for extending the existing Spring.Java samples.Beatting Mole XNA Game on Windows Phone: The project game using XNA Game Engine in Windows PhoneBrecham.Obex: The library provides very broad OBEX support, providing not just the ‘Put’ operation , but also: Connect, Put, Get, SetPath, Delete, and Abort.Command Line Media Controller: This application provides a command line interface for issuing basic media controls to most media player applications.DevExpress Prism Adapters: DevExpress Prism Adapters is a project intented to provide different adapters for DevExpress controls integration with Microsoft Prism.FVSB: fvsbH Logger (8 logger): Create logs with a html format with a Visual Studio 2013 style.Masked Input For CRM 2013: Mask Input for more user friendliness and to avoid user typo errors.MovieDatabase: A movie database manipulation program that uses the movie database api.OpenNetworkTester: GUI-based bandwidth testing toolProgress Tracker: A simple pet project that allows users to set up daily tasks and track which ones they complete.ProjectShipping: summarySerXio: tfs, read tfs dataValu Akunting: Sistem Informasi Akuntansi Valudata KomputindoWindows Phone 8.1 Training for MIC15: Using for store training source code and resource url/files/.??????-??????【??】: ????????????????????,??????????,????????、????,??????????,??????????。??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????????????????,??????????,????,????,???,??????。??????-??????【??】: ????????????????,?????????????? ??。????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。????-????【??】: ??????,??????:?????,?????,??????,??????????,????????。????????!????-????【??】: ?????????????????????:????、????、??????????????,????????。????????!??????-??????【??】: ???????????,?????,???????????,???????,????,????,????,?????。??????-??????【??】: ????????????、???、??、??????????????????????????????,????????????????!????-????【??】: ???????????????????????????、????、????、???????????,????,????!?????-?????【??】: ???????????????8?，????????,????????,??????????,?????,????? ,????????!?????-?????【??】: ???????????????6?,???????????????????????????,??????????????,?????????！????-????【??】: ????????????????????????????,???????????????????????,???????。??????-??????【??】: ????????????????、??????、??????、??????、??????、?????、??????、????、????、????????！?????-?????【??】: ???????????????,????????,????:???????,??????,????,????,?????,?????,??????!?????-?????【??】: ????????????????,?????????????。?????????,???????,???????,?????????????。??????-??????【??】: ?????????????????,??????????????、???????、???????、???????、?????！??????-??????【??】: ????????????????????,????????????????,????????????????,??????！????-????【??】: ???????????????,?????????????。????????????,???????,???????,?????,?????。?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????????????,???????????,????????,?????????????????????。?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????????,????“???????,???????”?????,????????????！??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????????????,????,????,??????????。???????????????,??,??,??????????,??????...??????-??????【??】: ???????????????????,?????????????,????,?????????,?????????????,?????,?????!????-????【??】: ??????????????,?????????????? ??。????????、????、????、?????????? ???????。?????-?????【??】: ????????????????,???????????????。???????????,??????:????、????、???????！?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????,???????????,??????????????,??????????，??????????????！??????-??????【??】: ????????????,????,??????????? ???? ???? ?????????,???,??,?????!??????-??????【??】: ????????????????、????、????、??????、????、????????,????????、?????????,?????。????-????【??】: ????????????????:?????? ???? ??????,???????,??????,???????。?????-?????【??】: ????????????????,?????????????。????????????,???????,???????,?????,?????。?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????????????,???????????,????????,???????????????????????????-??????【??】: ???????????????????,?????????????,????,?????????,?????????????,?????,?????!??????-??????【??】: ?????????????????,???????????????。???????????,??????:????、????、???????！????-????【??】: ????????????????????????,????,????,??????????。???????????????,??,??,??????????,??????...?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????,???????????,??????????????,??????????，???????????????????-?????【??】: ?????????????????、?????、?????、????、?????,??????????。????????????????!??????-??????【??】: ????????????????????,????????????????,????????????????,??????！??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????????,????“???????,???????”?????,????????????！????-????【??】: ???????????????,??????????????、???????、???????、???????、?????！?????-?????【??】: ???????????????,????,????,??????,????“????、????、????、????”????????,??????.?????-?????【??】: ???????????????????,????????:??、??、???,?????????????????????!??????-??????【??】: ????????,??????:?????,?????,??????,??????????,????????。????????!??????-??????【??】: ???????????????????????:????、????、??????????????,????????。????????!??????-??????【??】: ?????????????????????????????,??????????,????,????,???,??????????-????【??】: ????????????????、????,??100%????,??????,????????????,???????????!????-????【??】: ??????????????????,??????????,????????、????,??????????,??????????。??????-??????【??】: ??????????????,????????,?????,???,???????????,???????????,?????,??????！??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????????????????????:???????,??????,????,????,????,?????！????-????【??】: ???????????????????，?????????/?,,???????????,??????????????!?????-?????【??】: ???????????????????????,????,????,????,???????,?????,?????.??????。?????-?????【??】: ???????????????、?????,????????????????????,????,????,??????。??????-??????【??】: ????????????????????,???????????????????????????,????:????,????,????,?????。?????-?????【??】: ???????????????????、????????、????????、????????、???????,????????????。?????-?????【??】: ????????????????,???????,??????。??????????,????,????,?????,????????????。???????-???????【??】: ??????????????????,??????,????,?????????????,????????,??????,????,?????...???????-???????【??】: ?????????????? , ???? ?????,??????????????,????,????,??????。?????-?????【??】: ???????????????????,??????????????,???????????,??????,????,??????,??????。??????-??????【??】: ????????????????,??????????????????????:???????,??????,????,????,????,????,????,???????！??????-??????【??】: ??????????????!???????????,??????,????,?????????????,????????,??????,????,?????...??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????、?????、?????、????、?????,??????????。????????????????!??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????????,????????,??????????,?????,????? ,????????!??????-??????【??】: ?????????????????,??????????、??????,??????????、????、????、???????。????-????【??】: ???????????、??????????????????,????????,?????,??????,????,????,????!?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????????,???????????????,???????,?????,?????,????? !!!?????-?????【??】: ?????????????????????,???????????????,????????????????????!???????-???????【??】: ????????????????????,??????????????????,?????????????。?????????,????????????。??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????,????,????,?????????.?????,?????!?????,?????????、??、??!??????-??????【??】: ???????????????????,?????????????,?????????????,??????,????,????,??????????！??????-??????【??】: ?????????????????,??????????、??????,??????????、????、????、???????。??????-??????【??】: ??????????????????????,???????????????,???????,?????,?????,????? 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• Where does ASP.NET Web API Fit?

  - by Rick Strahl

  With the pending release of ASP.NET MVC 4 and the new ASP.NET Web API, there has been a lot of discussion of where the new Web API technology fits in the ASP.NET Web stack. There are a lot of choices to build HTTP based applications available now on the stack - we've come a long way from when WebForms and Http Handlers/Modules where the only real options. Today we have WebForms, MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages, ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST and now Web API as well as the core ASP.NET runtime to choose to build HTTP content with. Web API definitely squarely addresses the 'API' aspect - building consumable services - rather than HTML content, but even to that end there are a lot of choices you have today. So where does Web API fit, and when doesn't it? But before we get into that discussion, let's talk about what a Web API is and why we should care. What's a Web API? HTTP 'APIs' (Microsoft's new terminology for a service I guess)  are becoming increasingly more important with the rise of the many devices in use today. Most mobile devices like phones and tablets run Apps that are using data retrieved from the Web over HTTP. Desktop applications are also moving in this direction with more and more online content and synching moving into even traditional desktop applications. The pending Windows 8 release promises an app like platform for both the desktop and other devices, that also emphasizes consuming data from the Cloud. Likewise many Web browser hosted applications these days are relying on rich client functionality to create and manipulate the browser user interface, using AJAX rather than server generated HTML data to load up the user interface with data. These mobile or rich Web applications use their HTTP connection to return data rather than HTML markup in the form of JSON or XML typically. But an API can also serve other kinds of data, like images or other binary files, or even text data and HTML (although that's less common). A Web API is what feeds rich applications with data. ASP.NET Web API aims to service this particular segment of Web development by providing easy semantics to route and handle incoming requests and an easy to use platform to serve HTTP data in just about any content format you choose to create and serve from the server. But .NET already has various HTTP Platforms The .NET stack already includes a number of technologies that provide the ability to create HTTP service back ends, and it has done so since the very beginnings of the .NET platform. From raw HTTP Handlers and Modules in the core ASP.NET runtime, to high level platforms like ASP.NET MVC, Web Forms, ASP.NET AJAX and the WCF REST engine (which technically is not ASP.NET, but can integrate with it), you've always been able to handle just about any kind of HTTP request and response with ASP.NET. The beauty of the raw ASP.NET platform is that it provides you everything you need to build just about any type of HTTP application you can dream up from low level APIs/custom engines to high level HTML generation engine. ASP.NET as a core platform clearly has stood the test of time 10+ years later and all other frameworks like Web API are built on top of this ASP.NET core. However, although it's possible to create Web APIs / Services using any of the existing out of box .NET technologies, none of them have been a really nice fit for building arbitrary HTTP based APIs. Sure, you can use an HttpHandler to create just about anything, but you have to build a lot of plumbing to build something more complex like a comprehensive API that serves a variety of requests, handles multiple output formats and can easily pass data up to the server in a variety of ways. Likewise you can use ASP.NET MVC to handle routing and creating content in various formats fairly easily, but it doesn't provide a great way to automatically negotiate content types and serve various content formats directly (it's possible to do with some plumbing code of your own but not built in). Prior to Web API, Microsoft's main push for HTTP services has been WCF REST, which was always an awkward technology that had a severe personality conflict, not being clear on whether it wanted to be part of WCF or purely a separate technology. In the end it didn't do either WCF compatibility or WCF agnostic pure HTTP operation very well, which made for a very developer-unfriendly environment. Personally I didn't like any of the implementations at the time, so much so that I ended up building my own HTTP service engine (as part of the West Wind Web Toolkit), as have a few other third party tools that provided much better integration and ease of use. With the release of Web API for the first time I feel that I can finally use the tools in the box and not have to worry about creating and maintaining my own toolkit as Web API addresses just about all the features I implemented on my own and much more. ASP.NET Web API provides a better HTTP Experience ASP.NET Web API differentiates itself from the previous Microsoft in-box HTTP service solutions in that it was built from the ground up around the HTTP protocol and its messaging semantics. Unlike WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX with ASMX, it’s a brand new platform rather than bolted on technology that is supposed to work in the context of an existing framework. The strength of the new ASP.NET Web API is that it combines the best features of the platforms that came before it, to provide a comprehensive and very usable HTTP platform. Because it's based on ASP.NET and borrows a lot of concepts from ASP.NET MVC, Web API should be immediately familiar and comfortable to most ASP.NET developers. Here are some of the features that Web API provides that I like: Strong Support for URL Routing to produce clean URLs using familiar MVC style routing semantics Content Negotiation based on Accept headers for request and response serialization Support for a host of supported output formats including JSON, XML, ATOM Strong default support for REST semantics but they are optional Easily extensible Formatter support to add new input/output types Deep support for more advanced HTTP features via HttpResponseMessage and HttpRequestMessage classes and strongly typed Enums to describe many HTTP operations Convention based design that drives you into doing the right thing for HTTP Services Very extensible, based on MVC like extensibility model of Formatters and Filters Self-hostable in non-Web applications  Testable using testing concepts similar to MVC Web API is meant to handle any kind of HTTP input and produce output and status codes using the full spectrum of HTTP functionality available in a straight forward and flexible manner. Looking at the list above you can see that a lot of functionality is very similar to ASP.NET MVC, so many ASP.NET developers should feel quite comfortable with the concepts of Web API. The Routing and core infrastructure of Web API are very similar to how MVC works providing many of the benefits of MVC, but with focus on HTTP access and manipulation in Controller methods rather than HTML generation in MVC. There’s much improved support for content negotiation based on HTTP Accept headers with the framework capable of detecting automatically what content the client is sending and requesting and serving the appropriate data format in return. This seems like such a little and obvious thing, but it's really important. Today's service backends often are used by multiple clients/applications and being able to choose the right data format for what fits best for the client is very important. While previous solutions were able to accomplish this using a variety of mixed features of WCF and ASP.NET, Web API combines all this functionality into a single robust server side HTTP framework that intrinsically understands the HTTP semantics and subtly drives you in the right direction for most operations. And when you need to customize or do something that is not built in, there are lots of hooks and overrides for most behaviors, and even many low level hook points that allow you to plug in custom functionality with relatively little effort. No Brainers for Web API There are a few scenarios that are a slam dunk for Web API. If your primary focus of an application or even a part of an application is some sort of API then Web API makes great sense. HTTP ServicesIf you're building a comprehensive HTTP API that is to be consumed over the Web, Web API is a perfect fit. You can isolate the logic in Web API and build your application as a service breaking out the logic into controllers as needed. Because the primary interface is the service there's no confusion of what should go where (MVC or API). Perfect fit. Primary AJAX BackendsIf you're building rich client Web applications that are relying heavily on AJAX callbacks to serve its data, Web API is also a slam dunk. Again because much if not most of the business logic will probably end up in your Web API service logic, there's no confusion over where logic should go and there's no duplication. In Single Page Applications (SPA), typically there's very little HTML based logic served other than bringing up a shell UI and then filling the data from the server with AJAX which means the business logic required for data retrieval and data acceptance and validation too lives in the Web API. Perfect fit. Generic HTTP EndpointsAnother good fit are generic HTTP endpoints that to serve data or handle 'utility' type functionality in typical Web applications. If you need to implement an image server, or an upload handler in the past I'd implement that as an HTTP handler. With Web API you now have a well defined place where you can implement these types of generic 'services' in a location that can easily add endpoints (via Controller methods) or separated out as more full featured APIs. Granted this could be done with MVC as well, but Web API seems a clearer and more well defined place to store generic application services. This is one thing I used to do a lot of in my own libraries and Web API addresses this nicely. Great fit. Mixed HTML and AJAX Applications: Not a clear Choice  For all the commonality that Web API and MVC share they are fundamentally different platforms that are independent of each other. A lot of people have asked when does it make sense to use MVC vs. Web API when you're dealing with typical Web application that creates HTML and also uses AJAX functionality for rich functionality. While it's easy to say that all 'service'/AJAX logic should go into a Web API and all HTML related generation into MVC, that can often result in a lot of code duplication. Also MVC supports JSON and XML result data fairly easily as well so there's some confusion where that 'trigger point' is of when you should switch to Web API vs. just implementing functionality as part of MVC controllers. Ultimately there's a tradeoff between isolation of functionality and duplication. A good rule of thumb I think works is that if a large chunk of the application's functionality serves data Web API is a good choice, but if you have a couple of small AJAX requests to serve data to a grid or autocomplete box it'd be overkill to separate out that logic into a separate Web API controller. Web API does add overhead to your application (it's yet another framework that sits on top of core ASP.NET) so it should be worth it .Keep in mind that MVC can generate HTML and JSON/XML and just about any other content easily and that functionality is not going away, so just because you Web API is there it doesn't mean you have to use it. Web API is not a full replacement for MVC obviously either since there's not the same level of support to feed HTML from Web API controllers (although you can host a RazorEngine easily enough if you really want to go that route) so if you're HTML is part of your API or application in general MVC is still a better choice either alone or in combination with Web API. I suspect (and hope) that in the future Web API's functionality will merge even closer with MVC so that you might even be able to mix functionality of both into single Controllers so that you don't have to make any trade offs, but at the moment that's not the case. Some Issues To think about Web API is similar to MVC but not the Same Although Web API looks a lot like MVC it's not the same and some common functionality of MVC behaves differently in Web API. For example, the way single POST variables are handled is different than MVC and doesn't lend itself particularly well to some AJAX scenarios with POST data. Code Duplication I already touched on this in the Mixed HTML and Web API section, but if you build an MVC application that also exposes a Web API it's quite likely that you end up duplicating a bunch of code and - potentially - infrastructure. You may have to create authentication logic both for an HTML application and for the Web API which might need something different altogether. More often than not though the same logic is used, and there's no easy way to share. If you implement an MVC ActionFilter and you want that same functionality in your Web API you'll end up creating the filter twice. AJAX Data or AJAX HTML On a recent post's comments, David made some really good points regarding the commonality of MVC and Web API's and its place. One comment that caught my eye was a little more generic, regarding data services vs. HTML services. David says: I see a lot of merit in the combination of Knockout.js, client side templates and view models, calling Web API for a responsive UI, but sometimes late at night that still leaves me wondering why I would no longer be using some of the nice tooling and features that have evolved in MVC ;-) You know what - I can totally relate to that. On the last Web based mobile app I worked on, we decided to serve HTML partials to the client via AJAX for many (but not all!) things, rather than sending down raw data to inject into the DOM on the client via templating or direct manipulation. While there are definitely more bytes on the wire, with this, the overhead ended up being actually fairly small if you keep the 'data' requests small and atomic. Performance was often made up by the lack of client side rendering of HTML. Server rendered HTML for AJAX templating gives so much better infrastructure support without having to screw around with 20 mismatched client libraries. Especially with MVC and partials it's pretty easy to break out your HTML logic into very small, atomic chunks, so it's actually easy to create small rendering islands that can be used via composition on the server, or via AJAX calls to small, tight partials that return HTML to the client. Although this is often frowned upon as to 'heavy', it worked really well in terms of developer effort as well as providing surprisingly good performance on devices. There's still plenty of jQuery and AJAX logic happening on the client but it's more manageable in small doses rather than trying to do the entire UI composition with JavaScript and/or 'not-quite-there-yet' template engines that are very difficult to debug. This is not an issue directly related to Web API of course, but something to think about especially for AJAX or SPA style applications. Summary Web API is a great new addition to the ASP.NET platform and it addresses a serious need for consolidation of a lot of half-baked HTTP service API technologies that came before it. Web API feels 'right', and hits the right combination of usability and flexibility at least for me and it's a good fit for true API scenarios. However, just because a new platform is available it doesn't meant that other tools or tech that came before it should be discarded or even upgraded to the new platform. There's nothing wrong with continuing to use MVC controller methods to handle API tasks if that's what your app is running now - there's very little to be gained by upgrading to Web API just because. But going forward Web API clearly is the way to go, when building HTTP data interfaces and it's good to see that Microsoft got this one right - it was sorely needed! Resources ASP.NET Web API AspConf Ask the Experts Session (first 5 minutes) © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Differences Between NHibernate and Entity Framework

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction NHibernate and Entity Framework are two of the most popular O/RM frameworks on the .NET world. Although they share some functionality, there are some aspects on which they are quite different. This post will describe this differences and will hopefully help you get started with the one you know less. Mind you, this is a personal selection of features to compare, it is by no way an exhaustive list. History First, a bit of history. NHibernate is an open-source project that was first ported from Java’s venerable Hibernate framework, one of the first O/RM frameworks, but nowadays it is not tied to it, for example, it has .NET specific features, and has evolved in different ways from those of its Java counterpart. Current version is 3.3, with 3.4 on the horizon. It currently targets .NET 3.5, but can be used as well in .NET 4, it only makes no use of any of its specific functionality. You can find its home page at NHForge. Entity Framework 1 came out with .NET 3.5 and is now on its second major version, despite being version 4. Code First sits on top of it and but came separately and will also continue to be released out of line with major .NET distributions. It is currently on version 4.3.1 and version 5 will be released together with .NET Framework 4.5. All versions will target the current version of .NET, at the time of their release. Its home location is located at MSDN. Architecture In NHibernate, there is a separation between the Unit of Work and the configuration and model instances. You start off by creating a Configuration object, where you specify all global NHibernate settings such as the database and dialect to use, the batch sizes, the mappings, etc, then you build an ISessionFactory from it. The ISessionFactory holds model and metadata that is tied to a particular database and to the settings that came from the Configuration object, and, there will typically be only one instance of each in a process. Finally, you create instances of ISession from the ISessionFactory, which is the NHibernate representation of the Unit of Work and Identity Map. This is a lightweight object, it basically opens and closes a database connection as required and keeps track of the entities associated with it. ISession objects are cheap to create and dispose, because all of the model complexity is stored in the ISessionFactory and Configuration objects. As for Entity Framework, the ObjectContext/DbContext holds the configuration, model and acts as the Unit of Work, holding references to all of the known entity instances. This class is therefore not lightweight as its NHibernate counterpart and it is not uncommon to see examples where an instance is cached on a field. Mappings Both NHibernate and Entity Framework (Code First) support the use of POCOs to represent entities, no base classes are required (or even possible, in the case of NHibernate). As for mapping to and from the database, NHibernate supports three types of mappings: XML-based, which have the advantage of not tying the entity classes to a particular O/RM; the XML files can be deployed as files on the file system or as embedded resources in an assembly; Attribute-based, for keeping both the entities and database details on the same place at the expense of polluting the entity classes with NHibernate-specific attributes; Strongly-typed code-based, which allows dynamic creation of the model and strongly typing it, so that if, for example, a property name changes, the mapping will also be updated. Entity Framework can use: Attribute-based (although attributes cannot express all of the available possibilities – for example, cascading); Strongly-typed code mappings. Database Support With NHibernate you can use mostly any database you want, including: SQL Server; SQL Server Compact; SQL Server Azure; Oracle; DB2; PostgreSQL; MySQL; Sybase Adaptive Server/SQL Anywhere; Firebird; SQLLite; Informix; Any through OLE DB; Any through ODBC. Out of the box, Entity Framework only supports SQL Server, but a number of providers exist, both free and commercial, for some of the most used databases, such as Oracle and MySQL. See a list here. Inheritance Strategies Both NHibernate and Entity Framework support the three canonical inheritance strategies: Table Per Type Hierarchy (Single Table Inheritance), Table Per Type (Class Table Inheritance) and Table Per Concrete Type (Concrete Table Inheritance). Associations Regarding associations, both support one to one, one to many and many to many. However, NHibernate offers far more collection types: Bags of entities or values: unordered, possibly with duplicates; Lists of entities or values: ordered, indexed by a number column; Maps of entities or values: indexed by either an entity or any value; Sets of entities or values: unordered, no duplicates; Arrays of entities or values: indexed, immutable. Querying NHibernate exposes several querying APIs: LINQ is probably the most used nowadays, and really does not need to be introduced; Hibernate Query Language (HQL) is a database-agnostic, object-oriented SQL-alike language that exists since NHibernate’s creation and still offers the most advanced querying possibilities; well suited for dynamic queries, even if using string concatenation; Criteria API is an implementation of the Query Object pattern where you create a semi-abstract conceptual representation of the query you wish to execute by means of a class model; also a good choice for dynamic querying; Query Over offers a similar API to Criteria, but using strongly-typed LINQ expressions instead of strings; for this, although more refactor-friendlier that Criteria, it is also less suited for dynamic queries; SQL, including stored procedures, can also be used; Integration with Lucene.NET indexer is available. As for Entity Framework: LINQ to Entities is fully supported, and its implementation is considered very complete; it is the API of choice for most developers; Entity-SQL, HQL’s counterpart, is also an object-oriented, database-independent querying language that can be used for dynamic queries; SQL, of course, is also supported. Caching Both NHibernate and Entity Framework, of course, feature first-level cache. NHibernate also supports a second-level cache, that can be used among multiple ISessionFactorys, even in different processes/machines: Hashtable (in-memory); SysCache (uses ASP.NET as the cache provider); SysCache2 (same as above but with support for SQL Server SQL Dependencies); Prevalence; SharedCache; Memcached; Redis; NCache; Appfabric Caching. Out of the box, Entity Framework does not have any second-level cache mechanism, however, there are some public samples that show how we can add this. ID Generators NHibernate supports different ID generation strategies, coming from the database and otherwise: Identity (for SQL Server, MySQL, and databases who support identity columns); Sequence (for Oracle, PostgreSQL, and others who support sequences); Trigger-based; HiLo; Sequence HiLo (for databases that support sequences); Several GUID flavors, both in GUID as well as in string format; Increment (for single-user uses); Assigned (must know what you’re doing); Sequence-style (either uses an actual sequence or a single-column table); Table of ids; Pooled (similar to HiLo but stores high values in a table); Native (uses whatever mechanism the current database supports, identity or sequence). Entity Framework only supports: Identity generation; GUIDs; Assigned values. Properties NHibernate supports properties of entity types (one to one or many to one), collections (one to many or many to many) as well as scalars and enumerations. It offers a mechanism for having complex property types generated from the database, which even include support for querying. It also supports properties originated from SQL formulas. Entity Framework only supports scalars, entity types and collections. Enumerations support will come in the next version. Events and Interception NHibernate has a very rich event model, that exposes more than 20 events, either for synchronous pre-execution or asynchronous post-execution, including: Pre/Post-Load; Pre/Post-Delete; Pre/Post-Insert; Pre/Post-Update; Pre/Post-Flush. It also features interception of class instancing and SQL generation. As for Entity Framework, only two events exist: ObjectMaterialized (after loading an entity from the database); SavingChanges (before saving changes, which include deleting, inserting and updating). Tracking Changes For NHibernate as well as Entity Framework, all changes are tracked by their respective Unit of Work implementation. Entities can be attached and detached to it, Entity Framework does, however, also support self-tracking entities. Optimistic Concurrency Control NHibernate supports all of the imaginable scenarios: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Oracle’s ORA_ROWSCN; A column containing date and time; A column containing a version number; All/dirty columns comparison. Entity Framework is more focused on Entity Framework, so it only supports: SQL Server’s ROWVERSION; Comparing all/some columns. Batching NHibernate has full support for insertion batching, but only if the ID generator in use is not database-based (for example, it cannot be used with Identity), whereas Entity Framework has no batching at all. Cascading Both support cascading for collections and associations: when an entity is deleted, their conceptual children are also deleted. NHibernate also offers the possibility to set the foreign key column on children to NULL instead of removing them. Flushing Changes NHibernate’s ISession has a FlushMode property that can have the following values: Auto: changes are sent to the database when necessary, for example, if there are dirty instances of an entity type, and a query is performed against this entity type, or if the ISession is being disposed; Commit: changes are sent when committing the current transaction; Never: changes are only sent when explicitly calling Flush(). As for Entity Framework, changes have to be explicitly sent through a call to AcceptAllChanges()/SaveChanges(). Lazy Loading NHibernate supports lazy loading for Associated entities (one to one, many to one); Collections (one to many, many to many); Scalar properties (thing of BLOBs or CLOBs). Entity Framework only supports lazy loading for: Associated entities; Collections. Generating and Updating the Database Both NHibernate and Entity Framework Code First (with the Migrations API) allow creating the database model from the mapping and updating it if the mapping changes. Extensibility As you can guess, NHibernate is far more extensible than Entity Framework. Basically, everything can be extended, from ID generation, to LINQ to SQL transformation, HQL native SQL support, custom column types, custom association collections, SQL generation, supported databases, etc. With Entity Framework your options are more limited, at least, because practically no information exists as to what can be extended/changed. It features a provider model that can be extended to support any database. Integration With Other Microsoft APIs and Tools When it comes to integration with Microsoft technologies, it will come as no surprise that Entity Framework offers the best support. For example, the following technologies are fully supported: ASP.NET (through the EntityDataSource); ASP.NET Dynamic Data; WCF Data Services; WCF RIA Services; Visual Studio (through the integrated designer). Documentation This is another point where Entity Framework is superior: NHibernate lacks, for starters, an up to date API reference synchronized with its current version. It does have a community mailing list, blogs and wikis, although not much used. Entity Framework has a number of resources on MSDN and, of course, several forums and discussion groups exist. Conclusion Like I said, this is a personal list. I may come as a surprise to some that Entity Framework is so behind NHibernate in so many aspects, but it is true that NHibernate is much older and, due to its open-source nature, is not tied to product-specific timeframes and can thus evolve much more rapidly. I do like both, and I chose whichever is best for the job I have at hands. I am looking forward to the changes in EF5 which will add significant value to an already interesting product. So, what do you think? Did I forget anything important or is there anything else worth talking about? Looking forward for your comments!

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• Use IIS Application Initialization for keeping ASP.NET Apps alive

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been working quite a bit with Windows Services in the recent months, and well, it turns out that Windows Services are quite a bear to debug, deploy, update and maintain. The process of getting services set up,  debugged and updated is a major chore that has to be extensively documented and or automated specifically. On most projects when a service is built, people end up scrambling for the right 'process' to use for administration. Web app deployment and maintenance on the other hand are common and well understood today, as we are constantly dealing with Web apps. There's plenty of infrastructure and tooling built into Web Tools like Visual Studio to facilitate the process. By comparison Windows Services or anything self-hosted for that matter seems convoluted.In fact, in a recent blog post I mentioned that on a recent project I'd been using self-hosting for SignalR inside of a Windows service, because the application is in fact a 'service' that also needs to send out lots of messages via SignalR. But the reality is that it could just as well be an IIS application with a service component that runs in the background. Either way you look at it, it's either a Windows Service with a built in Web Server, or an IIS application running a Service application, neither of which follows the standard Service or Web App template.Personally I much prefer Web applications. Running inside of IIS I get all the benefits of the IIS platform including service lifetime management (crash and restart), controlled shutdowns, the whole security infrastructure including easy certificate support, hot-swapping of code and the the ability to publish directly to IIS from within Visual Studio with ease.Because of these benefits we set out to move from the self hosted service into an ASP.NET Web app instead.The Missing Link for ASP.NET as a Service: Auto-LoadingI've had moments in the past where I wanted to run a 'service like' application in ASP.NET because when you think about it, it's so much easier to control a Web application remotely. Services are locked into start/stop operations, but if you host inside of a Web app you can write your own ticket and control it from anywhere. In fact nearly 10 years ago I built a background scheduling application that ran inside of ASP.NET and it worked great and it's still running doing its job today.The tricky part for running an app as a service inside of IIS then and now, is how to get IIS and ASP.NET launched so your 'service' stays alive even after an Application Pool reset. 7 years ago I faked it by using a web monitor (my own West Wind Web Monitor app) I was running anyway to monitor my various web sites for uptime, and having the monitor ping my 'service' every 20 seconds to effectively keep ASP.NET alive or fire it back up after a reload. I used a simple scheduler class that also includes some logic for 'self-reloading'. Hacky for sure, but it worked reliably.Luckily today it's much easier and more integrated to get IIS to launch ASP.NET as soon as an Application Pool is started by using the Application Initialization Module. The Application Initialization Module basically allows you to turn on Preloading on the Application Pool and the Site/IIS App, which essentially fires a request through the IIS pipeline as soon as the Application Pool has been launched. This means that effectively your ASP.NET app becomes active immediately, Application_Start is fired making sure your app stays up and running at all times. All the other features like Application Pool recycling and auto-shutdown after idle time still work, but IIS will then always immediately re-launch the application.Getting started with Application InitializationAs of IIS 8 Application Initialization is part of the IIS feature set. For IIS 7 and 7.5 there's a separate download available via Web Platform Installer. Using IIS 8 Application Initialization is an optional install component in Windows or the Windows Server Role Manager: This is an optional component so make sure you explicitly select it.IIS Configuration for Application InitializationInitialization needs to be applied on the Application Pool as well as the IIS Application level. As of IIS 8 these settings can be made through the IIS Administration console.Start with the Application Pool:Here you need to set both the Start Automatically which is always set, and the StartMode which should be set to AlwaysRunning. Both have to be set - the Start Automatically flag is set true by default and controls the starting of the application pool itself while Always Running flag is required in order to launch the application. Without the latter flag set the site settings have no effect.Now on the Site/Application level you can specify whether the site should pre load: Set the Preload Enabled flag to true.At this point ASP.NET apps should auto-load. This is all that's needed to pre-load the site if all you want is to get your site launched automatically.If you want a little more control over the load process you can add a few more settings to your web.config file that allow you to show a static page while the App is starting up. This can be useful if startup is really slow, so rather than displaying blank screen while the user is fiddling their thumbs you can display a static HTML page instead: <system.webServer> <applicationInitialization remapManagedRequestsTo="Startup.htm" skipManagedModules="true"> <add initializationPage="ping.ashx" /> </applicationInitialization> </system.webServer>This allows you to specify a page to execute in a dry run. IIS basically fakes request and pushes it directly into the IIS pipeline without hitting the network. You specify a page and IIS will fake a request to that page in this case ping.ashx which just returns a simple OK string - ie. a fast pipeline request. This request is run immediately after Application Pool restart, and while this request is running and your app is warming up, IIS can display an alternate static page - Startup.htm above. So instead of showing users an empty loading page when clicking a link on your site you can optionally show some sort of static status page that says, "we'll be right back".  I'm not sure if that's such a brilliant idea since this can be pretty disruptive in some cases. Personally I think I prefer letting people wait, but at least get the response they were supposed to get back rather than a random page. But it's there if you need it.Note that the web.config stuff is optional. If you don't provide it IIS hits the default site link (/) and even if there's no matching request at the end of that request it'll still fire the request through the IIS pipeline. Ideally though you want to make sure that an ASP.NET endpoint is hit either with your default page, or by specify the initializationPage to ensure ASP.NET actually gets hit since it's possible for IIS fire unmanaged requests only for static pages (depending how your pipeline is configured).What about AppDomain Restarts?In addition to full Worker Process recycles at the IIS level, ASP.NET also has to deal with AppDomain shutdowns which can occur for a variety of reasons:Files are updated in the BIN folderWeb Deploy to your siteweb.config is changedHard application crashThese operations don't cause the worker process to restart, but they do cause ASP.NET to unload the current AppDomain and start up a new one. Because the features above only apply to Application Pool restarts, AppDomain restarts could also cause your 'ASP.NET service' to stop processing in the background.In order to keep the app running on AppDomain recycles, you can resort to a simple ping in the Application_End event:protected void Application_End() { var client = new WebClient(); var url = App.AdminConfiguration.MonitorHostUrl + "ping.aspx"; client.DownloadString(url); Trace.WriteLine("Application Shut Down Ping: " + url); }which fires any ASP.NET url to the current site at the very end of the pipeline shutdown which in turn ensures that the site immediately starts back up.Manual Configuration in ApplicationHost.configThe above UI corresponds to the following ApplicationHost.config settings. If you're using IIS 7, there's no UI for these flags so you'll have to manually edit them.When you install the Application Initialization component into IIS it should auto-configure the module into ApplicationHost.config. Unfortunately for me, with Mr. Murphy in his best form for me, the module registration did not occur and I had to manually add it.<globalModules> <add name="ApplicationInitializationModule" image="%windir%\System32\inetsrv\warmup.dll" /> </globalModules>Most likely you won't need ever need to add this, but if things are not working it's worth to check if the module is actually registered.Next you need to configure the ApplicationPool and the Web site. The following are the two relevant entries in ApplicationHost.config.<system.applicationHost> <applicationPools> <add name="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" autoStart="true" startMode="AlwaysRunning" managedRuntimeVersion="v4.0" managedPipelineMode="Integrated"> <processModel identityType="LocalSystem" setProfileEnvironment="true" /> </add> </applicationPools> <sites> <site name="Default Web Site" id="1"> <application path="/MPress.Workflow.WebQueueMessageManager" applicationPool="West Wind West Wind Web Connection" preloadEnabled="true"> <virtualDirectory path="/" physicalPath="C:\Clients\…" /> </application> </site> </sites> </system.applicationHost>On the Application Pool make sure to set the autoStart and startMode flags to true and AlwaysRunning respectively. On the site make sure to set the preloadEnabled flag to true.And that's all you should need. You can still set the web.config settings described above as well.ASP.NET as a Service?In the particular application I'm working on currently, we have a queue manager that runs as standalone service that polls a database queue and picks out jobs and processes them on several threads. The service can spin up any number of threads and keep these threads alive in the background while IIS is running doing its own thing. These threads are newly created threads, so they sit completely outside of the IIS thread pool. In order for this service to work all it needs is a long running reference that keeps it alive for the life time of the application.In this particular app there are two components that run in the background on their own threads: A scheduler that runs various scheduled tasks and handles things like picking up emails to send out outside of IIS's scope and the QueueManager. Here's what this looks like in global.asax:public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication { private static ApplicationScheduler scheduler; private static ServiceLauncher launcher; protected void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e) { // Pings the service and ensures it stays alive scheduler = new ApplicationScheduler() { CheckFrequency = 600000 }; scheduler.Start(); launcher = new ServiceLauncher(); launcher.Start(); // register so shutdown is controlled HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(launcher); }}By keeping these objects around as static instances that are set only once on startup, they survive the lifetime of the application. The code in these classes is essentially unchanged from the Windows Service code except that I could remove the various overrides required for the Windows Service interface (OnStart,OnStop,OnResume etc.). Otherwise the behavior and operation is very similar.In this application ASP.NET serves two purposes: It acts as the host for SignalR and provides the administration interface which allows remote management of the 'service'. I can start and stop the service remotely by shutting down the ApplicationScheduler very easily. I can also very easily feed stats from the queue out directly via a couple of Web requests or (as we do now) through the SignalR service.Registering a Background Object with ASP.NETNotice also the use of the HostingEnvironment.RegisterObject(). This function registers an object with ASP.NET to let it know that it's a background task that should be notified if the AppDomain shuts down. RegisterObject() requires an interface with a Stop() method that's fired and allows your code to respond to a shutdown request. Here's what the IRegisteredObject::Stop() method looks like on the launcher:public void Stop(bool immediate = false) { LogManager.Current.LogInfo("QueueManager Controller Stopped."); Controller.StopProcessing(); Controller.Dispose(); Thread.Sleep(1500); // give background threads some time HostingEnvironment.UnregisterObject(this); }Implementing IRegisterObject should help with reliability on AppDomain shutdowns. Thanks to Justin Van Patten for pointing this out to me on Twitter.RegisterObject() is not required but I would highly recommend implementing it on whatever object controls your background processing to all clean shutdowns when the AppDomain shuts down.Testing it outI'm still in the testing phase with this particular service to see if there are any side effects. But so far it doesn't look like it. With about 50 lines of code I was able to replace the Windows service startup to Web start up - everything else just worked as is. An honorable mention goes to SignalR 2.0's oWin hosting, because with the new oWin based hosting no code changes at all were required, merely a couple of configuration file settings and an assembly directive needed, to point at the SignalR startup class. Sweet!It also seems like SignalR is noticeably faster running inside of IIS compared to self-host. Startup feels faster because of the preload.Starting and Stopping the 'Service'Because the application is running as a Web Server, it's easy to have a Web interface for starting and stopping the services running inside of the service. For our queue manager the SignalR service and front monitoring app has a play and stop button for toggling the queue.If you want more administrative control and have it work more like a Windows Service you can also stop the application pool explicitly from the command line which would be equivalent to stopping and restarting a service.To start and stop from the command line you can use the IIS appCmd tool. To stop:> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd stop apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"and to start> %windir%\system32\inetsrv\appcmd start apppool /apppool.name:"Weblog"Note that when you explicitly force the AppPool to stop running either in the UI (on the ApplicationPools page use Start/Stop) or via command line tools, the application pool will not auto-restart immediately. You have to manually start it back up.What's not to like?There are certainly a lot of benefits to running a background service in IIS, but… ASP.NET applications do have more overhead in terms of memory footprint and startup time is a little slower, but generally for server applications this is not a big deal. If the application is stable the service should fire up and stay running indefinitely. A lot of times this kind of service interface can simply be attached to an existing Web application, or if scalability requires be offloaded to its own Web server.Easier to work withBut the ultimate benefit here is that it's much easier to work with a Web app as opposed to a service. While developing I can simply turn off the auto-launch features and launch the service on demand through IIS simply by hitting a page on the site. If I want to shut down an IISRESET -stop will shut down the service easily enough. I can then attach a debugger anywhere I want and this works like any other ASP.NET application. Yes you end up on a background thread for debugging but Visual Studio handles that just fine and if you stay on a single thread this is no different than debugging any other code.SummaryUsing ASP.NET to run background service operations is probably not a super common scenario, but it probably should be something that is considered carefully when building services. Many applications have service like features and with the auto-start functionality of the Application Initialization module, it's easy to build this functionality into ASP.NET. Especially when combined with the notification features of SignalR it becomes very, very easy to create rich services that can also communicate their status easily to the outside world.Whether it's existing applications that need some background processing for scheduling related tasks, or whether you just create a separate site altogether just to host your service it's easy to do and you can leverage the same tool chain you're already using for other Web projects. If you have lots of service projects it's worth considering… give it some thought…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in ASP.NET  SignalR  IIS   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Q1 2010 New Feature: Paging with RadGridView for Silverlight and WPF

  We are glad to announce that the Q1 2010 Release has added another weapon to RadGridViews growing arsenal of features. This is the brand new RadDataPager control which provides the user interface for paging through a collection of data. The good news is that RadDataPager can be used to page any collection. It does not depend on RadGridView in any way, so you will be free to use it with the rest of your ItemsControls if you chose to do so. Before you read on, you might want to download the samples solution that I have attached. It contains a sample project for every scenario that I will discuss later on. Looking at the code while reading will make things much easier for you. There is something for everyone among the 10 Visual Studio projects that are included in the solution. So go and grab it. I. Paging essentials The single most important piece of software concerning paging in Silverlight is the System.ComponentModel.IPagedCollectionView interface. Those of you who are on the WPF front need not worry though. As you might already know, Teleriks Silverlight and WPF controls is share the same code-base. Since WPF does not contain a similar interface, Telerik has provided its own Telerik.Windows.Data.IPagedCollectionView. The IPagedCollectionView interface contains several important members which are used by RadGridView to perform the actual paging. Silverlight provides a default implementation of this interface which, naturally, is called PagedCollectionView. You should definitely take a look at its source code in case you are interested in what is going on under the hood. But this is not a prerequisite for our discussion. The WPF default implementation of the interface is Teleriks QueryableCollectionView which, among many other interfaces, implements IPagedCollectionView. II. No Paging In order to gradually build up my case, I will start with a very simple example that lacks paging whatsoever. It might sound stupid, but this will help us build on top of this paging-devoid example. Let us imagine that we have the simplest possible scenario. That is a simple IEnumerable and an ItemsControl that shows its contents. This will look like this: No Paging IEnumerable itemsSource = Enumerable.Range(0, 1000); this.itemsControl.ItemsSource = itemsSource; XAML <Border Grid.Row="0" BorderBrush="Black" BorderThickness="1" Margin="5">     <ListBox Name="itemsControl"/> </Border> <Border Grid.Row="1" BorderBrush="Black" BorderThickness="1" Margin="5">     <TextBlock Text="No Paging"/> </Border> Nothing special for now. Just some data displayed in a ListBox. The two sample projects in the solution that I have attached are: NoPaging_WPF NoPaging_SL3 With every next sample those two project will evolve in some way or another. III. Paging simple collections The single most important property of RadDataPager is its Source property. This is where you pass in your collection of data for paging. More often than not your collection will not be an IPagedCollectionView. It will either be a simple List<T>, or an ObservableCollection<T>, or anything that is simply IEnumerable. Unless you had paging in mind when you designed your project, it is almost certain that your data source will not be pageable out of the box. So what are the options? III. 1. Wrapping the simple collection in an IPagedCollectionView If you look at the constructors of PagedCollectionView and QueryableCollectionView you will notice that you can pass in a simple IEnumerable as a parameter. Those two classes will wrap it and provide paging capabilities over your original data. In fact, this is what RadGridView does internally. It wraps your original collection in an QueryableCollectionView in order to easily perform many useful tasks such as filtering, sorting, and others, but in our case the most important one is paging. So let us start our series of examples with the most simplistic one. Imagine that you have a simple IEnumerable which is the source for an ItemsControl. Here is how to wrap it in order to enable paging: Silverlight IEnumerable itemsSource = Enumerable.Range(0, 1000); var pagedSource = new PagedCollectionView(itemsSource); this.radDataPager.Source = pagedSource; this.itemsControl.ItemsSource = pagedSource; WPF IEnumerable itemsSource = Enumerable.Range(0, 1000); var pagedSource = new QueryableCollectionView(itemsSource); this.radDataPager.Source = pagedSource; this.itemsControl.ItemsSource = pagedSource; XAML <Border Grid.Row="0"         BorderBrush="Black"         BorderThickness="1"         Margin="5">     <ListBox Name="itemsControl"/> </Border> <Border Grid.Row="1"         BorderBrush="Black"         BorderThickness="1"         Margin="5">     <telerikGrid:RadDataPager Name="radDataPager"                               PageSize="10"                              IsTotalItemCountFixed="True"                              DisplayMode="All"/> This will do the trick. It is quite simple, isnt it? The two sample projects in the solution that I have attached are: PagingSimpleCollectionWithWrapping_WPF PagingSimpleCollectionWithWrapping_SL3 III. 2. Binding to RadDataPager.PagedSource In case you do not like this approach there is a better one. When you assign an IEnumerable as the Source of a RadDataPager it will automatically wrap it in a QueryableCollectionView and expose it through its PagedSource property. From then on, you can attach any number of ItemsControls to the PagedSource and they will be automatically paged. Here is how to do this entirely in XAML: Using RadDataPager.PagedSource <Border Grid.Row="0"         BorderBrush="Black"         BorderThickness="1" Margin="5">     <ListBox Name="itemsControl"              ItemsSource="{Binding PagedSource, ElementName=radDataPager}"/> </Border> <Border Grid.Row="1"         BorderBrush="Black"         BorderThickness="1"         Margin="5">     <telerikGrid:RadDataPager Name="radDataPager"                               Source="{Binding ItemsSource}"                              PageSize="10"                              IsTotalItemCountFixed="True"                              DisplayMode="All"/> The two sample projects in the solution that I have attached are: PagingSimpleCollectionWithPagedSource_WPF PagingSimpleCollectionWithPagedSource_SL3 IV. Paging collections implementing IPagedCollectionView Those of you who are using WCF RIA Services should feel very lucky. After a quick look with Reflector or the debugger we can see that the DomainDataSource.Data property is in fact an instance of the DomainDataSourceView class. This class implements a handful of useful interfaces: ICollectionView IEnumerable INotifyCollectionChanged IEditableCollectionView IPagedCollectionView INotifyPropertyChanged Luckily, IPagedCollectionView is among them which lets you do the whole paging in the server. So lets do this. We will add a DomainDataSource control to our page/window and connect the items control and the pager to it. Here is how to do this: MainPage <riaControls:DomainDataSource x:Name="invoicesDataSource"                               AutoLoad="True"                               QueryName="GetInvoicesQuery">     <riaControls:DomainDataSource.DomainContext>         <services:ChinookDomainContext/>     </riaControls:DomainDataSource.DomainContext> </riaControls:DomainDataSource> <Border Grid.Row="0"         BorderBrush="Black"         BorderThickness="1"         Margin="5">     <ListBox Name="itemsControl"              ItemsSource="{Binding Data, ElementName=invoicesDataSource}"/> </Border> <Border Grid.Row="1"         BorderBrush="Black"         BorderThickness="1"         Margin="5">     <telerikGrid:RadDataPager Name="radDataPager"                               Source="{Binding Data, ElementName=invoicesDataSource}"                              PageSize="10"                              IsTotalItemCountFixed="True"                              DisplayMode="All"/> By the way, you can replace the ListBox from the above code snippet with any other ItemsControl. It can be RadGridView, it can be the MS DataGrid, you name it. Essentially, RadDataPager is sending paging commands to the the DomainDataSource.Data. It does not care who, what, or how many different controls are bound to this same Data property of the DomainDataSource control. So if you would like to experiment with this, you can throw in any number of other ItemsControls next to the ListBox, bind them in the same manner, and all of them will be paged by our single RadDataPager. Furthermore, you can throw in any number of RadDataPagers and bind them to the same property. Then when you page with any one of them will automatically update all of the rest. The whole picture is simply beautiful and we can do all of this thanks to WCF RIA Services. The two sample projects (Silverlight only) in the solution that I have attached are: PagingIPagedCollectionView PagingIPagedCollectionView.Web IV. Paging RadGridView While you can replace the ListBox in any of the above examples with a RadGridView, RadGridView offers something extra. Similar to the DomainDataSource.Data property, the RadGridView.Items collection implements the IPagedCollectionView interface. So you are already thinking: Then why not bind the Source property of RadDataPager to RadGridView.Items? Well thats exactly what you can do and you will start paging RadGridView out-of-the-box. It is as simple as that, no code-behind is involved: MainPage <Border Grid.Row="0"         BorderBrush="Black"         BorderThickness="1" Margin="5">     <telerikGrid:RadGridView Name="radGridView"                              ItemsSource="{Binding ItemsSource}"/> </Border> <Border Grid.Row="1"         BorderBrush="Black"         BorderThickness="1"         Margin="5">     <telerikGrid:RadDataPager Name="radDataPager"                               Source="{Binding Items, ElementName=radGridView}"                              PageSize="10"                              IsTotalItemCountFixed="True"                              DisplayMode="All"/> The two sample projects in the solution that I have attached are: PagingRadGridView_SL3 PagingRadGridView_WPF With this last example I think I have covered every possible paging combination. In case you would like to see an example of something that I have not covered, please let me know. Also, make sure you check out those great online examples: WCF RIA Services with DomainDataSource Paging Configurator Endless Paging Paging Any Collection Paging RadGridView Happy Paging! Download Full Source Code Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 01, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 01, 2012Popular ReleasesMetodología General Ajustada - MGA: 01.09.08: Cambios John: Cambios en el MDI: Habilitación del menú e ícono de Imprimir. Deshabilitación de menú Ayuda y opciones de Importar y Exportar del menú Proyectos temporalmente. Integración con código de Crystal Report. Validaciones con Try-Catch al generar los reportes, personalización de los formularios en estilos y botones y validación de selección de tipo de reporte. Creación de instalador con TODOS los cambios y la creación de las carpetas asociadas a los RPT.WatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke®: CKEditor Provider 1.14.01: Whats NewAdded New Plugin "Ventrian News Articles Link Selector" to select an Article Link from the News Article Module (This Plugin is not visible by default in your Toolbar, you need to manually add the 'newsarticleslinks' to your toolbarset) http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/CKEditorNewsArticlesLinks.png File-Browser: Added Paging to the Files List. You can define the Page Size in the Options (Default Value: 20) http://www.watchersnet.de/Portals/0/screenshots/dnn/CKEdito...MyRouter (Virtual WiFi Router): MyRouter 1.0 (Beta): A friendlier User Interface. A logger file to catch exceptions so you may send it to use to improve and fix any bugs that may occur. A feedback form because we always love hearing what you guy's think of MyRouter. Check for update menu item for you to stay up to date will the latest changes. Facebook fan page so you may spread the word and share MyRouter with friends and family And Many other exciting features were sure your going to love!WPF Sound Visualization Library: WPF SVL 0.3 (Source, Binaries, Examples, Help): Version 0.3 of WPFSVL. This includes three new controls: an equalizer, a digital clock, and a time editor.Thai Flood Watch: Thai Flood Watch - Source: non commercial use only ** This project supported by Department of Computer Science KhonKaen University Thailand.ZXing.Net: ZXing.Net 0.4.0.0: sync with rev. 2196 of the java version important fix for RGBLuminanceSource generating barcode bitmaps Windows Phone demo client (only tested with emulator, because I don't have a Windows Phone) Barcode generation support for Windows Forms demo client Webcam support for Windows Forms demo clientOrchard Project: Orchard 1.4: Please read our release notes for Orchard 1.4: http://docs.orchardproject.net/Documentation/Orchard-1-4-Release-Notes.NET Assembly Information: Assembly Information 2.1.0.1: - Fixed the issue in which AnyCPU binaries were shown as 32bit - Added support to show the errors in-case if some dlls failed to load.FluentData -Micro ORM with a fluent API that makes it simple to query a database: FluentData version 1.2: New features: - QueryValues method - Added support for automapping to enumerations (both int and string are supported). Fixed 2 reported issues.NetSqlAzMan - .NET SQL Authorization Manager: 3.6.0.15: 3.6.0.15 28-Feb-2012 • Fix: The communication object, System.ServiceModel.Channels.ServiceChannel, cannot be used for communication because it is in the Faulted state. Work Item 10435: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10435 • Fix: Made StorageCache thread safe. Thanks to tangrl. • Fix: Members property of SqlAzManApplicationGroup is not functioning. Thanks to tangrl. Work Item 10267: http://netsqlazman.codeplex.com/workitem/10267 • Fix: Indexer are making database calls. Thanks to t...SCCM Client Actions Tool: Client Actions Tool v1.1: SCCM Client Actions Tool v1.1 is the latest version. It comes with following changes since last version: Added stop button to stop the ongoing process. Added action "Query update status". Added option "saveOnlineComputers" in config.ini to enable saving list of online computers from last session. Default value for "LatestClientVersion" set to SP2 R3 (4.00.6487.2157). Wuauserv service manual startup mode is considered healthy on Windows 7. Errors are now suppressed in checkReleases...Kinect PowerPoint Control: Kinect PowerPoint Control v1.1: Updated for Kinect SDK 1.0.SharpCompress - a fully native C# library for RAR, 7Zip, Zip, Tar, GZip, BZip2: SharpCompress 0.8: API Updates: SOLID Extract Method for Archives (7Zip and RAR). ExtractAllEntries method on Archive classes will extract archives as a streaming file. This can offer better 7Zip extraction performance if any of the entries are solid. The IsSolid method on 7Zip archives will return true if any are solid. Removed IExtractionListener was removed in favor of events. Unit tests show example. Bug fixes: PPMd passes tests plus other fixes (Thanks Pavel) Zip used to always write a Post Descri...Social Network Importer for NodeXL: SocialNetImporter(v.1.3): This new version includes: - Download new networks for Facebook fan pages. - New options for downloading more posts - Bug fixes To use the new graph data provider, do the following: Unzip the Zip file into the "PlugIns" folder that can be found in the NodeXL installation folder (i.e "C:\Program Files\Social Media Research Foundation\NodeXL Excel Template\PlugIns") Open NodeXL template and you can access the new importer from the "Import" menuASP.NET REST Services Framework: Release 1.1 - Standard version: Beginning from v1.1 the REST-services Framework is compatible with ASP.NET Routing model as well with CRUD (Create, Read, Update, and Delete) principle. These two are often important when building REST API functionality within your application. It also includes ability to apply Filters to a class to target all WebRest methods, as well as some performance enhancements. New version includes Metadata Explorer providing ability exploring the existing services that becomes essential as the number ...SQL Live Monitor: SQL Live Monitor 1.31: A quick fix to make it this version work with SQL 2012. Version 2 already has 2012 working, but am still developing the UI in version 2, so this is just an interim fix to allow user to monitor SQL 2012.Content Slider Module for DotNetNuke: 01.02.00: This release has the following updates and new features: Feature: One-Click Enabling of Pager Setting Feature: Cache Sliders for Performance Feature: Configurable Cache Setting Enhancement: Transitions can be Selected Bug: Secure Folder Images not Viewable Bug: Sliders Disappear on Postback Bug: Remote Images Cause Error Bug: Deleted Images Cause Error System Requirements DotNetNuke v06.00.00 or newer .Net Framework v3.5 SP1 or newer SQL Server 2005 or newerImage Resizer for Windows: Image Resizer 3 Preview 3: Here is yet another iteration toward what will eventually become Image Resizer 3. This release is stable. However, I'm calling it a preview since there are still many features I'd still like to add before calling it complete. Updated on February 28 to fix an issue with installing on multi-user machines. As usual, here is my progress report. Done Preview 3 Fix: 3206 3076 3077 5688 Fix: 7420 Fix: 7527 Fix: 7576 7612 Preview 2 6308 6309 Fix: 7339 Fix: 7357 Preview 1 UI...Finestra Virtual Desktops: 2.5.4500: This is a bug fix release for version 2.5. It fixes several things and adds a couple of minor features. See the 2.5 release notes for more information on the major new features in that version. Important - If Finestra crashes on startup for you, you must install the Visual C++ 2010 runtime from http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=5555. Fixes a bug with window animations not refreshing the screen on XP and with DWM off Fixes a bug with with crashing on XP due to a bug in t...Media Companion: MC 3.432b Release: General Now remembers window location. Catching a few more exceptions when an image is blank TV A couple of UI tweaks Movies Fixed the actor name displaying HTML Fixed crash when using Save files as "movie.nfo", "movie.tbn", & "fanart.jpg" New CSV template for HTML output function Added <createdate> tag for HTML output A couple of UI tweaks Known Issues Multiepisodes are not handled correctly in MC. The created nfo is valid, but they are not displayed in MC correctly & saving the...New Projectsabac: abac cn websiteAION Launcher: simple aion launcher...just edit the background image of your choosing inside the code and other things such as the links for the buttons and the ip adress and port of the serverAXTFSTool: Dynamics AX tool that connects to your project's TFS and lists the objects your colleagues have changed. Written in C#, still under development and improvements. Useful for team leaders, deployment managers, etc.cookieTopo: Topo map viewerCrmFetchKit.js: Simple Library at allows the execution of fetchxml queries via JavaScript for Dynamics CRM 2011 (using the new WCF endpoints). Like the CrmRestKit this framework uses the promise/A capacities of jQuery. The code and the idea for this framework bases on the CrmServiceToolkit (http://crmtoolkit.codeplex.com/) developed by Daniel Cai. cy univerX engine: ????????DNSAPI.NET: A common API for managing DNS servers on Windows. This project is based on the work I started back in 2002 when I needed to create a web front-end for Windows' DNS server using the .Net framework. The plan is to expand on the project and include support for the BIND server on Windows too. ego.net: ego.netfdTFS: Team Foundation Server Source Control Plugin for FlashDevelopGeoWPS: GeoWPS is an implementation of the OGC WPS. It will be developed in C#. IThink: A new project.King Garden: Boy King's .net practical projects.King Garret: Boy King's .net learning projects.LottoCheck: Follow LottoNot-Terraria: This is a like terraria game but NOT terrariaPassword Protector: Password Protector SharePoint 2010 BlobCache Manager: Manage your web application's blobcache settings directly in the central administration.SharePoint 2010 SilverLight Multiple File Uploader: SharePoint 2010 SilverLight Multiple File Uploader for Documents Libraries with MetaData.Sharepoint Tool Collection: I want to Integrate Various Utilities of Sharepoint at one place. It is for easy working of user or developer. Ex-1. A utility which takes some params & csv file and upload 100s of items on the sharepoint list easily. Ex-2 A utility to upload documents in a library. etc.SQLCLR Cmd Exec Framework Example: For users of MS SQL Server, xp_cmdshell is a utility that we usually want to have disabled. However there are still cases where calling a command line is needed. This project provides an framework/example to make command line calls. It is not meant as an xp_cmdshell replacement but as a workaround.Symmetric Designs Python 3.2: Symmetric Designs for Python 3.2 helps graphical artists to design and develop their own designs freestyle. It uses the pygame module for Python 3.2. It can also be analysed in order to get a grasp of graphics programming in Python.Terminsoft open CLR libraries: Terminsoft open CLR libraries. The first is Terminsoft.Intervals, intended for modeling the sets of intervals with elements, the comparison operation is defined for. The second is Terminsoft.Syntax, intended for text parsing and transformation and built upon regular expressions.Thai Flood Watch: Thai Flood Watch provides useful information, up-to-date and visual access to the major canal in Bangkok, Thailand using data from department of drainage and sewerage. Easily monitor river and canal flow information in Bangkok area, right from your hand.TheNerd: Sample video game source code. Using Sunburn.Unity.WebAPI: A library that allows simple Integration of Microsoft's Unity IoC container with ASP.NET's WebAPI. This project includes a bespoke DependencyResolver that creates a child container per HTTP request and disposes of all registered IDisposable instances at the end of the request.Wholemy.RemoteTouch: The project is a remote touch-sensitive keyboard with a customizable interface which allows to supplement control of another computer, regardless of the wires. For example, if you have not so fast Tablet PC - a client and a fast desktop computer - the server using the network.WindowPlace: WindowPlace makes it possible to save Window positions and sizes to a profile. Switching between profiles will effortlessly move and resize your windows. Help improve productivity - especially for multi-monitor systems. Developed in C# using WPF and a few Windows API calls in the background. WP Error Manager (Devv.Core.WPErrorManager): Library to log, handle and report errors on Windows Phone 7 apps. Fully customizable and extremely easy to implement. Works with any WP7 app. Tested with the emulator, Nokia Lumia 800 and Samsung Focus Flash.WPMatic: Windows Phone7 App to manage Homematic (eQ-3) Devices. The App is like the Homematic Central Configuration Unit (CCU) in German.www.Nabaza.com Freeware and Ebooks: www.Nabaza.com Freeware and Ebooks by William R. NabazaZap: Zap is a light weight .NET communication framework. It is designed for programs running in local area network. Zap provides code generation tool that enables user to call remote methods, add/remote event listener to remote objects, while hides the lower details.

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• Mobile Friendly Websites with CSS Media Queries

  - by dwahlin

  In a previous post the concept of CSS media queries was introduced and I discussed the fundamentals of how they can be used to target different screen sizes. I showed how they could be used to convert a 3-column wide page into a more vertical view of data that displays better on devices such as an iPhone:     In this post I'll provide an additional look at how CSS media queries can be used to mobile-enable a sample site called "Widget Masters" without having to change any server-side code or HTML code. The site that will be discussed is shown next:     This site has some of the standard items shown in most websites today including a title area, menu bar, and sections where data is displayed. Without including CSS media queries the site is readable but has to be zoomed out to see everything on a mobile device, cuts-off some of the menu items, and requires horizontal scrolling to get to additional content. The following image shows what the site looks like on an iPhone. While the site works on mobile devices it's definitely not optimized for mobile.     Let's take a look at how CSS media queries can be used to override existing styles in the site based on different screen widths. Adding CSS Media Queries into a Site The Widget Masters Website relies on standard CSS combined with HTML5 elements to provide the layout shown earlier. For example, to layout the menu bar shown at the top of the page the nav element is used as shown next. A standard div element could certainly be used as well if desired.   <nav> <ul class="clearfix"> <li><a href="#home">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#products">Products</a></li> <li><a href="#aboutus">About Us</a></li> <li><a href="#contactus">Contact Us</a></li> <li><a href="#store">Store</a></li> </ul> </nav>   This HTML is combined with the CSS shown next to add a CSS3 gradient, handle the horizontal orientation, and add some general hover effects.   nav { width: 100%; } nav ul { border-radius: 6px; height: 40px; width: 100%; margin: 0; padding: 0; background: rgb(125,126,125); /* Old browsers */ background: -moz-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* FF3.6+ */ background: -webkit-gradient(linear, left top, left bottom, color-stop(0%,rgba(125,126,125,1)), color-stop(100%,rgba(14,14,14,1))); /* Chrome,Safari4+ */ background: -webkit-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* Chrome10+,Safari5.1+ */ background: -o-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* Opera 11.10+ */ background: -ms-linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* IE10+ */ background: linear-gradient(top, rgba(125,126,125,1) 0%, rgba(14,14,14,1) 100%); /* W3C */ filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.gradient( startColorstr='#7d7e7d', endColorstr='#0e0e0e',GradientType=0 ); /* IE6-9 */ } nav ul > li { list-style: none; float: left; margin: 0; padding: 0; } nav ul > li:first-child { margin-left: 8px; } nav ul > li > a { color: #ccc; text-decoration: none; line-height: 2.8em; font-size: 0.95em; font-weight: bold; padding: 8px 25px 7px 25px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; } nav ul > li a:hover { background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1); color: #fff; }   When mobile devices hit the site the layout of the menu items needs to be adjusted so that they're all visible without having to swipe left or right to get to them. This type of modification can be accomplished using CSS media queries by targeting specific screen sizes. To start, a media query can be added into the site's CSS file as shown next: @media screen and (max-width:320px) { /* CSS style overrides for this screen width go here */ } This media query targets screens that have a maximum width of 320 pixels. Additional types of queries can also be added – refer to my previous post for more details as well as resources that can be used to test media queries in different devices. In that post I emphasize (and I'll emphasize again) that CSS media queries only modify the overall layout and look and feel of a site. They don't optimize the site as far as the size of the images or content sent to the device which is important to keep in mind. To make the navigation menu more accessible on devices such as an iPhone or Android the CSS shown next can be used. This code changes the height of the menu from 40 pixels to 100%, takes off the li element floats, changes the line-height, and changes the margins.   @media screen and (max-width:320px) { nav ul { height: 100%; } nav ul > li { float: none; } nav ul > li a { line-height: 1.5em; } nav ul > li:first-child { margin-left: 0px; } /* Additional CSS overrides go here */ }   The following image shows an example of what the menu look like when run on a device with a width of 320 pixels:   Mobile devices with a maximum width of 480 pixels need different CSS styles applied since they have 160 additional pixels of width. This can be done by adding a new CSS media query into the stylesheet as shown next. Looking through the CSS you'll see that only a minimal override is added to adjust the padding of anchor tags since the menu fits by default in this screen width.   @media screen and (max-width: 480px) { nav ul > li > a { padding: 8px 10px 7px 10px; } }   Running the site on a device with 480 pixels results in the menu shown next being rendered. Notice that the space between the menu items is much smaller compared to what was shown when the main site loads in a standard browser.     In addition to modifying the menu, the 3 horizontal content sections shown earlier can be changed from a horizontal layout to a vertical layout so that they look good on a variety of smaller mobile devices and are easier to navigate by end users. The HTML5 article and section elements are used as containers for the 3 sections in the site as shown next:   <article class="clearfix"> <section id="info"> <header>Why Choose Us?</header> <br /> <img id="mainImage" src="Images/ArticleImage.png" title="Article Image" /> <p> Post emensos insuperabilis expeditionis eventus languentibus partium animis, quas periculorum varietas fregerat et laborum, nondum tubarum cessante clangore vel milite locato per stationes hibernas. </p> </section> <section id="products"> <header>Products</header> <br /> <img id="gearsImage" src="Images/Gears.png" title="Article Image" /> <p> <ul> <li>Widget 1</li> <li>Widget 2</li> <li>Widget 3</li> <li>Widget 4</li> <li>Widget 5</li> </ul> </p> </section> <section id="FAQ"> <header>FAQ</header> <br /> <img id="faqImage" src="Images/faq.png" title="Article Image" /> <p> <ul> <li>FAQ 1</li> <li>FAQ 2</li> <li>FAQ 3</li> <li>FAQ 4</li> <li>FAQ 5</li> </ul> </p> </section> </article>   To force the sections into a vertical layout for smaller mobile devices the CSS styles shown next can be added into the media queries targeting 320 pixel and 480 pixel widths. Styles to target the display size of the images in each section are also included. It's important to note that the original image is still being downloaded from the server and isn't being optimized in any way for the mobile device. It's certainly possible for the CSS to include URL information for a mobile-optimized image if desired. @media screen and (max-width:320px) { section { float: none; width: 97%; margin: 0px; padding: 5px; } #wrapper { padding: 5px; width: 96%; } #mainImage, #gearsImage, #faqImage { width: 100%; height: 100px; } } @media screen and (max-width: 480px) { section { float: none; width: 98%; margin: 0px 0px 10px 0px; padding: 5px; } article > section:last-child { margin-right: 0px; float: none; } #bottomSection { width: 99%; } #wrapper { padding: 5px; width: 96%; } #mainImage, #gearsImage, #faqImage { width: 100%; height: 100px; } }   The following images show the site rendered on an iPhone with the CSS media queries in place. Each of the sections now displays vertically making it much easier for the user to access them. Images inside of each section also scale appropriately to fit properly.     CSS media queries provide a great way to override default styles in a website and target devices with different resolutions. In this post you've seen how CSS media queries can be used to convert a standard browser-based site into a site that is more accessible to mobile users. Although much more can be done to optimize sites for mobile, CSS media queries provide a nice starting point if you don't have the time or resources to create mobile-specific versions of sites.

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• URL Rewrite – Multiple domains under one site. Part II

  - by OWScott

  I believe I have it … I’ve been meaning to put together the ultimate outgoing rule for hosting multiple domains under one site.  I finally sat down this week and setup a few test cases, and created one rule to rule them all.  In Part I of this two part series, I covered the incoming rule necessary to host a site in a subfolder of a website, while making it appear as if it’s in the root of the site.  Part II won’t work without applying Part I first, so if you haven’t read it, I encourage you to read it now. However, the incoming rule by itself doesn’t address everything.  Here’s the problem … Let’s say that we host www.site2.com in a subfolder called site2, off of masterdomain.com.  This is the same example I used in Part I.   Using an incoming rewrite rule, we are able to make a request to www.site2.com even though the site is really in the /site2 folder.  The gotcha comes with any type of path that ASP.NET generates (I’m sure other scripting technologies could do the same too).  ASP.NET thinks that the path to the root of the site is /site2, but the URL is /.  See the issue?  If ASP.NET generates a path or a redirect for us, it will always add /site2 to the URL.  That results in a path that looks something like www.site2.com/site2.  In Part I, I mentioned that you should add a condition where “{PATH_INFO} ‘does not match’ /site2”.  That allows www.site2.com/site2 and www.site2.com to both function the same.  This allows the site to always work, but if you want to hide /site2 in the URL, you need to take it one step further. One way to address this is in your code.  Ultimately this is the best bet.  Ruslan Yakushev has a great article on a few considerations that you can address in code.  I recommend giving that serious consideration.  Additionally, if you have upgraded to ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 or greater, it takes care of some of the references automatically for you. However, what if you inherit an existing application?  Or you can’t easily go through your existing site and make the code changes?  If this applies to you, read on. That’s where URL Rewrite 2.0 comes in.  With URL Rewrite 2.0, you can create an outgoing rule that will remove the /site2 before the page is sent back to the user.  This means that you can take an existing application, host it in a subfolder of your site, and ensure that the URL never reveals that it’s in a subfolder. Performance Considerations Performance overhead is something to be mindful of.  These outbound rules aren’t simply changing the server variables.  The first rule I’ll cover below needs to parse the HTML body and pull out the path (i.e. /site2) on the way through.  This will add overhead, possibly significant if you have large pages and a busy site.  In other words, your mileage may vary and you may need to test to see the impact that these rules have.  Don’t worry too much though.  For many sites, the performance impact is negligible. So, how do we do it? Creating the Outgoing Rule There are really two things to keep in mind.  First, ASP.NET applications frequently generate a URL that adds the /site2 back into the URL.  In addition to URLs, they can be in form elements, img elements and the like.  The goal is to find all of those situations and rewrite it on the way out.  Let’s call this the ‘URL problem’. Second, and similarly, ASP.NET can send a LOCATION redirect that causes a redirect back to another page.  Again, ASP.NET isn’t aware of the different URL and it will add the /site2 to the redirect.  Form Authentication is a good example on when this occurs.  Try to password protect a site running from a subfolder using forms auth and you’ll quickly find that the URL becomes www.site2.com/site2 again.  Let’s term this the ‘redirect problem’. Solving the URL Problem – Outgoing Rule #1 Let’s create a rule that removes the /site2 from any URL.  We want to remove it from relative URLs like /site2/something, or absolute URLs like http://www.site2.com/site2/something.  Most URLs that ASP.NET creates will be relative URLs, but I figure that there may be some applications that piece together a full URL, so we might as well expect that situation. Let’s get started.  First, create a new outbound rule.  You can create the rule within the /site2 folder which will reduce the performance impact of the rule.  Just a reminder that incoming rules for this situation won’t work in a subfolder … but outgoing rules will. Give it a name that makes sense to you, for example “Outgoing – URL paths”. Precondition.  If you place the rule in the subfolder, it will only run for that site and folder, so there isn’t need for a precondition.  Run it for all requests.  If you place it in the root of the site, you may want to create a precondition for HTTP_HOST = ^(www\.)?site2\.com$. For the Match section, there are a few things to consider.  For performance reasons, it’s best to match the least amount of elements that you need to accomplish the task.  For my test cases, I just needed to rewrite the <a /> tag, but you may need to rewrite any number of HTML elements.  Note that as long as you have the exclude /site2 rule in your incoming rule as I described in Part I, some elements that don’t show their URL—like your images—will work without removing the /site2 from them.  That reduces the processing needed for this rule. Leave the “matching scope” at “Response” and choose the elements that you want to change. Set the pattern to “^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*)”.  Make sure to replace ‘site2’ with your subfolder name in both places.  Yes, I realize this is a pretty messy looking rule, but it handles a few situations.  This rule will handle the following situations correctly: Original Rewritten using {R:1}{R:2} http://www.site2.com/site2/default.aspx http://www.site2.com/default.aspx http://www.site2.com/folder1/site2/default.aspx Won’t rewrite since it’s a sub-sub folder /site2/default.aspx /default.aspx site2/default.aspx /default.aspx /folder1/site2/default.aspx Won’t rewrite since it’s a sub-sub folder. For the conditions section, you can leave that be. Finally, for the rule, set the Action Type to “Rewrite” and set the Value to “{R:1}{R:2}”.  The {R:1} and {R:2} are back references to the sections within parentheses.  In other words, in http://domain.com/site2/something, {R:1} will be http://domain.com and {R:2} will be /something. If you view your rule from your web.config file (or applicationHost.config if it’s a global rule), it should look like this: <rule name="Outgoing - URL paths" enabled="true"> <match filterByTags="A" pattern="^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> Solving the Redirect Problem Outgoing Rule #2 The second issue that we can run into is with a client-side redirect.  This is triggered by a LOCATION response header that is sent to the client.  Forms authentication is a common example.  To reproduce this, password protect your subfolder and watch how it redirects and adds the subfolder path back in. Notice in my test case the extra paths: http://site2.com/site2/login.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2fsite2%2fdefault.aspx I want to remove /site2 from both the URL and the ReturnUrl querystring value.  For semi-readability, let’s do this in 2 separate rules, one for the URL and one for the querystring. Create a second rule.  As with the previous rule, it can be created in the /site2 subfolder.  In the URL Rewrite wizard, select Outbound rules –> “Blank Rule”. Fill in the following information: Name response_location URL Precondition Don’t set Match: Matching Scope Server Variable Match: Variable Name RESPONSE_LOCATION Match: Pattern ^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*) Conditions Don’t set Action Type Rewrite Action Properties {R:1}{R:2} It should end up like so: <rule name="response_location URL"> <match serverVariable="RESPONSE_LOCATION" pattern="^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> Outgoing Rule #3 Outgoing Rule #2 only takes care of the URL path, and not the querystring path.  Let’s create one final rule to take care of the path in the querystring to ensure that ReturnUrl=%2fsite2%2fdefault.aspx gets rewritten to ReturnUrl=%2fdefault.aspx. The %2f is the HTML encoding for forward slash (/). Create a rule like the previous one, but with the following settings: Name response_location querystring Precondition Don’t set Match: Matching Scope Server Variable Match: Variable Name RESPONSE_LOCATION Match: Pattern (.*)%2fsite2(.*) Conditions Don’t set Action Type Rewrite Action Properties {R:1}{R:2} The config should look like this: <rule name="response_location querystring"> <match serverVariable="RESPONSE_LOCATION" pattern="(.*)%2fsite2(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> It’s possible to squeeze the last two rules into one, but it gets kind of confusing so I felt that it’s better to show it as two separate rules. Summary With the rules covered in these two parts, we’re able to have a site in a subfolder and make it appear as if it’s in the root of the site.  Not only that, we can overcome automatic redirecting that is caused by ASP.NET, other scripting technologies, and especially existing applications. Following is an example of the incoming and outgoing rules necessary for a site called www.site2.com hosted in a subfolder called /site2.  Remember that the outgoing rules can be placed in the /site2 folder instead of the in the root of the site. <rewrite> <rules> <rule name="site2.com in a subfolder" enabled="true" stopProcessing="true"> <match url=".*" /> <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll" trackAllCaptures="false"> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="^(www\.)?site2\.com$" /> <add input="{PATH_INFO}" pattern="^/site2($|/)" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" url="/site2/{R:0}" /> </rule> </rules> <outboundRules> <rule name="Outgoing - URL paths" enabled="true"> <match filterByTags="A" pattern="^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> <rule name="response_location URL"> <match serverVariable="RESPONSE_LOCATION" pattern="^(?:site2|(.*//[_a-zA-Z0-9-\.]*)?/site2)(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> <rule name="response_location querystring"> <match serverVariable="RESPONSE_LOCATION" pattern="(.*)%2fsite2(.*)" /> <action type="Rewrite" value="{R:1}{R:2}" /> </rule> </outboundRules> </rewrite> If you run into any situations that aren’t caught by these rules, please let me know so I can update this to be as complete as possible. Happy URL Rewriting!

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• An easy way to create Side by Side registrationless COM Manifests with Visual Studio

  - by Rick Strahl

  Here's something I didn't find out until today: You can use Visual Studio to easily create registrationless COM manifest files for you with just a couple of small steps. Registrationless COM lets you use COM component without them being registered in the registry. This means it's possible to deploy COM components along with another application using plain xcopy semantics. To be sure it's rarely quite that easy - you need to watch out for dependencies - but if you know you have COM components that are light weight and have no or known dependencies it's easy to get everything into a single folder and off you go. Registrationless COM works via manifest files which carry the same name as the executable plus a .manifest extension (ie. yourapp.exe.manifest) I'm going to use a Visual FoxPro COM object as an example and create a simple Windows Forms app that calls the component - without that component being registered. Let's take a walk down memory lane… Create a COM Component I start by creating a FoxPro COM component because that's what I know and am working with here in my legacy environment. You can use VB classic or C++ ATL object if that's more to your liking. Here's a real simple Fox one: DEFINE CLASS SimpleServer as Session OLEPUBLIC FUNCTION HelloWorld(lcName) RETURN "Hello " + lcName ENDDEFINE Compile it into a DLL COM component with: BUILD MTDLL simpleserver FROM simpleserver RECOMPILE And to make sure it works test it quickly from Visual FoxPro: server = CREATEOBJECT("simpleServer.simpleserver") MESSAGEBOX( server.HelloWorld("Rick") ) Using Visual Studio to create a Manifest File for a COM Component Next open Visual Studio and create a new executable project - a Console App or WinForms or WPF application will all do. Go to the References Node Select Add Reference Use the Browse tab and find your compiled DLL to import  Next you'll see your assembly in the project. Right click on the reference and select Properties Click on the Isolated DropDown and select True Compile and that's all there's to it. Visual Studio will create a App.exe.manifest file right alongside your application's EXE. The manifest file created looks like this: xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? assembly xsi:schemaLocation="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1 assembly.adaptive.xsd" manifestVersion="1.0" xmlns:asmv1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:asmv2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" xmlns:asmv3="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v3" xmlns:dsig="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#" xmlns:co.v1="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v1" xmlns:co.v2="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:clickonce.v2" xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" asmv2:size="27293" hash xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v2" dsig:Transforms dsig:Transform Algorithm="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:HashTransforms.Identity" / dsig:Transforms dsig:DigestMethod Algorithm="http://www.w3.org/2000/09/xmldsig#sha1" / dsig:DigestValuepuq+ua20bbidGOWhPOxfquztBCU=dsig:DigestValue hash typelib tlbid="{f10346e2-c9d9-47f7-81d1-74059cc15c3c}" version="1.0" helpdir="" resourceid="0" flags="HASDISKIMAGE" / comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" tlbid="{f10346e2-c9d9-47f7-81d1-74059cc15c3c}" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file assembly Now let's finish our super complex console app to test with: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Text; namespace ConsoleApplication1 {     class Program     {         static voidMain(string[] args)         { Type type = Type.GetTypeFromProgID("simpleserver.simpleserver",true); dynamic server = Activator.CreateInstance(type); Console.WriteLine(server.HelloWorld("rick")); Console.ReadLine(); } } } Now run the Console Application… As expected that should work. And why not? The COM component is still registered, right? :-) Nothing tricky about that. Let's unregister the COM component and then re-run and see what happens. Go to the Command Prompt Change to the folder where the DLL is installed Unregister with: RegSvr32 -u simpleserver.dll      To be sure that the COM component no longer works, check it out with the same test you used earlier (ie. o = CREATEOBJECT("SimpleServer.SimpleServer") in your development environment or VBScript etc.). Make sure you run the EXE and you don't re-compile the application or else Visual Studio will complain that it can't find the COM component in the registry while compiling. In fact now that we have our .manifest file you can remove the COM object from the project. When you run run the EXE from Windows Explorer or a command prompt to avoid the recompile. Watch out for embedded Manifest Files Now recompile your .NET project and run it… and it will most likely fail! The problem is that .NET applications by default embeds a manifest file into the compiled EXE application which results in the externally created manifest file being completely ignored. Only one manifest can be applied at a time and the compiled manifest takes precedency. Uh, thanks Visual Studio - not very helpful… Note that if you use another development tool like Visual FoxPro to create your EXE this won't be an issue as long as the tool doesn't automatically add a manifest file. Creating a Visual FoxPro EXE for example will work immediately with the generated manifest file as is. If you are using .NET and Visual Studio you have a couple of options of getting around this: Remove the embedded manifest file Copy the contents of the generated manifest file into a project manifest file and compile that in To remove an embedded manifest in a Visual Studio project: Open the Project Properties (Alt-Enter on project node) Go down to Resources | Manifest and select | Create Application without a Manifest   You can now add use the external manifest file and it will actually be respected when the app runs. The other option is to let Visual Studio create the manifest file on disk and then explicitly add the manifest file into the project. Notice on the dialog above I did this for app.exe.manifest and the manifest actually shows up in the list. If I select this file it will be compiled into the EXE and be used in lieu of any external files and that works as well. Remove the simpleserver.dll reference so you can compile your code and run the application. Now it should work without COM registration of the component. Personally I prefer external manifests because they can be modified after the fact - compiled manifests are evil in my mind because they are immutable - once they are there they can't be overriden or changed. So I prefer an external manifest. However, if you are absolutely sure nothing needs to change and you don't want anybody messing with your manifest, you can also embed it. The option to either is there. Watch for Manifest Caching While working trying to get this to work I ran into some problems at first. Specifically when it wasn't working at first (due to the embedded schema) I played with various different manifest layouts in different files etc.. There are a number of different ways to actually represent manifest files including offloading to separate folder (more on that later). A few times I made deliberate errors in the schema file and I found that regardless of what I did once the app failed or worked no amount of changing of the manifest file would make it behave differently. It appears that Windows is caching the manifest data for a given EXE or DLL. It takes a restart or a recompile of either the EXE or the DLL to clear the caching. Recompile your servers in order to see manifest changes unless there's an outright failure of an invalid manifest file. If the app starts the manifest is being read and caches immediately. This can be very confusing especially if you don't know that it's happening. I found myself always recompiling the exe after each run and before making any changes to the manifest file. Don't forget about Runtimes of COM Objects In the example I used above I used a Visual FoxPro COM component. Visual FoxPro is a runtime based environment so if I'm going to distribute an application that uses a FoxPro COM object the runtimes need to be distributed as well. The same is true of classic Visual Basic applications. Assuming that you don't know whether the runtimes are installed on the target machines make sure to install all the additional files in the EXE's directory alongside the COM DLL. In the case of Visual FoxPro the target folder should contain: The EXE  App.exe The Manifest file (unless it's compiled in) App.exe.manifest The COM object DLL (simpleserver.dll) Visual FoxPro Runtimes: VFP9t.dll (or VFP9r.dll for non-multithreaded dlls), vfp9rENU.dll, msvcr71.dll All these files should be in the same folder. Debugging Manifest load Errors If you for some reason get your manifest loading wrong there are a couple of useful tools available - SxSTrace and SxSParse. These two tools can be a huge help in debugging manifest loading errors. Put the following into a batch file (SxS_Trace.bat for example): sxstrace Trace -logfile:sxs.bin sxstrace Parse -logfile:sxs.bin -outfile:sxs.txt Then start the batch file before running your EXE. Make sure there's no caching happening as described in the previous section. For example, if I go into the manifest file and explicitly break the CLSID and/or ProgID I get a detailed report on where the EXE is looking for the manifest and what it's reading. Eventually the trace gives me an error like this: INFO: Parsing Manifest File C:\wwapps\Conf\SideBySide\Code\app.EXE.     INFO: Manifest Definition Identity is App.exe,processorArchitecture="x86",type="win32",version="1.0.0.0".     ERROR: Line 13: The value {AAaf2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff} of attribute clsid in element comClass is invalid. ERROR: Activation Context generation failed. End Activation Context Generation. pinpointing nicely where the error lies. Pay special attention to the various attributes - they have to match exactly in the different sections of the manifest file(s). Multiple COM Objects The manifest file that Visual Studio creates is actually quite more complex than is required for basic registrationless COM object invokation. The manifest file can be simplified a lot actually by stripping off various namespaces and removing the type library references altogether. Here's an example of a simplified manifest file that actually includes references to 2 COM servers: xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file file name = "sidebysidedeploy.dll" comClass clsid="{EF82B819-7963-4C36-9443-3978CD94F57C}" progid="sidebysidedeploy.SidebysidedeployServer" description="SidebySideDeploy Server" threadingModel="apartment" / file assembly Simple enough right? Routing to separate Manifest Files and Folders In the examples above all files ended up in the application's root folder - all the DLLs, support files and runtimes. Sometimes that's not so desirable and you can actually create separate manifest files. The easiest way to do this is to create a manifest file that 'routes' to another manifest file in a separate folder. Basically you create a new 'assembly identity' via a named id. You can then create a folder and another manifest with the id plus .manifest that points at the actual file. In this example I create: App.exe.manifest A folder called App.deploy A manifest file in App.deploy All DLLs and runtimes in App.deploy Let's start with that master manifest file. This file only holds a reference to another manifest file: App.exe.manifest xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.exe" version="1.0.0.0" processorArchitecture="x86" type="win32" / dependency dependentAssembly assemblyIdentity name="App.deploy" version="1.0.0.0" type="win32" / dependentAssembly dependency assembly   Note this file only contains a dependency to App.deploy which is another manifest id. I can then create App.deploy.manifest in the current folder or in an App.deploy folder. In this case I'll create App.deploy and in it copy the DLLs and support runtimes. I then create App.deploy.manifest. App.deploy.manifest xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"? assembly xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1" manifestVersion="1.0" assemblyIdentity name="App.deploy" type="win32" version="1.0.0.0" / file name="simpleserver.DLL" comClass clsid="{af2c2811-0657-4264-a1f5-06d033a969ff}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="simpleserver.SimpleServer" description="simpleserver.SimpleServer" / file file name="sidebysidedeploy.dll" comClass clsid="{EF82B819-7963-4C36-9443-3978CD94F57C}" threadingModel="Apartment" progid="sidebysidedeploy.SidebysidedeployServer" description="SidebySideDeploy Server" / file assembly   In this manifest file I then host my COM DLLs and any support runtimes. This is quite useful if you have lots of DLLs you are referencing or if you need to have separate configuration and application files that are associated with the COM object. This way the operation of your main application and the COM objects it interacts with is somewhat separated. You can see the two folders here:   Routing Manifests to different Folders In theory registrationless COM should be pretty easy in painless - you've seen the configuration manifest files and it certainly doesn't look very complicated, right? But the devil's in the details. The ActivationContext API (SxS - side by side activation) is very intolerant of small errors in the XML or formatting of the keys, so be really careful when setting up components, especially if you are manually editing these files. If you do run into trouble SxsTrace/SxsParse are a huge help to track down the problems. And remember that if you do have problems that you'll need to recompile your EXEs or DLLs for the SxS APIs to refresh themselves properly. All of this gets even more fun if you want to do registrationless COM inside of IIS :-) But I'll leave that for another blog post…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in COM  .NET  FoxPro   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• How to avoid the Portlet Skin mismatch

  - by Martin Deh

  here are probably many on going debates whether to use portlets or taskflows in a WebCenter custom portal application.  Usually the main battle on which side to take in these debates are centered around which technology enables better performance.  The good news is that both of my colleagues, Maiko Rocha and George Maggessy have posted their respective views on this topic so I will not have to further the discussion.  However, if you do plan to use portlets in a WebCenter custom portal application, this post will help you not have the "portlet skin mismatch" issue.   An example of the presence of the mismatch can be view from the applications log: The skin customsharedskin.desktop specified on the requestMap will be used even though the consumer's skin's styleSheetDocumentId on the requestMap does not match the local skin's styleSheetDocument's id. This will impact performance since the consumer and producer stylesheets cannot be shared. The producer styleclasses will not be compressed to avoid conflicts. A reason the ids do not match may be the jars are not identical on the producer and the consumer. For example, one might have trinidad-skins.xml's skin-additions in a jar file on the class path that the other does not have. Notice that due to the mismatch the portlet's CSS will not be able to be compressed, which will most like impact performance in the portlet's consuming portal. The first part of the blog will define the portlet mismatch and cover some debugging tips that can help you solve the portlet mismatch issue.  Following that I will give a complete example of the creating, using and sharing a shared skin in both a portlet producer and the consumer application. Portlet Mismatch Defined  In general, when you consume/render an ADF page (or task flow) using the ADF Portlet bridge, the portlet (producer) would try to use the skin of the consumer page - this is called skin-sharing. When the producer cannot match the consumer skin, the portlet would generate its own stylesheet and reference it from its markup - this is called mismatched-skin. This can happen because: The consumer and producer use different versions of ADF Faces, or The consumer has additional skin-additions that the producer doesn't have or vice-versa, or The producer does not have the consumer skin For case (1) & (2) above, the producer still uses the consumer skin ID to render its markup. For case (3), the producer would default to using portlet skin. If there is a skin mis-match then there may be a performance hit because: The browser needs to fetch this extra stylesheet (though it should be cached unless expires caching is turned off) The generated portlet markup uses uncompressed styles resulting in a larger markup It is often not obvious when a skin mismatch occurs, unless you look for either of these indicators: The log messages in the producer log, for example: The skin blafplus-rich.desktop specified on the requestMap will not be used because the styleSheetDocument id on the requestMap does not match the local skin's styleSheetDocument's id. It could mean the jars are not identical. For example, one might have trinidad-skins.xml's skin-additions in a jar file on the class path that the other does not have. View the portlet markup inside the iframe, there should be a <link> tag to the portlet stylesheet resource like this (note the CSS is proxied through consumer's resourceproxy): <link rel=\"stylesheet\" charset=\"UTF-8\" type=\"text/css\" href=\"http:.../resourceproxy/portletId...252525252Fadf%252525252Fstyles%252525252Fcache%252525252Fblafplus-rich-portlet-d1062g-en-ltr-gecko.css... Using HTTP monitoring tool (eg, firebug, httpwatch), you can see a request is made to the portlet stylesheet resource (see URL above) There are a number of reasons for mismatched-skin. For skin to match the producer and consumer must match the following configurations: The ADF Faces version (different versions may have different style selectors) Style Compression, this is defined in the web.xml (default value is false, i.e. compression is ON) Tonal styles or themes, also defined in the web.xml via context-params The same skin additions (jars with skin) are available for both producer and consumer.  Skin additions are defined in the trinidad-skins.xml, using the <skin-addition> tags. These are then aggregated from all the jar files in the classpath. If there's any jar that exists on the producer but not the consumer, or vice veras, you get a mismatch. Debugging Tips  Ensure the style compression and tonal styles/themes match on the consumer and producer, by looking at the web.xml documents for the consumer & producer applications It is bit more involved to determine if the jars match.  However, you can enable the Trinidad logging to show which skin-addition it is processing.  To enable this feature, update the logging.xml log level of both the producer and consumer WLS to FINEST.  For example, in the case of the WebLogic server used by JDeveloper: $JDEV_USER_DIR/system<version number>/DefaultDomain/config/fmwconfig/servers/DefaultServer/logging.xml Add a new entry: <logger name="org.apache.myfaces.trinidadinternal.skin.SkinUtils" level="FINEST"/> Restart WebLogic.  Run the consumer page, you should see the following logging in both the consumer and producer log files. Any entries that don't match is the cause of the mismatch.  The following is an example of what the log will produce with this setting: [SRC_CLASS: org.apache.myfaces.trinidadinternal.skin.SkinUtils] [APP: WebCenter] [SRC_METHOD: _getMetaInfSkinsNodeList] Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/announcement-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/calendar-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/custComps-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/forum-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/page-service-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/peopleconnections-kudos-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/peopleconnections-wall-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/portlet-client-adf-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/rtc-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/serviceframework-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/smarttag-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.skin/in1ar8/APP-INF/lib/spaces-service-skins.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/oracle.webcenter.composer/3yo7j/WEB-INF/lib/custComps-skin.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/adf.oracle.domain.webapp/q433f9/WEB-INF/lib/adf-richclient-impl-11.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/adf.oracle.domain.webapp/q433f9/WEB-INF/lib/dvt-faces.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml Processing skin URL:zip:/tmp/_WL_user/adf.oracle.domain.webapp/q433f9/WEB-INF/lib/dvt-trinidad.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml   The Complete Example The first step is to create the shared library.  The WebCenter documentation covering this is located here in section 15.7.  In addition, our ADF guru Frank Nimphius also covers this in hes blog.  Here are my steps (in JDeveloper) to create the skin that will be used as the shared library for both the portlet producer and consumer. Create a new Generic Application Give application name (i.e. MySharedSkin) Give a project name (i.e. MySkinProject) Leave Project Technologies blank (none selected), and click Finish Create the trinidad-skins.xml Right-click on the MySkinProject node in the Application Navigator and select "New" In the New Galley, click on "General", select "File" from the Items, and click OK In the Create File dialog, name the file trinidad-skins.xml, and (IMPORTANT) give the directory path to MySkinProject\src\META-INF In the trinidad-skins.xml, complete the skin entry.  for example: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252" ?> <skins xmlns="http://myfaces.apache.org/trinidad/skin">   <skin>     <id>mysharedskin.desktop</id>     <family>mysharedskin</family>     <extends>fusionFx-v1.desktop</extends>     <style-sheet-name>css/mysharedskin.css</style-sheet-name>   </skin> </skins> Create CSS file In the Application Navigator, right click on the META-INF folder (where the trinidad-skins.xml is located), and select "New" In the New Gallery, select Web-Tier-> HTML, CSS File from the the Items and click OK In the Create Cascading Style Sheet dialog, give the name (i.e. mysharedskin.css) Ensure that the Directory path is the under the META-INF (i.e. MySkinProject\src\META-INF\css) Once the new CSS opens in the editor, add in a style selector.  For example, this selector will style the background of a particular panelGroupLayout: af|panelGroupLayout.customPGL{     background-color:Fuchsia; } Create the MANIFEST.MF (used for deployment JAR) In the Application Navigator, right click on the META-INF folder (where the trinidad-skins.xml is located), and select "New" In the New Galley, click on "General", select "File" from the Items, and click OK In the Create File dialog, name the file MANIFEST.MF, and (IMPORTANT) ensure that the directory path is to MySkinProject\src\META-INF Complete the MANIFEST.MF, where the extension name is the shared library name Manifest-Version: 1.1 Created-By: Martin Deh Implementation-Title: mysharedskin Extension-Name: mysharedskin.lib.def Specification-Version: 1.0.1 Implementation-Version: 1.0.1 Implementation-Vendor: MartinDeh Create new Deployment Profile Right click on the MySkinProject node, and select New From the New Gallery, select General->Deployment Profiles, Shared Library JAR File from Items, and click OK In the Create Deployment Profile dialog, give name (i.e.mysharedskinlib) and click OK In the Edit JAR Deployment dialog, un-check Include Manifest File option  Select Project Output->Contributors, and check Project Source Path Select Project Output->Filters, ensure that all items under the META-INF folder are selected Click OK to exit the Project Properties dialog Deploy the shared lib to WebLogic (start server before steps) Right click on MySkin Project and select Deploy For this example, I will deploy to JDeverloper WLS In the Deploy dialog, select Deploy to Weblogic Application Server and click Next Choose IntegratedWebLogicServer and click Next Select Deploy to selected instances in the domain radio, select Default Server (note: server must be already started), and ensure Deploy as a shared Library radio is selected Click Finish Open the WebLogic console to see the deployed shared library The following are the steps to create a simple test Portlet Create a new WebCenter Portal - Portlet Producer Application In the Create Portlet Producer dialog, select default settings and click Finish Right click on the Portlets node and select New IIn the New Gallery, select Web-Tier->Portlets, Standards-based Java Portlet (JSR 286) and click OK In the General Portlet information dialog, give portlet name (i.e. MyPortlet) and click Next 2 times, stopping at Step 3 In the Content Types, select the "view" node, in the Implementation Method, select the Generate ADF-Faces JSPX radio and click Finish Once the portlet code is generated, open the view.jspx in the source editor Based on the simple CSS entry, which sets the background color of a panelGroupLayout, replace the <af:form/> tag with the example code <af:form>         <af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl1" styleClass="customPGL">           <af:outputText value="background from shared lib skin" id="ot1"/>         </af:panelGroupLayout>  </af:form> Since this portlet is to use the shared library skin, in the generated trinidad-config.xml, remove both the skin-family tag and the skin-version tag In the Application Resources view, under Descriptors->META-INF, double-click to open the weblogic-application.xml Add a library reference to the shared skin library (note: the library-name must match the extension-name declared in the MANIFEST.MF):  <library-ref>     <library-name>mysharedskin.lib.def</library-name>  </library-ref> Notice that a reference to oracle.webcenter.skin exists.  This is important if this portlet is going to be consumed by a WebCenter Portal application.  If this tag is not present, the portlet skin mismatch will happen.  Configure the portlet for deployment Create Portlet deployment WAR Right click on the Portlets node and select New In the New Gallery, select Deployment Profiles, WAR file from Items and click OK In the Create Deployment Profile dialog, give name (i.e. myportletwar), click OK Keep all of the defaults, however, remember the Context Root entry (i.e. MyPortlet4SharedLib-Portlets-context-root, this will be needed to obtain the producer WSDL URL) Click OK, then OK again to exit from the Properties dialog Since the weblogic-application.xml has to be included in the deployment, the portlet must be deployed as a WAR, within an EAR In the Application dropdown, select Deploy->New Deployment Profile... By default EAR File has been selected, click OK Give Deployment Profile (EAR) a name (i.e. MyPortletProducer) and click OK In the Properties dialog, select Application Assembly and ensure that the myportletwar is checked Keep all of the other defaults and click OK For this demo, un-check the Auto Generate ..., and all of the Security Deployment Options, click OK Save All In the Application dropdown, select Deploy->MyPortletProducer In the Deployment Action, select Deploy to Application Server, click Next Choose IntegratedWebLogicServer and click Next Select Deploy to selected instances in the domain radio, select Default Server (note: server must be already started), and ensure Deploy as a standalone Application radio is selected The select deployment type (identifying the deployment as a JSR 286 portlet) dialog appears.  Keep default radio "Yes" selection and click OK Open the WebLogic console to see the deployed Portlet The last step is to create the test portlet consuming application.  This will be done using the OOTB WebCenter Portal - Framework Application.  Create the Portlet Producer Connection In the JDeveloper Deployment log, copy the URL of the portlet deployment (i.e. http://localhost:7101/MyPortlet4SharedLib-Portlets-context-root Open a browser and paste in the URL.  The Portlet information page should appear.  Click on the WSRP v2 WSDL link Copy the URL from the browser (i.e. http://localhost:7101/MyPortlet4SharedLib-Portlets-context-root/portlets/wsrp2?WSDL) In the Application Resources view, right click on the Connections folder and select New Connection->WSRP Connection Give the producer a name or accept the default, click Next Enter (paste in) the WSDL URL, click Next If connection to Portlet is succesful, Step 3 (Specify Additional ...) should appear.  Accept defaults and click Finish Add the portlet to a test page Open the home.jspx.  Note in the visual editor, the orange dashed border, which identifies the panelCustomizable tag. From the Application Resources. select the MyPortlet portlet node, and drag and drop the node into the panelCustomizable section.  A Confirm Portlet Type dialog appears, keep default ADF Rich Portlet and click OK Configure the portlet to use the shared skin library Open the weblogic-application.xml and add the library-ref entry (mysharedskin.lib.def) for the shared skin library.  See create portlet example above for the steps Since by default, the custom portal using a managed bean to (dynamically) determine the skin family, the default trinidad-config.xml will need to be altered Open the trinidad-config.xml in the editor and replace the EL (preferenceBean) for the skin-family tag, with mysharedskin (this is the skin-family named defined in the trinidad-skins.xml) Remove the skin-version tag Right click on the index.html to test the application   Notice that the JDeveloper log view does not have any reporting of a skin mismatch.  In addition, since I have configured the extra logging outlined in debugging section above, I can see the processed skin jar in both the producer and consumer logs: <SkinUtils> <_getMetaInfSkinsNodeList> Processing skin URL:zip:/JDeveloper/system11.1.1.6.38.61.92/DefaultDomain/servers/DefaultServer/upload/mysharedskin.lib.def/[email protected]/app/mysharedskinlib.jar!/META-INF/trinidad-skins.xml 

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• Metro, Authentication, and the ASP.NET Web API

  - by Stephen.Walther

  Imagine that you want to create a Metro style app written with JavaScript and you want to communicate with a remote web service. For example, you are creating a movie app which retrieves a list of movies from a movies service. In this situation, how do you authenticate your Metro app and the Metro user so not just anyone can call the movies service? How can you identify the user making the request so you can return user specific data from the service? The Windows Live SDK supports a feature named Single Sign-On. When a user logs into a Windows 8 machine using their Live ID, you can authenticate the user’s identity automatically. Even better, when the Metro app performs a call to a remote web service, you can pass an authentication token to the remote service and prevent unauthorized access to the service. The documentation for Single Sign-On is located here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh826544.aspx In this blog entry, I describe the steps that you need to follow to use Single Sign-On with a (very) simple movie app. We build a Metro app which communicates with a web service created using the ASP.NET Web API. Creating the Visual Studio Solution Let’s start by creating a Visual Studio solution which contains two projects: a Windows Metro style Blank App project and an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Application project. Name the Metro app MovieApp and the ASP.NET MVC application MovieApp.Services. When you create the ASP.NET MVC application, select the Web API template: After you create the two projects, your Visual Studio Solution Explorer window should look like this: Configuring the Live SDK You need to get your hands on the Live SDK and register your Metro app. You can download the latest version of the SDK (version 5.2) from the following address: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29938 After you download the Live SDK, you need to visit the following website to register your Metro app: https://manage.dev.live.com/build Don’t let the title of the website — Windows Push Notifications & Live Connect – confuse you, this is the right place. Follow the instructions at the website to register your Metro app. Don’t forget to follow the instructions in Step 3 for updating the information in your Metro app’s manifest. After you register, your client secret is displayed. Record this client secret because you will need it later (we use it with the web service): You need to configure one more thing. You must enter your Redirect Domain by visiting the following website: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index Click on your application name, click Edit Settings, click the API Settings tab, and enter a value for the Redirect Domain field. You can enter any domain that you please just as long as the domain has not already been taken: For the Redirect Domain, I entered http://superexpertmovieapp.com. Create the Metro MovieApp Next, we need to create the MovieApp. The MovieApp will: 1. Use Single Sign-On to log the current user into Live 2. Call the MoviesService web service 3. Display the results in a ListView control Because we use the Live SDK in the MovieApp, we need to add a reference to it. Right-click your References folder in the Solution Explorer window and add the reference: Here’s the HTML page for the Metro App: <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <meta charset="utf-8" /> <title>MovieApp</title> <!-- WinJS references --> <link href="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/css/ui-dark.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/js/base.js"></script> <script src="//Microsoft.WinJS.1.0.RC/js/ui.js"></script> <!-- Live SDK --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/LiveSDKHTML/js/wl.js"></script> <!-- WebServices references --> <link href="/css/default.css" rel="stylesheet" /> <script src="/js/default.js"></script> </head> <body> <div id="tmplMovie" data-win-control="WinJS.Binding.Template"> <div class="movieItem"> <span data-win-bind="innerText:title"></span> <br /><span data-win-bind="innerText:director"></span> </div> </div> <div id="lvMovies" data-win-control="WinJS.UI.ListView" data-win-options="{ itemTemplate: select('#tmplMovie') }"> </div> </body> </html> The HTML page above contains a Template and ListView control. These controls are used to display the movies when the movies are returned from the movies service. Notice that the page includes a reference to the Live script that we registered earlier: <!-- Live SDK --> <script type="text/javascript" src="/LiveSDKHTML/js/wl.js"></script> The JavaScript code looks like this: (function () { "use strict"; var REDIRECT_DOMAIN = "http://superexpertmovieapp.com"; var WEBSERVICE_URL = "http://localhost:49743/api/movies"; function init() { WinJS.UI.processAll().done(function () { // Get element and control references var lvMovies = document.getElementById("lvMovies").winControl; // Login to Windows Live var scopes = ["wl.signin"]; WL.init({ scope: scopes, redirect_uri: REDIRECT_DOMAIN }); WL.login().then( function(response) { // Get the authentication token var authenticationToken = response.session.authentication_token; // Call the web service var options = { url: WEBSERVICE_URL, headers: { authenticationToken: authenticationToken } }; WinJS.xhr(options).done( function (xhr) { var movies = JSON.parse(xhr.response); var listMovies = new WinJS.Binding.List(movies); lvMovies.itemDataSource = listMovies.dataSource; }, function (xhr) { console.log(xhr.statusText); } ); }, function(response) { throw WinJS.ErrorFromName("Failed to login!"); } ); }); } document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", init); })(); There are two constants which you need to set to get the code above to work: REDIRECT_DOMAIN and WEBSERVICE_URL. The REDIRECT_DOMAIN is the domain that you entered when registering your app with Live. The WEBSERVICE_URL is the path to your web service. You can get the correct value for WEBSERVICE_URL by opening the Project Properties for the MovieApp.Services project, clicking the Web tab, and getting the correct URL. The port number is randomly generated. In my code, I used the URL  “http://localhost:49743/api/movies”. Assuming that the user is logged into Windows 8 with a Live account, when the user runs the MovieApp, the user is logged into Live automatically. The user is logged in with the following code: // Login to Windows Live var scopes = ["wl.signin"]; WL.init({ scope: scopes, redirect_uri: REDIRECT_DOMAIN }); WL.login().then(function(response) { // Do something }); The scopes setting determines what the user has permission to do. For example, access the user’s SkyDrive or access the user’s calendar or contacts. The available scopes are listed here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/live/hh243646.aspx In our case, we only need the wl.signin scope which enables Single Sign-On. After the user signs in, you can retrieve the user’s Live authentication token. The authentication token is passed to the movies service to authenticate the user. Creating the Movies Service The Movies Service is implemented as an API controller in an ASP.NET MVC 4 Web API project. Here’s what the MoviesController looks like: using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Net; using System.Net.Http; using System.Web.Http; using JWTSample; using MovieApp.Services.Models; namespace MovieApp.Services.Controllers { public class MoviesController : ApiController { const string CLIENT_SECRET = "NtxjF2wu7JeY1unvVN-lb0hoeWOMUFoR"; // GET api/values public HttpResponseMessage Get() { // Authenticate // Get authenticationToken var authenticationToken = Request.Headers.GetValues("authenticationToken").FirstOrDefault(); if (authenticationToken == null) { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized); } // Validate token var d = new Dictionary<int, string>(); d.Add(0, CLIENT_SECRET); try { var myJWT = new JsonWebToken(authenticationToken, d); } catch { return new HttpResponseMessage(HttpStatusCode.Unauthorized); } // Return results return Request.CreateResponse( HttpStatusCode.OK, new List<Movie> { new Movie {Title="Star Wars", Director="Lucas"}, new Movie {Title="King Kong", Director="Jackson"}, new Movie {Title="Memento", Director="Nolan"} } ); } } } Because the Metro app performs an HTTP GET request, the MovieController Get() action is invoked. This action returns a set of three movies when, and only when, the authentication token is validated. The Movie class looks like this: using Newtonsoft.Json; namespace MovieApp.Services.Models { public class Movie { [JsonProperty(PropertyName="title")] public string Title { get; set; } [JsonProperty(PropertyName="director")] public string Director { get; set; } } } Notice that the Movie class uses the JsonProperty attribute to change Title to title and Director to director to make JavaScript developers happy. The Get() method validates the authentication token before returning the movies to the Metro app. To get authentication to work, you need to provide the client secret which you created at the Live management site. If you forgot to write down the secret, you can get it again here: https://manage.dev.live.com/Applications/Index The client secret is assigned to a constant at the top of the MoviesController class. The MoviesController class uses a helper class named JsonWebToken to validate the authentication token. This class was created by the Windows Live team. You can get the source code for the JsonWebToken class from the following GitHub repository: https://github.com/liveservices/LiveSDK/blob/master/Samples/Asp.net/AuthenticationTokenSample/JsonWebToken.cs You need to add an additional reference to your MVC project to use the JsonWebToken class: System.Runtime.Serialization. You can use the JsonWebToken class to get a unique and validated user ID like this: var user = myJWT.Claims.UserId; If you need to store user specific information then you can use the UserId property to uniquely identify the user making the web service call. Running the MovieApp When you first run the Metro MovieApp, you get a screen which asks whether the app should have permission to use Single Sign-On. This screen never appears again after you give permission once. Actually, when I first ran the app, I get the following error: According to the error, the app is blocked because “We detected some suspicious activity with your Online Id account. To help protect you, we’ve temporarily blocked your account.” This appears to be a bug in the current preview release of the Live SDK and there is more information about this bug here: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/messengerconnect/thread/866c495f-2127-429d-ab07-842ef84f16ae/ If you click continue, and continue running the app, the error message does not appear again.  Summary The goal of this blog entry was to describe how you can validate Metro apps and Metro users when performing a call to a remote web service. First, I explained how you can create a Metro app which takes advantage of Single Sign-On to authenticate the current user against Live automatically. You learned how to register your Metro app with Live and how to include an authentication token in an Ajax call. Next, I explained how you can validate the authentication token – retrieved from the request header – in a web service. I discussed how you can use the JsonWebToken class to validate the authentication token and retrieve the unique user ID.

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• Enterprise Process Maps: A Process Picture worth a Million Words

  - by raul.goycoolea

  p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; }h1 { margin-top: 0.33in; margin-bottom: 0in; color: rgb(54, 95, 145); page-break-inside: avoid; }h1.western { font-family: "Cambria",serif; font-size: 14pt; }h1.cjk { font-family: "DejaVu Sans"; font-size: 14pt; }h1.ctl { font-size: 14pt; } Getting Started with Business Transformations A well-known proverb states that "A picture is worth a thousand words." In relation to Business Process Management (BPM), a credible analyst might have a few questions. What if the picture was taken from some particular angle, like directly overhead? What if it was taken from only an inch away or a mile away? What if the photographer did not focus the camera correctly? Does the value of the picture depend on who is looking at it? Enterprise Process Maps are analogous in this sense of relative value. Every BPM project (holistic BPM kick-off, enterprise system implementation, Service-oriented Architecture, business process transformation, corporate performance management, etc.) should be begin with a clear understanding of the business environment, from the biggest picture representations down to the lowest level required or desired for the particular project type, scope and objectives. The Enterprise Process Map serves as an entry point for the process architecture and is defined: the single highest level of process mapping for an organization. It is constructed and evaluated during the Strategy Phase of the Business Process Management Lifecycle. (see Figure 1) Fig. 1: Business Process Management Lifecycle Many organizations view such maps as visual abstractions, constructed for the single purpose of process categorization. This, in turn, results in a lesser focus on the inherent intricacies of the Enterprise Process view, which are explored in the course of this paper. With the main focus of a large scale process documentation effort usually underlying an ERP or other system implementation, it is common for the work to be driven by the desire to "get to the details," and to the type of modeling that will derive near-term tangible results. For instance, a project in American Pharmaceutical Company X is driven by the Director of IT. With 120+ systems in place, and a lack of standardized processes across the United States, he and the VP of IT have decided to embark on a long-term ERP implementation. At the forethought of both are questions, such as: How does my application architecture map to the business? What are each application's functionalities, and where do the business processes utilize them? Where can we retire legacy systems? Well-developed BPM methodologies prescribe numerous model types to capture such information and allow for thorough analysis in these areas. Process to application maps, Event Driven Process Chains, etc. provide this level of detail and facilitate the completion of such project-specific questions. These models and such analysis are appropriately carried out at a relatively low level of process detail. (see figure 2) Fig. 2: The Level Concept, Generic Process HierarchySome of the questions remaining are ones of documentation longevity, the continuation of BPM practice in the organization, process governance and ownership, process transparency and clarity in business process objectives and strategy. The Level Concept in Brief Figure 2 shows a generic, four-level process hierarchy depicting the breakdown of a "Process Area" into progressively more detailed process classifications. The number of levels and the names of these levels are flexible, and can be fit to the standards of the organization's chosen terminology or any other chosen reference model that makes logical sense for both short and long term process description. It is at Level 1 (in this case the Process Area level), that the Enterprise Process Map is created. This map and its contained objects become the foundation for a top-down approach to subsequent mapping, object relationship development, and analysis of the organization's processes and its supporting infrastructure. Additionally, this picture serves as a communication device, at an executive level, describing the design of the business in its service to a customer. It seems, then, imperative that the process development effort, and this map, start off on the right foot. Figuring out just what that right foot is, however, is critical and trend-setting in an evolving organization. Key Considerations Enterprise Process Maps are usually not as living and breathing as other process maps. Just as it would be an extremely difficult task to change the foundation of the Sears Tower or a city plan for the entire city of Chicago, the Enterprise Process view of an organization usually remains unchanged once developed (unless, of course, an organization is at a stage where it is capable of true, high-level process innovation). Regardless, the Enterprise Process map is a key first step, and one that must be taken in a precise way. What makes this groundwork solid depends on not only the materials used to construct it (process areas), but also the layout plan and knowledge base of what will be built (the entire process architecture). It seems reasonable that care and consideration are required to create this critical high level map... but what are the important factors? Does the process modeler need to worry about how many process areas there are? About who is looking at it? Should he only use the color pink because it's his boss' favorite color? Interestingly, and perhaps surprisingly, these are all valid considerations that may just require a bit of structure. Below are Three Key Factors to consider when building an Enterprise Process Map: Company Strategic Focus Process Categorization: Customer is Core End-to-end versus Functional Processes Company Strategic Focus As mentioned above, the Enterprise Process Map is created during the Strategy Phase of the Business Process Management Lifecycle. From Oracle Business Process Management methodology for business transformation, it is apparent that business processes exist for the purpose of achieving the strategic objectives of an organization. In a prescribed, top-down approach to process development, it must be ensured that each process fulfills its objectives, and in an aggregated manner, drives fulfillment of the strategic objectives of the company, whether for particular business segments or in a broader sense. This is a crucial point, as the strategic messages of the company must therefore resound in its process maps, in particular one that spans the processes of the complete business: the Enterprise Process Map. One simple example from Company X is shown below (see figure 3). Fig. 3: Company X Enterprise Process Map In reviewing Company X's Enterprise Process Map, one can immediately begin to understand the general strategic mindset of the organization. It shows that Company X is focused on its customers, defining 10 of its process areas belonging to customer-focused categories. Additionally, the organization views these end-customer-oriented process areas as part of customer-fulfilling value chains, while support process areas do not provide as much contiguous value. However, by including both support and strategic process categorizations, it becomes apparent that all processes are considered vital to the success of the customer-oriented focus processes. Below is an example from Company Y (see figure 4). Fig. 4: Company Y Enterprise Process Map Company Y, although also a customer-oriented company, sends a differently focused message with its depiction of the Enterprise Process Map. Along the top of the map is the company's product tree, overarching the process areas, which when executed deliver the products themselves. This indicates one strategic objective of excellence in product quality. Additionally, the view represents a less linear value chain, with strong overlaps of the various process areas. Marketing and quality management are seen as a key support processes, as they span the process lifecycle. Often, companies may incorporate graphics, logos and symbols representing customers and suppliers, and other objects to truly send the strategic message to the business. Other times, Enterprise Process Maps may show high level of responsibility to organizational units, or the application types that support the process areas. It is possible that hundreds of formats and focuses can be applied to an Enterprise Process Map. What is of vital importance, however, is which formats and focuses are chosen to truly represent the direction of the company, and serve as a driver for focusing the business on the strategic objectives set forth in that right. Process Categorization: Customer is Core In the previous two examples, processes were grouped using differing categories and techniques. Company X showed one support and three customer process categorizations using encompassing chevron objects; Customer Y achieved a less distinct categorization using a gradual color scheme. Either way, and in general, modeling of the process areas becomes even more valuable and easily understood within the context of business categorization, be it strategic or otherwise. But how one categorizes their processes is typically more complex than simply choosing object shapes and colors. Previously, it was stated that the ideal is a prescribed top-down approach to developing processes, to make certain linkages all the way back up to corporate strategy. But what about external influences? What forces push and pull corporate strategy? Industry maturity, product lifecycle, market profitability, competition, etc. can all drive the critical success factors of a particular business segment, or the company as a whole, in addition to previous corporate strategy. This may seem to be turning into a discussion of theory, but that is far from the case. In fact, in years of recent study and evolution of the way businesses operate, cross-industry and across the globe, one invariable has surfaced with such strength to make it undeniable in the game plan of any strategy fit for survival. That constant is the customer. Many of a company's critical success factors, in any business segment, relate to the customer: customer retention, satisfaction, loyalty, etc. Businesses serve customers, and so do a business's processes, mapped or unmapped. The most effective way to categorize processes is in a manner that visualizes convergence to what is core for a company. It is the value chain, beginning with the customer in mind, and ending with the fulfillment of that customer, that becomes the core or the centerpiece of the Enterprise Process Map. (See figure 5) Fig. 5: Company Z Enterprise Process Map Company Z has what may be viewed as several different perspectives or "cuts" baked into their Enterprise Process Map. It has divided its processes into three main categories (top, middle, and bottom) of Management Processes, the Core Value Chain and Supporting Processes. The Core category begins with Corporate Marketing (which contains the activities of beginning to engage customers) and ends with Customer Service Management. Within the value chain, this company has divided into the focus areas of their two primary business lines, Foods and Beverages. Does this mean that areas, such as Strategy, Information Management or Project Management are not as important as those in the Core category? No! In some cases, though, depending on the organization's understanding of high-level BPM concepts, use of category names, such as "Core," "Management" or "Support," can be a touchy subject. What is important to understand, is that no matter the nomenclature chosen, the Core processes are those that drive directly to customer value, Support processes are those which make the Core processes possible to execute, and Management Processes are those which steer and influence the Core. Some common terms for these three basic categorizations are Core, Customer Fulfillment, Customer Relationship Management, Governing, Controlling, Enabling, Support, etc. End-to-end versus Functional Processes Every high and low level of process: function, task, activity, process/work step (whatever an organization calls it), should add value to the flow of business in an organization. Suppose that within the process "Deliver package," there is a documented task titled "Stop for ice cream." It doesn't take a process expert to deduce the room for improvement. Though stopping for ice cream may create gain for the one person performing it, it likely benefits neither the organization nor, more importantly, the customer. In most cases, "Stop for ice cream" wouldn't make it past the first pass of To-Be process development. What would make the cut, however, would be a flow of tasks that, each having their own value add, build up to greater and greater levels of process objective. In this case, those tasks would combine to achieve a status of "package delivered." Figure 3 shows a simple example: Just as the package can only be delivered (outcome of the process) without first being retrieved, loaded, and the travel destination reached (outcomes of the process steps), some higher level of process "Play Practical Joke" (e.g., main process or process area) cannot be completed until a package is delivered. It seems that isolated or functionally separated processes, such as "Deliver Package" (shown in Figure 6), are necessary, but are always part of a bigger value chain. Each of these individual processes must be analyzed within the context of that value chain in order to ensure successful end-to-end process performance. For example, this company's "Create Joke Package" process could be operating flawlessly and efficiently, but if a joke is never developed, it cannot be created, so the end-to-end process breaks. Fig. 6: End to End Process Construction That being recognized, it is clear that processes must be viewed as end-to-end, customer-to-customer, and in the context of company strategy. But as can also be seen from the previous example, these vital end-to-end processes cannot be built without the functionally oriented building blocks. Without one, the other cannot be had, or at least not in a complete and organized fashion. As it turns out, but not discussed in depth here, the process modeling effort, BPM organizational development, and comprehensive coverage cannot be fully realized without a semi-functional, process-oriented approach. Then, an Enterprise Process Map should be concerned with both views, the building blocks, and access points to the business-critical end-to-end processes, which they construct. Without the functional building blocks, all streams of work needed for any business transformation would be lost mess of process disorganization. End-to-end views are essential for utilization in optimization in context, understanding customer impacts, base-lining all project phases and aligning objectives. Including both views on an Enterprise Process Map allows management to understand the functional orientation of the company's processes, while still providing access to end-to-end processes, which are most valuable to them. (See figures 7 and 8). Fig. 7: Simplified Enterprise Process Map with end-to-end Access Point The above examples show two unique ways to achieve a successful Enterprise Process Map. The first example is a simple map that shows a high level set of process areas and a separate section with the end-to-end processes of concern for the organization. This particular map is filtered to show just one vital end-to-end process for a project-specific focus. Fig. 8: Detailed Enterprise Process Map showing connected Functional Processes The second example shows a more complex arrangement and categorization of functional processes (the names of each process area has been removed). The end-to-end perspective is achieved at this level through the connections (interfaces at lower levels) between these functional process areas. An important point to note is that the organization of these two views of the Enterprise Process Map is dependent, in large part, on the orientation of its audience, and the complexity of the landscape at the highest level. If both are not apparent, the Enterprise Process Map is missing an opportunity to serve as a holistic, high-level view. Conclusion In the world of BPM, and specifically regarding Enterprise Process Maps, a picture can be worth as many words as the thought and effort that is put into it. Enterprise Process Maps alone cannot change an organization, but they serve more purposes than initially meet the eye, and therefore must be designed in a way that enables a BPM mindset, business process understanding and business transformation efforts. Every Enterprise Process Map will and should be different when looking across organizations. Its design will be driven by company strategy, a level of customer focus, and functional versus end-to-end orientations. This high-level description of the considerations of the Enterprise Process Maps is not a prescriptive "how to" guide. However, a company attempting to create one may not have the practical BPM experience to truly explore its options or impacts to the coming work of business process transformation. The biggest takeaway is that process modeling, at all levels, is a science and an art, and art is open to interpretation. It is critical that the modeler of the highest level of process mapping be a cognoscente of the message he is delivering and the factors at hand. Without sufficient focus on the design of the Enterprise Process Map, an entire BPM effort may suffer. For additional information please check: Oracle Business Process Management.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 02, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 02, 2010New ProjectsAE.Remoting: An alternative means of remoting for .NET to allow for intuitive usage and easy implementation into existing code.animated-smoke-modeling: This is an implementation or a demo of our method to model animated smokes. ASP.NET Google Maps: Extensible and easy to use, this is ASP.NET Google Maps Control. Drag & Drop and is ready to go. You can configure map style, add a PushPin using t...CartPatches able to see: CartPatches able to see youCodemix Cms: Codemix CmsDo the right thing - The Simple TodoManager: A simple Todo Manager which lets you focus on your daily most important tasks/todos. So do the right thing.....at your home, in your office, in you...Fast Console: Fast Console is a simple xml programming language. This may be a really good starting language as there are printing, variables and as soon as poss...Graphing Calculator in Silverlight: This was initially an effort to port a WPF graphing calculator written by Bob Brown (Microsoft) into Silverlight but soon after it became necessary...InformationVSTS: This application allows you to have all informations on VSTS installed. It also lets you know the server of BUILD and project.La Ranisima: La Ranisima is an open source "Space Invaders" alike game totally written in DHTML (JavaScript, CSS and HTML) that uses keyboard. This cross-platfo...La villa del seis: La villa del seis is a multiplatform point-and-click graphical adventure. Also, you can play it like a text adventure (interactive fiction) on a te...LParse: LParse is a monadic parser combinator library, similar to Haskell’s Parsec. It allows you create parsers on C# language. All parsers are first-clas...Manage Recents File/Project VS2005/2008: Clear Recents Files and Projects, and Clear Broken Links of Recents Files and Projects for VS2005 and VS2008. Developed in Visual Studio 2008 SP...Mavention: Mavention makes SharePoint work for you.MixMail: MixMailMixScrum: mixScrumMixTemplate: MixTemplate.NepomucenoBR Regex Learning Tool: This is a simple program designed to help people to study regular expressions.Pruebas: Pruebas is an open source game mix of text adventure and RPG written in Microsoft QBasic (under MS-DOS 6.22) that uses keyboard. Runs natively unde...Python Design by Contract: Simple to use invariants, pre- and postconditions which use some of the new metaprogramming features in Python 3.Rubik Cube's 3D Silverlight 3.0 Animated Solution: Rubik Cube's Silverlight 3.0 Animated Solution is a 3D presentation of Rubik Cube in range of up to 7x7x7 size with full functionality and an anima...Seminarka: Seminarka - ko treba znat šta je zna!SENAC 2010 - Projeto Integrador 2 (Material de Apoio): Material utilizado para apoiar os alunos da disciplina de Projeto integrador 2. O tema são sistemas web utilizando ASP.NET, com C# e banco de da...SENAC CG2010: Contém código apresentado em sala de aula para a disciplina de CG, 5ºBSI NoturnoSistema de facturación: Sistema de facturación desarrollado en C# para la clase de programación 3.SmartFront - WPF and Silverlight Toolkit: SmartFront is a framework piece which allow to quickly building Smart Client application in WPF and in Silverlight. This framework uses existing s...Solar 1: This is the ASP.NET MVC engine based on Oxite and used for 32planets.net.TemporalSQL: SQL Patterns - tables, queries, and functions - to design a temporal database. TFunkOrderSystem: The Funkalistic Blueprint and Items order management systemTribe.Cache: Tribe.Cache is a simple dictionary cache (persistent dictionary) written in C# which is easy to implement and use.tstProject: Testing ProjectUDC indexes parser: UDC (Universal Decimal Classification) indexes parserWebAssert: A test assertion library to assist in writing automated tests against websites. Allows for assertion of HTML validity, etc. Initially has support f...Words Via Subtitle: Words Via Subtitle makes it easier for English Learners to learn new words that appears in TV shows or movies. You'll no longer have to look up the...x5s - a cross site scripting (XSS) testing tool: x5s aims to be a specialized testing tool which assists penetration testers in finding cross-site scripting hot-spots. By auto-injecting token valu...XNA Shooter Engine: The XNA Shooter Engine is a game engine for XNA designed specifically with first-person-shooter-style games in mind. It's being developed for an as...我的开发集: for my study .net csharpNew ReleasesAppFabric Caching Admin Tool: AppFabric Caching Admin Tool 1.1: System Requirements:.NET 4.0 RC AppFabric Caching Beta2 Test On:Win 7 (64x) Note: Must run as Administrator !!!ASP.NET Google Maps: ASP.NET Google Maps 0.1b: Project Description Extensible and easy to use, this is ASP.NET Bing Maps Control. Drag & Drop and is ready to go. You can configure map style, add...AutoFixture: Version 1.0.9 (RC1): This is Release Candidate 1 of AutoFixture 1.1. This release contains no known bugs. Compared to AutoFixture 1.0, it fixes some bugs that were dis...Camlex.NET: Camlex.NET 2.0: Camlex.NET 2.0 release New features Search by field id Support for native System.Guid type for values Search by lookup id and lookup value D...CloudCache - Distributed Cache Tier with Azure: v1.0.0.1: New Release on April 1st 2010 No this is not April fools a new release has made it's way out. Below are the changes: Removed dependency on Azure S...DigitallyCreated Utilities: DigitallyCreated Utilities v1.0.1: This release is the v1.0.1 version of DigitallyCreated Utilities. This update is highly recommended for all users of v1.0.0 as it fixes a critical ...Fast Console: Fast Console Alpha: Fast Console is an easy to use and learn programming language. Code example is found in the file TestFile.xml When you've written your code just sa...Free Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire SL and WPF Charts 3.0.6 beta Released: Hi, This release contains following enhancements. * Zooming feature has been enhanced with the new functionality of ZoomRectangle. Now, users...Graphing Calculator in Silverlight: 1.0.1: Graphing Calculator for Silverlight is written entirely in C# and is based on the Silverlight 3 release. I will soon release the full documentation...Home Access Plus+: v3.2.0.1: v3.2.0.1 Release Change Log: Fixed: Issue with & ampersand File Changes: ~/bin/CHS Extranet.dll ~/bin/CHS Extranet.pdb ~/Scripts/viewmode.jsIcarus Scene Engine: Icarus Professional 2 Alpha 2 v 1.10.329.913: Alpha release 2 of Icarus Professional. This release includes: IcarusX: The ActiveX-based browser control for rendering IPX projects online. Icaru...Line Counter: 1.5.2: The Line Counter is a tool to calculate lines of your code files. The tool was written in .NET 2.0. Line Counter 1.5.2 Added General Code Counter ...ManagedCv: ManagedCv v0.0.0.1: Win32Mavention: Mavention Simple Menu: SharePoint 2010 ships with a menu control that allows you to render a site menu using semantic markup. Using the Mavention Simple Menu you can do t...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.10.57200: Fixed uploading.com links detection; Fixed downloading from uploading.com; Fixed downloading from load.to; Fixed detecting incompatible sources;MixMail: V1: MixMailMixTemplate: v1: releaseMvcPager: MvcPager 1.3 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0: MvcPager 1.3 for ASP.NET MVC 1.0 compiled assembly files and demo projectsMvcPager: MvcPager 1.3 for ASP.NET MVC 2.0: MvcPager 1.3 for ASP.NET MVC 2.0 compiled assembly and demo projectsMvcUnity - ASP.NET MVC Dependency Injection: 2.1 Source Code: Drop 2.1 Source CodeNepomucenoBR Regex Learning Tool: NepomucenoBR Regex Learning Tool v0.1 alpha: This is the first version of this application. If you find any bug, please contact me at http://www.nepomucenobr.com.brNepomucenoBR Regex Learning Tool: NepomucenoBR Regex Learning Tool v0.1 source-code: This is the first version of this application. If you find any bug, please contact me at http://www.nepomucenobr.com.brocculo: occulo 0.2 binaries: Release build binaries instead of debug, should now work for other users. Fixed bit rotation and output filename bugs.occulo: occulo 0.2 source: Second source release. See binary release for changes.Python Design by Contract: v0.1: This is the inital release. I think it is working fine.SharePoint Labs: SPLab5002A-FRA-Level200: SPLab5002A-FRA-Level200 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to modify CAML schema to have IntelliSense on Feature's GUID. Lab Language : French ...SharePoint Labs: SPLab5003A-FRA-Level100: SPLab5003A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to manually create a Feature, how to brand a Feature and how to incorporate ressourc...SharePoint Labs: SPLab5004A-FRA-Level100: SPLab5004A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to create a Feature within Visual Studio, how to brand it, how to incorporate ressou...SharePoint Labs: SPLab5005A-FRA-Level100: SPLab5005A-FRA-Level100 This SharePoint Lab will teach you how to create a Feature within Visual Studio, how to brand it, how to incorporate ressou...SSIS ReportGeneratorTask: Version 1.53: Some bugfixes to version 1.52 beta Server Report properties can be displayed. Snapshots can be created. Screenshots of the planned version 1.53 ca...TemporalSQL: April 2010: Initial set of prototypes demonstrating temporal patterns, queries, and functions in SQL ServerTortoiseHg: TortoiseHg 1.0.1: TortoiseHg 1.0.1 is a bug fix release. We recommend all users upgrade to this release. http://bitbucket.org/tortoisehg/stable/wiki/ReleaseNotes#t...Tribe.Cache: Tribe.Cache Alpha: Functional Alpha Release - Do not use in productionTS3QueryLib.Net: TS3QueryLib.Net Version 0.21.15.0: Changelog Added class "ServerListItemBase" which is used in the new method "GetServerListShort" of QueryRunner class. (Change of Beta 21) Added ...UDC indexes parser: Runtime Binary Alpha 1: First alpha versionVisual Studio DSite: Text To Binary (Visual C++ 2008): A simple c program that can convert text to binary. Source code only.x5s - a cross site scripting (XSS) testing tool: x5s 1.0 beta: PLACEHOLDER (coming soon)XNA Shooter Engine: GDK Tools 0.1.0.0: This is a small, very early release of the GDK Tools. The only included tool is Input Map Editor.XPath Visualizer: XPathVisualizer v1.2: Last updated 1 April 2010. This is not a joke! includes new features: Ctrl-S shortcut key for Saving the XML file Ctrl-F shortcut for re-form...すとれおじさん(仮): すとれおじさん β 0.01: とりあえず公開のバージョンです。 中途半端な機能がいっぱいあります。Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETLiveUpload to FacebookMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrGraffiti CMSBase Class LibrariesjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationN2 CMSLINQ to TwitterManaged Extensibility FrameworkFarseer Physics Engine

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• Yet Another ASP.NET MVC CRUD Tutorial

  - by Ricardo Peres

  I know that I have not posted much on MVC, mostly because I don’t use it on my daily life, but since I find it so interesting, and since it is gaining such popularity, I will be talking about it much more. This time, it’s about the most basic of scenarios: CRUD. Although there are several ASP.NET MVC tutorials out there that cover ordinary CRUD operations, I couldn’t find any that would explain how we can have also AJAX, optimistic concurrency control and validation, using Entity Framework Code First, so I set out to write one! I won’t go into explaining what is MVC, Code First or optimistic concurrency control, or AJAX, I assume you are all familiar with these concepts by now. Let’s consider an hypothetical use case, products. For simplicity, we only want to be able to either view a single product or edit this product. First, we need our model: 1: public class Product 2: { 3: public Product() 4: { 5: this.Details = new HashSet<OrderDetail>(); 6: } 7:  8: [Required] 9: [StringLength(50)] 10: public String Name 11: { 12: get; 13: set; 14: } 15:  16: [Key] 17: [ScaffoldColumn(false)] 18: [DatabaseGenerated(DatabaseGeneratedOption.Identity)] 19: public Int32 ProductId 20: { 21: get; 22: set; 23: } 24:  25: [Required] 26: [Range(1, 100)] 27: public Decimal Price 28: { 29: get; 30: set; 31: } 32:  33: public virtual ISet<OrderDetail> Details 34: { 35: get; 36: protected set; 37: } 38:  39: [Timestamp] 40: [ScaffoldColumn(false)] 41: public Byte[] RowVersion 42: { 43: get; 44: set; 45: } 46: } Keep in mind that this is a simple scenario. Let’s see what we have: A class Product, that maps to a product record on the database; A product has a required (RequiredAttribute) Name property which can contain up to 50 characters (StringLengthAttribute); The product’s Price must be a decimal value between 1 and 100 (RangeAttribute); It contains a set of order details, for each time that it has been ordered, which we will not talk about (Details); The record’s primary key (mapped to property ProductId) comes from a SQL Server IDENTITY column generated by the database (KeyAttribute, DatabaseGeneratedAttribute); The table uses a SQL Server ROWVERSION (previously known as TIMESTAMP) column for optimistic concurrency control mapped to property RowVersion (TimestampAttribute). Then we will need a controller for viewing product details, which will located on folder ~/Controllers under the name ProductController: 1: public class ProductController : Controller 2: { 3: [HttpGet] 4: public ViewResult Get(Int32 id = 0) 5: { 6: if (id != 0) 7: { 8: using (ProductContext ctx = new ProductContext()) 9: { 10: return (this.View("Single", ctx.Products.Find(id) ?? new Product())); 11: } 12: } 13: else 14: { 15: return (this.View("Single", new Product())); 16: } 17: } 18: } If the requested product does not exist, or one was not requested at all, one with default values will be returned. I am using a view named Single to display the product’s details, more on that later. As you can see, it delegates the loading of products to an Entity Framework context, which is defined as: 1: public class ProductContext: DbContext 2: { 3: public DbSet<Product> Products 4: { 5: get; 6: set; 7: } 8: } Like I said before, I’ll keep it simple for now, only aggregate root Product is available. The controller will use the standard routes defined by the Visual Studio ASP.NET MVC 3 template: 1: routes.MapRoute( 2: "Default", // Route name 3: "{controller}/{action}/{id}", // URL with parameters 4: new { controller = "Home", action = "Index", id = UrlParameter.Optional } // Parameter defaults 5: ); Next, we need a view for displaying the product details, let’s call it Single, and have it located under ~/Views/Product: 1: <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<Product>" %> 2: <!DOCTYPE html> 3:  4: <html> 5: <head runat="server"> 6: <title>Product</title> 7: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-1.7.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 1:  2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.19.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: function onFailure(error) 4: { 5: } 6:  7: function onComplete(ctx) 8: { 9: } 10:  11: </script> 8: </head> 9: <body> 10: <div> 11: <% 1: : this.Html.ValidationSummary(false) %> 12: <% 1: using (this.Ajax.BeginForm("Edit", "Product", new AjaxOptions{ HttpMethod = FormMethod.Post.ToString(), OnSuccess = "onSuccess", OnFailure = "onFailure" })) { %> 13: <% 1: : this.Html.EditorForModel() %> 14: <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" /> 15: <% 1: } %> 16: </div> 17: </body> 18: </html> Yes… I am using ASPX syntax… sorry about that!   I implemented an editor template for the Product class, which must be located on the ~/Views/Shared/EditorTemplates folder as file Product.ascx: 1: <%@ Control Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewUserControl<Product>" %> 2: <div> 3: <%: this.Html.HiddenFor(model => model.ProductId) %> 4: <%: this.Html.HiddenFor(model => model.RowVersion) %> 5: <fieldset> 6: <legend>Product</legend> 7: <div class="editor-label"> 8: <%: this.Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name) %> 9: </div> 10: <div class="editor-field"> 11: <%: this.Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Name) %> 12: <%: this.Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Name) %> 13: </div> 14: <div class="editor-label"> 15: <%= this.Html.LabelFor(model => model.Price) %> 16: </div> 17: <div class="editor-field"> 18: <%= this.Html.TextBoxFor(model => model.Price) %> 19: <%: this.Html.ValidationMessageFor(model => model.Price) %> 20: </div> 21: </fieldset> 22: </div> One thing you’ll notice is, I am including both the ProductId and the RowVersion properties as hidden fields; they will come handy later or, so that we know what product and version we are editing. The other thing is the included JavaScript files: jQuery, jQuery UI and unobtrusive validations. Also, I am not using the Content extension method for translating relative URLs, because that way I would lose JavaScript intellisense for jQuery functions. OK, so, at this moment, I want to add support for AJAX and optimistic concurrency control. So I write a controller method like this: 1: [HttpPost] 2: [AjaxOnly] 3: [Authorize] 4: public JsonResult Edit(Product product) 5: { 6: if (this.TryValidateModel(product) == true) 7: { 8: using (BlogContext ctx = new BlogContext()) 9: { 10: Boolean success = false; 11:  12: ctx.Entry(product).State = (product.ProductId == 0) ? EntityState.Added : EntityState.Modified; 13:  14: try 15: { 16: success = (ctx.SaveChanges() == 1); 17: } 18: catch (DbUpdateConcurrencyException) 19: { 20: ctx.Entry(product).Reload(); 21: } 22:  23: return (this.Json(new { Success = success, ProductId = product.ProductId, RowVersion = Convert.ToBase64String(product.RowVersion) })); 24: } 25: } 26: else 27: { 28: return (this.Json(new { Success = false, ProductId = 0, RowVersion = String.Empty })); 29: } 30: } So, this method is only valid for HTTP POST requests (HttpPost), coming from AJAX (AjaxOnly, from MVC Futures), and from authenticated users (Authorize). It returns a JSON object, which is what you would normally use for AJAX requests, containing three properties: Success: a boolean flag; RowVersion: the current version of the ROWVERSION column as a Base-64 string; ProductId: the inserted product id, as coming from the database. If the product is new, it will be inserted into the database, and its primary key will be returned into the ProductId property. Success will be set to true; If a DbUpdateConcurrencyException occurs, it means that the value in the RowVersion property does not match the current ROWVERSION column value on the database, so the record must have been modified between the time that the page was loaded and the time we attempted to save the product. In this case, the controller just gets the new value from the database and returns it in the JSON object; Success will be false. Otherwise, it will be updated, and Success, ProductId and RowVersion will all have their values set accordingly. So let’s see how we can react to these situations on the client side. Specifically, we want to deal with these situations: The user is not logged in when the update/create request is made, perhaps the cookie expired; The optimistic concurrency check failed; All went well. So, let’s change our view: 1: <%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<Product>" %> 2: <%@ Import Namespace="System.Web.Security" %> 3:  4: <!DOCTYPE html> 5:  6: <html> 7: <head runat="server"> 8: <title>Product</title> 9: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-1.7.2.js" type="text/javascript"></script> 1:  2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.19.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.unobtrusive-ajax.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script src="/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.js" type="text/javascript"> 1: </script> 2: <script type="text/javascript"> 3: function onFailure(error) 4: { 5: window.alert('An error occurred: ' + error); 6: } 7:  8: function onSuccess(ctx) 9: { 10: if (typeof (ctx.Success) != 'undefined') 11: { 12: $('input#ProductId').val(ctx.ProductId); 13: $('input#RowVersion').val(ctx.RowVersion); 14:  15: if (ctx.Success == false) 16: { 17: window.alert('An error occurred while updating the entity: it may have been modified by third parties. Please try again.'); 18: } 19: else 20: { 21: window.alert('Saved successfully'); 22: } 23: } 24: else 25: { 26: if (window.confirm('Not logged in. Login now?') == true) 27: { 28: document.location.href = '<%: FormsAuthentication.LoginUrl %>?ReturnURL=' + document.location.pathname; 29: } 30: } 31: } 32:  33: </script> 10: </head> 11: <body> 12: <div> 13: <% 1: : this.Html.ValidationSummary(false) %> 14: <% 1: using (this.Ajax.BeginForm("Edit", "Product", new AjaxOptions{ HttpMethod = FormMethod.Post.ToString(), OnSuccess = "onSuccess", OnFailure = "onFailure" })) { %> 15: <% 1: : this.Html.EditorForModel() %> 16: <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" /> 17: <% 1: } %> 18: </div> 19: </body> 20: </html> The implementation of the onSuccess function first checks if the response contains a Success property, if not, the most likely cause is the request was redirected to the login page (using Forms Authentication), because it wasn’t authenticated, so we navigate there as well, keeping the reference to the current page. It then saves the current values of the ProductId and RowVersion properties to their respective hidden fields. They will be sent on each successive post and will be used in determining if the request is for adding a new product or to updating an existing one. The only thing missing is the ability to insert a new product, after inserting/editing an existing one, which can be easily achieved using this snippet: 1: <input type="button" value="New" onclick="$('input#ProductId').val('');$('input#RowVersion').val('');"/> And that’s it.

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• Introducing Data Annotations Extensions

  - by srkirkland

  Validation of user input is integral to building a modern web application, and ASP.NET MVC offers us a way to enforce business rules on both the client and server using Model Validation.  The recent release of ASP.NET MVC 3 has improved these offerings on the client side by introducing an unobtrusive validation library built on top of jquery.validation.  Out of the box MVC comes with support for Data Annotations (that is, System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations) and can be extended to support other frameworks.  Data Annotations Validation is becoming more popular and is being baked in to many other Microsoft offerings, including Entity Framework, though with MVC it only contains four validators: Range, Required, StringLength and Regular Expression.  The Data Annotations Extensions project attempts to augment these validators with additional attributes while maintaining the clean integration Data Annotations provides. A Quick Word About Data Annotations Extensions The Data Annotations Extensions project can be found at http://dataannotationsextensions.org/, and currently provides 11 additional validation attributes (ex: Email, EqualTo, Min/Max) on top of Data Annotations’ original 4.  You can find a current list of the validation attributes on the afore mentioned website. The core library provides server-side validation attributes that can be used in any .NET 4.0 project (no MVC dependency). There is also an easily pluggable client-side validation library which can be used in ASP.NET MVC 3 projects using unobtrusive jquery validation (only MVC3 included javascript files are required). On to the Preview Let’s say you had the following “Customer” domain model (or view model, depending on your project structure) in an MVC 3 project: public class Customer { public string Email { get; set; } public int Age { get; set; } public string ProfilePictureLocation { get; set; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } When it comes time to create/edit this Customer, you will probably have a CustomerController and a simple form that just uses one of the Html.EditorFor() methods that the ASP.NET MVC tooling generates for you (or you can write yourself).  It should look something like this: With no validation, the customer can enter nonsense for an email address, and then can even report their age as a negative number!  With the built-in Data Annotations validation, I could do a bit better by adding a Range to the age, adding a RegularExpression for email (yuck!), and adding some required attributes.  However, I’d still be able to report my age as 10.75 years old, and my profile picture could still be any string.  Let’s use Data Annotations along with this project, Data Annotations Extensions, and see what we can get: public class Customer { [Email] [Required] public string Email { get; set; }   [Integer] [Min(1, ErrorMessage="Unless you are benjamin button you are lying.")] [Required] public int Age { get; set; }   [FileExtensions("png|jpg|jpeg|gif")] public string ProfilePictureLocation { get; set; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now let’s try to put in some invalid values and see what happens: That is very nice validation, all done on the client side (will also be validated on the server).  Also, the Customer class validation attributes are very easy to read and understand. Another bonus: Since Data Annotations Extensions can integrate with MVC 3’s unobtrusive validation, no additional scripts are required! Now that we’ve seen our target, let’s take a look at how to get there within a new MVC 3 project. Adding Data Annotations Extensions To Your Project First we will File->New Project and create an ASP.NET MVC 3 project.  I am going to use Razor for these examples, but any view engine can be used in practice.  Now go into the NuGet Extension Manager (right click on references and select add Library Package Reference) and search for “DataAnnotationsExtensions.”  You should see the following two packages: The first package is for server-side validation scenarios, but since we are using MVC 3 and would like comprehensive sever and client validation support, click on the DataAnnotationsExtensions.MVC3 project and then click Install.  This will install the Data Annotations Extensions server and client validation DLLs along with David Ebbo’s web activator (which enables the validation attributes to be registered with MVC 3). Now that Data Annotations Extensions is installed you have all you need to start doing advanced model validation.  If you are already using Data Annotations in your project, just making use of the additional validation attributes will provide client and server validation automatically.  However, assuming you are starting with a blank project I’ll walk you through setting up a controller and model to test with. Creating Your Model In the Models folder, create a new User.cs file with a User class that you can use as a model.  To start with, I’ll use the following class: public class User { public string Email { get; set; } public string Password { get; set; } public string PasswordConfirm { get; set; } public string HomePage { get; set; } public int Age { get; set; } } Next, create a simple controller with at least a Create method, and then a matching Create view (note, you can do all of this via the MVC built-in tooling).  Your files will look something like this: UserController.cs: public class UserController : Controller { public ActionResult Create() { return View(new User()); }   [HttpPost] public ActionResult Create(User user) { if (!ModelState.IsValid) { return View(user); }   return Content("User valid!"); } } .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; } Create.cshtml: @model NuGetValidationTester.Models.User   @{ ViewBag.Title = "Create"; }   <h2>Create</h2>   <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery.validate.unobtrusive.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script>   @using (Html.BeginForm()) { @Html.ValidationSummary(true) <fieldset> <legend>User</legend> @Html.EditorForModel() <p> <input type="submit" value="Create" /> </p> </fieldset> } .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; } In the Create.cshtml view, note that we are referencing jquery validation and jquery unobtrusive (jquery is referenced in the layout page).  These MVC 3 included scripts are the only ones you need to enjoy both the basic Data Annotations validation as well as the validation additions available in Data Annotations Extensions.  These references are added by default when you use the MVC 3 “Add View” dialog on a modification template type. Now when we go to /User/Create we should see a form for editing a User Since we haven’t yet added any validation attributes, this form is valid as shown (including no password, email and an age of 0).  With the built-in Data Annotations attributes we can make some of the fields required, and we could use a range validator of maybe 1 to 110 on Age (of course we don’t want to leave out supercentenarians) but let’s go further and validate our input comprehensively using Data Annotations Extensions.  The new and improved User.cs model class. { [Required] [Email] public string Email { get; set; }   [Required] public string Password { get; set; }   [Required] [EqualTo("Password")] public string PasswordConfirm { get; set; }   [Url] public string HomePage { get; set; }   [Integer] [Min(1)] public int Age { get; set; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now let’s re-run our form and try to use some invalid values: All of the validation errors you see above occurred on the client, without ever even hitting submit.  The validation is also checked on the server, which is a good practice since client validation is easily bypassed. That’s all you need to do to start a new project and include Data Annotations Extensions, and of course you can integrate it into an existing project just as easily. Nitpickers Corner ASP.NET MVC 3 futures defines four new data annotations attributes which this project has as well: CreditCard, Email, Url and EqualTo.  Unfortunately referencing MVC 3 futures necessitates taking an dependency on MVC 3 in your model layer, which may be unadvisable in a multi-tiered project.  Data Annotations Extensions keeps the server and client side libraries separate so using the project’s validation attributes don’t require you to take any additional dependencies in your model layer which still allowing for the rich client validation experience if you are using MVC 3. Custom Error Message and Globalization: Since the Data Annotations Extensions are build on top of Data Annotations, you have the ability to define your own static error messages and even to use resource files for very customizable error messages. Available Validators: Please see the project site at http://dataannotationsextensions.org/ for an up-to-date list of the new validators included in this project.  As of this post, the following validators are available: CreditCard Date Digits Email EqualTo FileExtensions Integer Max Min Numeric Url Conclusion Hopefully I’ve illustrated how easy it is to add server and client validation to your MVC 3 projects, and how to easily you can extend the available validation options to meet real world needs. The Data Annotations Extensions project is fully open source under the BSD license.  Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.  More information than you require, along with links to the source code, is available at http://dataannotationsextensions.org/. Enjoy!

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• Cold Start

  - by antony.reynolds

  Well we had snow drifts 3ft deep on Saturday so it must be spring time.  In preparation for Spring we decided to move the lawn tractor.  Of course after sitting in the garage all winter it refused to start.  I then come into the office and need to start my 11g SOA Suite installation.  I thought about this and decided my tractor might be cranky but at least I can script the startup of my SOA Suite 11g installation. So with this in mind I created 6 scripts.  I created them for Linux but they should translate to Windows without too many problems.  This is left as an exercise to the reader, note you will have to hardcode more than I did in the Linux scripts and create separate script files for the sqlplus and WLST sections. Order to start things I believe there should be order in all things, especially starting the SOA Suite.  So here is my preferred order. Start Database This is need by EM and the rest of SOA Suite so best to start it before the Admin Server and managed servers. Start Node Manager on all machines This is needed if you want the scripts to work across machines. Start Admin Server Once this is done in theory you can manually stat the managed servers using WebLogic console.  But then you have to wait for console to be available.  Scripting it all is quicker and easier way of starting. Start Managed Servers & Clusters Best to start them one per physical machine at a time to avoid undue load on the machines.  Non-clustered install will have just soa_server1 and bam_serv1 by default.  Clusters will have at least SOA and BAM clusters that can be started as a group or individually.  I have provided scripts for standalone servers, but easy to change them to work with clusters. Starting Database I have provided a very primitive script (available here) to start the database, the listener and the DB console.  The section highlighted in red needs to match your database name. #!/bin/sh echo "##############################" echo "# Setting Oracle Environment #" echo "##############################" . oraenv <<-EOF orcl EOF echo "#####################" echo "# Starting Database #" echo "#####################" sqlplus / as sysdba <<-EOF startup exit EOF echo "#####################" echo "# Starting Listener #" echo "#####################" lsnrctl start echo "######################" echo "# Starting dbConsole #" echo "######################" emctl start dbconsole read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Starting SOA Suite My script for starting the SOA Suite (available here) breaks the task down into five sections. Setting the Environment First set up the environment variables.  The variables highlighted in red probably need changing for your environment. #!/bin/sh echo "###########################" echo "# Setting SOA Environment #" echo "###########################" export MW_HOME=~oracle/Middleware11gPS1 export WL_HOME=$MW_HOME/wlserver_10.3 export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA export DOMAIN_NAME=soa_std_domain export DOMAIN_HOME=$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME Starting the Node Manager I start node manager with a nohup to stop it exiting when the script terminates and I redirect the standard output and standard error to a file in a logs directory. cd $DOMAIN_HOME echo "#########################" echo "# Starting Node Manager #" echo "#########################" nohup $WL_HOME/server/bin/startNodeManager.sh >logs/NodeManager.out 2>&1 & Starting the Admin Server I had problems starting the Admin Server from Node Manager so I decided to start it using the command line script.  I again use nohup and redirect output. echo "#########################" echo "# Starting Admin Server #" echo "#########################" nohup ./startWebLogic.sh >logs/AdminServer.out 2>&1 & Starting the Managed Servers I then used WLST (WebLogic Scripting Tool) to start the managed servers.  First I waited for the Admin Server to come up by putting a connect command in a loop.  I could have put the WLST commands into a separate script file but I wanted to reduce the number of files I was using and so used redirected input (here syntax). $ORACLE_HOME/common/bin/wlst.sh <<-EOF import time sleep=time.sleep print "#####################################" print "# Waiting for Admin Server to Start #" print "#####################################" while True:   try:     connect(adminServerName="AdminServer")     break   except:     sleep(10) I then start the SOA server and tell WLST to wait until it is started before returning.  If starting a cluster then the start command would be modified accordingly to start the SOA cluster. print "#######################" print "# Starting SOA Server #" print "#######################" start(name="soa_server1", block="true") I then start the BAM server in the same way as the SOA server. print "#######################" print "# Starting BAM Server #" print "#######################" start(name="bam_server1", block="true") EOF Finally I let people know the servers are up and wait for input in case I am running in a separate window, in which case the result would be lost without the read command. echo "#####################" echo "# SOA Suite Started #" echo "#####################" read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Stopping the SOA Suite My script for shutting down the SOA Suite (available here)  is basically the reverse of my startup script.  After setting the environment I connect to the Admin Server using WLST and shut down the managed servers and the admin server.  Again the script would need modifying for a cluster. Stopping the Servers If I cannot connect to the Admin Server I try to connect to the node manager, in case the Admin Server is down but the managed servers are up. #!/bin/sh echo "###########################" echo "# Setting SOA Environment #" echo "###########################" export MW_HOME=~oracle/Middleware11gPS1 export WL_HOME=$MW_HOME/wlserver_10.3 export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA export DOMAIN_NAME=soa_std_domain export DOMAIN_HOME=$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME cd $DOMAIN_HOME $MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA/common/bin/wlst.sh <<-EOF try:   print("#############################")   print("# Connecting to AdminServer #")   print("#############################")   connect(username='weblogic',password='welcome1',url='t3://localhost:7001') except:   print "#########################################"   print "#   Unable to connect to Admin Server   #"   print "# Attempting to connect to Node Manager #"   print "#########################################"   nmConnect(domainName=os.getenv("DOMAIN_NAME")) print "#######################" print "# Stopping BAM Server #" print "#######################" shutdown('bam_server1') print "#######################" print "# Stopping SOA Server #" print "#######################" shutdown('soa_server1') print "#########################" print "# Stopping Admin Server #" print "#########################" shutdown('AdminServer') disconnect() nmDisconnect() EOF Stopping the Node Manager I stopped the node manager by searching for the java node manager process using the ps command and then killing that process. echo "#########################" echo "# Stopping Node Manager #" echo "#########################" kill -9 `ps -ef | grep java | grep NodeManager |  awk '{print $2;}'` echo "#####################" echo "# SOA Suite Stopped #" echo "#####################" read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Stopping the Database Again my script for shutting down the database is the reverse of my start script.  It is available here.  The only change needed might be to the database name. #!/bin/sh echo "##############################" echo "# Setting Oracle Environment #" echo "##############################" . oraenv <<-EOF orcl EOF echo "######################" echo "# Stopping dbConsole #" echo "######################" emctl stop dbconsole echo "#####################" echo "# Stopping Listener #" echo "#####################" lsnrctl stop echo "#####################" echo "# Stopping Database #" echo "#####################" sqlplus / as sysdba <<-EOF shutdown immediate exit EOF read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Cleaning Up Cleaning SOA Suite I often run tests and want to clean up all the log files.  The following script (available here) does this for the WebLogic servers in a given domain on a machine.  After setting the domain I just remove all files under the servers logs directories.  It also cleans up the log files I created with my startup scripts.  These scripts could be enhanced to copy off the log files if you needed them but in my test environments I don’t need them and would prefer to reclaim the disk space. #!/bin/sh echo "###########################" echo "# Setting SOA Environment #" echo "###########################" export MW_HOME=~oracle/Middleware11gPS1 export WL_HOME=$MW_HOME/wlserver_10.3 export ORACLE_HOME=$MW_HOME/Oracle_SOA export DOMAIN_NAME=soa_std_domain export DOMAIN_HOME=$MW_HOME/user_projects/domains/$DOMAIN_NAME echo "##########################" echo "# Cleaning SOA Log Files #" echo "##########################" cd $DOMAIN_HOME rm -Rf logs/* servers/*/logs/* read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Cleaning Database I also created a script to clean up the dump files of an Oracle database instance and also the EM log files (available here).  This relies on the machine name being correct as the EM log files are stored in a directory that is based on the hostname and the Oracle SID. #!/bin/sh echo "##############################" echo "# Setting Oracle Environment #" echo "##############################" . oraenv <<-EOF orcl EOF echo "#############################" echo "# Cleaning Oracle Log Files #" echo "#############################" rm -Rf $ORACLE_BASE/admin/$ORACLE_SID/*dump/* rm -Rf $ORACLE_HOME/`hostname`_$ORACLE_SID/sysman/log/* read -p "Hit <enter> to continue" Summary Hope you find the above scripts useful.  They certainly stop me hanging around waiting for things to happen on my test machine and make it easy to run a test, change parameters, bounce the SOA Suite and clean the logs between runs so I can see exactly what is happening. Now I need to get that mower started…

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• lxc containers hangs after upgrade to 13.10

  - by doug123

  I have 3 lxc containers. They were all working fine on 12.10 and I upgraded the containers with do-release-upgrade on the containers to 13.04 and 13.10 and that worked great. Then I upgraded the host to 13.04 and then 13.10 and now the 3 containers hang with this: >lxc-start -n as1 -l DEBUG -o $(tty) lxc-start 1383145786.513 INFO lxc_start_ui - using rcfile /var/lib/lxc/as1/config lxc-start 1383145786.513 WARN lxc_log - lxc_log_init called with log already initialized lxc-start 1383145786.513 INFO lxc_apparmor - aa_enabled set to 1 lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/2' (5/6) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/13' (7/8) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/14' (9/10) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/15' (11/12) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/17' (13/14) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/18' (15/16) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/19' (17/18) lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_conf - allocated pty '/dev/pts/20' (19/20) lxc-start 1383145786.514 INFO lxc_conf - tty's configured lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_start - sigchild handler set lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - opening /dev/tty for console peer lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - using '/dev/tty' as console lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - 6242 got SIGWINCH fd 25 lxc-start 1383145786.514 DEBUG lxc_console - set winsz dstfd:22 cols:177 rows:53 lxc-start 1383145786.514 INFO lxc_start - 'as1' is initialized lxc-start 1383145786.522 DEBUG lxc_start - Not dropping cap_sys_boot or watching utmp lxc-start 1383145786.524 DEBUG lxc_conf - mac address of host interface 'vethB4L35W' changed to private fe:7c:96:a0:ae:29 lxc-start 1383145786.525 DEBUG lxc_conf - instanciated veth 'vethB4L35W/vethVC61K2', index is '26' lxc-start 1383145786.529 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'memory.limit_in_bytes' set to '20G' lxc-start 1383145786.529 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'cpuset.cpus' set to '12-23' lxc-start 1383145786.529 INFO lxc_cgroup - cgroup has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.555 DEBUG lxc_conf - move 'eth0' to '6249' lxc-start 1383145786.555 INFO lxc_conf - 'as1' hostname has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.575 DEBUG lxc_conf - 'eth0' has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - network has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .44 42 252:0 / / rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/mapper/limitorderbook1-root rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .52 44 0:5 / /dev rw,relatime - devtmpfs udev rw,size=32961632k,nr_inodes=8240408,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .61 52 0:11 / /dev/pts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - devpts devpts rw,mode=600,ptmxmode=000 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev/pts. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .68 44 0:15 / /run rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw,size=6594456k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .69 68 0:18 / /run/lock rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=5120k . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/lock. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .72 68 0:19 / /run/shm rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime - tmpfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/shm. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .73 68 0:21 / /run/user rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=102400k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/user. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .76 44 0:14 / /sys rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - sysfs sysfs rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .77 76 0:16 / /sys/fs/cgroup rw,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=4k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .78 77 0:20 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuset,clone_children . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .79 77 0:23 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpu . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .80 77 0:24 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuacct . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .81 77 0:25 / /sys/fs/cgroup/memory rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,memory . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/memory. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .82 77 0:26 / /sys/fs/cgroup/devices rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,devices . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/devices. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .83 77 0:27 / /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,freezer . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .84 77 0:28 / /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,blkio . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .85 77 0:29 / /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,perf_event . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .94 77 0:30 / /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,hugetlb . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .95 77 0:31 / /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - cgroup systemd rw,name=systemd . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .96 76 0:17 / /sys/fs/fuse/connections rw,relatime - fusectl none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/fuse/connections. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .98 76 0:6 / /sys/kernel/debug rw,relatime - debugfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/debug. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .101 76 0:10 / /sys/kernel/security rw,relatime - securityfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/security. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .102 76 0:22 / /sys/fs/pstore rw,relatime - pstore none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/pstore. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .103 44 0:3 / /proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - proc proc rw . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /proc. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .104 44 9:2 / /data rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/md2 rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /data. lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .105 44 8:1 / /boot rw,relatime - ext2 /dev/sda1 rw,errors=continue . lxc-start 1383145786.575 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /boot. lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted '/data/srv/lxc/as1' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//dev/pts', type 'devpts' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//proc', type 'proc' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//sys', type 'sysfs' lxc-start 1383145786.576 DEBUG lxc_conf - mounted 'none' on '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc//run', type 'tmpfs' lxc-start 1383145786.576 INFO lxc_conf - mount points have been setup lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - console has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - 8 tty(s) has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - rootfs path is ./data/srv/lxc/as1., mount is ./usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc. lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_apparmor - I am 1, /proc/self points to 1 lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - created '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc/lxc_putold' directory lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - mountpoint for old rootfs is '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc/lxc_putold' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - pivot_root syscall to '/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/lxc' successful lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/dev/pts' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run/lock' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run/shm' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run/user' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/cpu' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/memory' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/devices' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/freezer' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/blkio' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup/systemd' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/fuse/connections' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/kernel/debug' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/kernel/security' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/pstore' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/proc' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/data' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/boot' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/dev' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/run' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys/fs/cgroup' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold/sys' lxc-start 1383145786.577 DEBUG lxc_conf - umounted '/lxc_putold' lxc-start 1383145786.577 INFO lxc_conf - created new pts instance lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_conf - drop capability 'sys_boot' (22) lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_conf - capabilities have been setup lxc-start 1383145786.578 NOTICE lxc_conf - 'as1' is setup. lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'memory.limit_in_bytes' set to '20G' lxc-start 1383145786.578 DEBUG lxc_cgroup - cgroup 'cpuset.cpus' set to '12-23' lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_cgroup - cgroup has been setup lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_apparmor - setting up apparmor lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_apparmor - changed apparmor profile to lxc-container-default lxc-start 1383145786.578 NOTICE lxc_start - exec'ing '/sbin/init' lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .15 20 0:14 / /sys rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - sysfs sysfs rw . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .16 20 0:3 / /proc rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - proc proc rw . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /proc. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .17 20 0:5 / /dev rw,relatime - devtmpfs udev rw,size=32961632k,nr_inodes=8240408,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .18 17 0:11 / /dev/pts rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - devpts devpts rw,mode=600,ptmxmode=000 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /dev/pts. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .19 20 0:15 / /run rw,nosuid,noexec,relatime - tmpfs tmpfs rw,size=6594456k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .20 1 252:0 / / rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/mapper/limitorderbook1-root rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .22 15 0:16 / /sys/fs/cgroup rw,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=4k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .23 15 0:17 / /sys/fs/fuse/connections rw,relatime - fusectl none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/fuse/connections. lxc-start 1383145786.578 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .24 15 0:6 / /sys/kernel/debug rw,relatime - debugfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/debug. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .25 15 0:10 / /sys/kernel/security rw,relatime - securityfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/kernel/security. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .26 19 0:18 / /run/lock rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=5120k . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/lock. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .27 19 0:19 / /run/shm rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime - tmpfs none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/shm. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .28 22 0:20 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuset,clone_children . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuset. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .29 19 0:21 / /run/user rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - tmpfs none rw,size=102400k,mode=755 . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /run/user. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .30 15 0:22 / /sys/fs/pstore rw,relatime - pstore none rw . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/pstore. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .31 22 0:23 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpu . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpu. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .32 22 0:24 / /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,cpuacct . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/cpuacct. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .33 22 0:25 / /sys/fs/cgroup/memory rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,memory . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/memory. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .34 22 0:26 / /sys/fs/cgroup/devices rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,devices . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/devices. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .35 22 0:27 / /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,freezer . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/freezer. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .36 22 0:28 / /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,blkio . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/blkio. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .37 22 0:29 / /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,perf_event . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/perf_event. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .38 22 0:30 / /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb rw,relatime - cgroup cgroup rw,hugetlb . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/hugetlb. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .39 20 9:2 / /data rw,relatime - ext4 /dev/md2 rw,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /data. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .40 20 8:1 / /boot rw,relatime - ext2 /dev/sda1 rw,errors=continue . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /boot. lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - looking at .41 22 0:31 / /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd rw,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime - cgroup systemd rw,name=systemd . lxc-start 1383145786.579 INFO lxc_conf - now p is . /sys/fs/cgroup/systemd. lxc-start 1383145786.579 NOTICE lxc_start - '/sbin/init' started with pid '6249' lxc-start 1383145786.579 WARN lxc_start - invalid pid for SIGCHLD <4>init: ureadahead main process (7) terminated with status 5 <4>init: console-font main process (94) terminated with status 1 And it will just sit there like that for hours at least. The container becomes pingable but I can't ssh and if I try lxc-console -n as1 I get a blank screen. If I do lxc-stop -n as1 or ^C in the window where it has hung I get: ^CTERM environment variable not set. <4>init: plymouth-upstart-bridge main process (192) terminated with status 1 <4>init: hwclock-save main process (187) terminated with status 70 * Asking all remaining processes to terminate... ...done. * All processes ended within 1 seconds... ...done. * Deactivating swap... ...fail! mount: cannot mount block device /dev/md2 read-only * Will now restart But after 20 minutes it hasn't restarted. Any ideas why these containers are hanging?

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• Building a jQuery Plug-in to make an HTML Table scrollable

  - by Rick Strahl

  Today I got a call from a customer and we were looking over an older application that uses a lot of tables to display financial and other assorted data. The application is mostly meta-data driven with lots of layout formatting automatically driven through meta data rather than through explicit hand coded HTML layouts. One of the problems in this apps are tables that display a non-fixed amount of data. The users of this app don't want to use paging to see more data, but instead want to display overflow data using a scrollbar. Many of the forms are very densely populated, often with multiple data tables that display a few rows of data in the UI at the most. This sort of layout does not lend itself well to paging, but works much better with scrollable data. Unfortunately scrollable tables are not easily created. HTML Tables are mangy beasts as anybody who's done any sort of Web development knows. Tables are finicky when it comes to styling and layout, and they have many funky quirks, especially when it comes to scrolling both of the table rows themselves or even the child columns. There's no built-in way to make tables scroll and to lock headers while you do, and while you can embed a table (or anything really) into a scrolling div with something like this: <div style="position:relative; overflow: hidden; overflow-y: scroll; height: 200px; width: 400px;"> <table id="table" style="width: 100%" class="blackborder" > <thead> <tr class="gridheader"> <th>Column 1</th> <th>Column 2</th> <th>Column 3</th> <th >Column 4</th> </tr> </thead> <tbody> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> <tr> <td>Column 1 Content</td> <td>Column 2 Content</td> <td>Column 3 Content</td> <td>Column 4 Content</td> </tr> … </tbody> </table> </div> </div> that won't give a very satisfying visual experience: Both the header and body scroll which looks odd. You lose context as soon as the header scrolls off the top and when you reach the bottom of the list the bottom outline of the table shows which also looks off. The the side bar shows all the way down the length of the table yet another visual miscue. In a pinch this will work, but it's ugly. What's out there? Before we go further here you should know that there are a few capable grid plug-ins out there already. Among them: Flexigrid (can work of any table as well as with AJAX data) jQuery Scrollable Table Plug-in (feature similar to what I need but not quite) jqGrid (mostly an Ajax Grid which is very powerful and works very well) But in the end none of them fit the bill of what I needed in this situation. All of these require custom CSS and some of them are fairly complex to restyle. Others are AJAX only or work better with AJAX loaded data. However, I need to actually try (as much as possible) to maintain the original styling of the tables without requiring extensive re-styling. Building the makeTableScrollable() Plug-in To make a table scrollable requires rearranging the table a bit. In the plug-in I built I create two <div> tags and split the table into two: one for the table header and one for the table body. The bottom <div> tag then contains only the table's row data and can be scrolled while the header stays fixed. Using jQuery the basic idea is pretty simple: You create the divs, copy the original table into the bottom, then clone the table, clear all content append the <thead> section, into new table and then copy that table into the second header <div>. Easy as pie, right? Unfortunately it's a bit more complicated than that as it's tricky to get the width of the table right to account for the scrollbar (by adding a small column) and making sure the borders properly line up for the two tables. A lot of style settings have to be made to ensure the table is a fixed size, to remove and reattach borders, to add extra space to allow for the scrollbar and so forth. The end result of my plug-in is a table with a scrollbar. Using the same table I used earlier the result looks like this: To create it, I use the following jQuery plug-in logic to select my table and run the makeTableScrollable() plug-in against the selector: $("#table").makeTableScrollable( { cssClass:"blackborder"} ); Without much further ado, here's the short code for the plug-in: (function ($) { $.fn.makeTableScrollable = function (options) { return this.each(function () { var $table = $(this); var opt = { // height of the table height: "250px", // right padding added to support the scrollbar rightPadding: "10px", // cssclass used for the wrapper div cssClass: "" } $.extend(opt, options); var $thead = $table.find("thead"); var $ths = $thead.find("th"); var id = $table.attr("id"); var cssClass = $table.attr("class"); if (!id) id = "_table_" + new Date().getMilliseconds().ToString(); $table.width("+=" + opt.rightPadding); $table.css("border-width", 0); // add a column to all rows of the table var first = true; $table.find("tr").each(function () { var row = $(this); if (first) { row.append($("<th>").width(opt.rightPadding)); first = false; } else row.append($("<td>").width(opt.rightPadding)); }); // force full sizing on each of the th elemnts $ths.each(function () { var $th = $(this); $th.css("width", $th.width()); }); // Create the table wrapper div var $tblDiv = $("<div>").css({ position: "relative", overflow: "hidden", overflowY: "scroll" }) .addClass(opt.cssClass); var width = $table.width(); $tblDiv.width(width).height(opt.height) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper") .css("border-top", "none"); // Insert before $tblDiv $tblDiv.insertBefore($table); // then move the table into it $table.appendTo($tblDiv); // Clone the div for header var $hdDiv = $tblDiv.clone(); $hdDiv.empty(); var width = $table.width(); $hdDiv.attr("style", "") .css("border-bottom", "none") .width(width) .attr("id", id + "_wrapper_header"); // create a copy of the table and remove all children var $newTable = $($table).clone(); $newTable.empty() .attr("id", $table.attr("id") + "_header"); $thead.appendTo($newTable); $hdDiv.insertBefore($tblDiv); $newTable.appendTo($hdDiv); $table.css("border-width", 0); }); } })(jQuery); Oh sweet spaghetti code :-) The code starts out by dealing the parameters that can be passed in the options object map: height The height of the full table/structure. The height of the outside wrapper container. Defaults to 200px. rightPadding The padding that is added to the right of the table to account for the scrollbar. Creates a column of this width and injects it into the table. If too small the rightmost column might get truncated. if too large the empty column might show. cssClass The CSS class of the wrapping container that appears to wrap the table. If you want a border around your table this class should probably provide it since the plug-in removes the table border. The rest of the code is obtuse, but pretty straight forward. It starts by creating a new column in the table to accommodate the width of the scrollbar and avoid clipping of text in the rightmost column. The width of the columns is explicitly set in the header elements to force the size of the table to be fixed and to provide the same sizing when the THEAD section is moved to a new copied table later. The table wrapper div is created, formatted and the table is moved into it. The new wrapper div is cloned for the header wrapper and configured. Finally the actual table is cloned and cleared of all elements. The original table's THEAD section is then moved into the new table. At last the new table is added to the header <div>, and the header <div> is inserted before the table wrapper <div>. I'm always amazed how easy jQuery makes it to do this sort of re-arranging, and given of what's happening the amount of code is rather small. Disclaimer: Your mileage may vary A word of warning: I make no guarantees about the code above. It's a first cut and I provided this here mainly to demonstrate the concepts of decomposing and reassembling an HTML layout :-) which jQuery makes so nice and easy. I tested this component against the typical scenarios we plan on using it for which are tables that use a few well known styles (or no styling at all). I suspect if you have complex styling on your <table> tag that things might not go so well. If you plan on using this plug-in you might want to minimize your styling of the table tag and defer any border formatting using the class passed in via the cssClass parameter, which ends up on the two wrapper div's that wrap the header and body rows. There's also no explicit support for footers. I rarely if ever use footers (when not using paging that is), so I didn't feel the need to add footer support. However, if you need that it's not difficult to add - the logic is the same as adding the header. The plug-in relies on a well-formatted table that has THEAD and TBODY sections along with TH tags in the header. Note that ASP.NET WebForm DataGrids and GridViews by default do not generate well-formatted table HTML. You can look at my Adding proper THEAD sections to a GridView post for more info on how to get a GridView to render properly. The plug-in has no dependencies other than jQuery. Even with the limitations in mind I hope this might be useful to some of you. I know I've already identified a number of places in my own existing applications where I will be plugging this in almost immediately. Resources Download Sample and Plug-in code Latest version in the West Wind Web & AJAX Toolkit Repository © Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in jQuery  HTML  ASP.NET  

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: The Joy of Anonymous Types

  - by James Michael Hare

  Once again, in this series of posts I look at the parts of the .NET Framework that may seem trivial, but can help improve your code by making it easier to write and maintain. The index of all my past little wonders posts can be found here. In the .NET 3 Framework, Microsoft introduced the concept of anonymous types, which provide a way to create a quick, compiler-generated types at the point of instantiation.  These may seem trivial, but are very handy for concisely creating lightweight, strongly-typed objects containing only read-only properties that can be used within a given scope. Creating an Anonymous Type In short, an anonymous type is a reference type that derives directly from object and is defined by its set of properties base on their names, number, types, and order given at initialization.  In addition to just holding these properties, it is also given appropriate overridden implementations for Equals() and GetHashCode() that take into account all of the properties to correctly perform property comparisons and hashing.  Also overridden is an implementation of ToString() which makes it easy to display the contents of an anonymous type instance in a fairly concise manner. To construct an anonymous type instance, you use basically the same initialization syntax as with a regular type.  So, for example, if we wanted to create an anonymous type to represent a particular point, we could do this: 1: var point = new { X = 13, Y = 7 }; Note the similarity between anonymous type initialization and regular initialization.  The main difference is that the compiler generates the type name and the properties (as readonly) based on the names and order provided, and inferring their types from the expressions they are assigned to. It is key to remember that all of those factors (number, names, types, order of properties) determine the anonymous type.  This is important, because while these two instances share the same anonymous type: 1: // same names, types, and order 2: var point1 = new { X = 13, Y = 7 }; 3: var point2 = new { X = 5, Y = 0 }; These similar ones do not: 1: var point3 = new { Y = 3, X = 5 }; // different order 2: var point4 = new { X = 3, Y = 5.0 }; // different type for Y 3: var point5 = new {MyX = 3, MyY = 5 }; // different names 4: var point6 = new { X = 1, Y = 2, Z = 3 }; // different count Limitations on Property Initialization Expressions The expression for a property in an anonymous type initialization cannot be null (though it can evaluate to null) or an anonymous function.  For example, the following are illegal: 1: // Null can't be used directly. Null reference of what type? 2: var cantUseNull = new { Value = null }; 3:  4: // Anonymous methods cannot be used. 5: var cantUseAnonymousFxn = new { Value = () => Console.WriteLine(“Can’t.”) }; Note that the restriction on null is just that you can’t use it directly as the expression, because otherwise how would it be able to determine the type?  You can, however, use it indirectly assigning a null expression such as a typed variable with the value null, or by casting null to a specific type: 1: string str = null; 2: var fineIndirectly = new { Value = str }; 3: var fineCast = new { Value = (string)null }; All of the examples above name the properties explicitly, but you can also implicitly name properties if they are being set from a property, field, or variable.  In these cases, when a field, property, or variable is used alone, and you don’t specify a property name assigned to it, the new property will have the same name.  For example: 1: int variable = 42; 2:  3: // creates two properties named varriable and Now 4: var implicitProperties = new { variable, DateTime.Now }; Is the same type as: 1: var explicitProperties = new { variable = variable, Now = DateTime.Now }; But this only works if you are using an existing field, variable, or property directly as the expression.  If you use a more complex expression then the name cannot be inferred: 1: // can't infer the name variable from variable * 2, must name explicitly 2: var wontWork = new { variable * 2, DateTime.Now }; In the example above, since we typed variable * 2, it is no longer just a variable and thus we would have to assign the property a name explicitly. ToString() on Anonymous Types One of the more trivial overrides that an anonymous type provides you is a ToString() method that prints the value of the anonymous type instance in much the same format as it was initialized (except actual values instead of expressions as appropriate of course). For example, if you had: 1: var point = new { X = 13, Y = 42 }; And then print it out: 1: Console.WriteLine(point.ToString()); You will get: 1: { X = 13, Y = 42 } While this isn’t necessarily the most stunning feature of anonymous types, it can be handy for debugging or logging values in a fairly easy to read format. Comparing Anonymous Type Instances Because anonymous types automatically create appropriate overrides of Equals() and GetHashCode() based on the underlying properties, we can reliably compare two instances or get hash codes.  For example, if we had the following 3 points: 1: var point1 = new { X = 1, Y = 2 }; 2: var point2 = new { X = 1, Y = 2 }; 3: var point3 = new { Y = 2, X = 1 }; If we compare point1 and point2 we’ll see that Equals() returns true because they overridden version of Equals() sees that the types are the same (same number, names, types, and order of properties) and that the values are the same.   In addition, because all equal objects should have the same hash code, we’ll see that the hash codes evaluate to the same as well: 1: // true, same type, same values 2: Console.WriteLine(point1.Equals(point2)); 3:  4: // true, equal anonymous type instances always have same hash code 5: Console.WriteLine(point1.GetHashCode() == point2.GetHashCode()); However, if we compare point2 and point3 we get false.  Even though the names, types, and values of the properties are the same, the order is not, thus they are two different types and cannot be compared (and thus return false).  And, since they are not equal objects (even though they have the same value) there is a good chance their hash codes are different as well (though not guaranteed): 1: // false, different types 2: Console.WriteLine(point2.Equals(point3)); 3:  4: // quite possibly false (was false on my machine) 5: Console.WriteLine(point2.GetHashCode() == point3.GetHashCode()); Using Anonymous Types Now that we’ve created instances of anonymous types, let’s actually use them.  The property names (whether implicit or explicit) are used to access the individual properties of the anonymous type.  The main thing, once again, to keep in mind is that the properties are readonly, so you cannot assign the properties a new value (note: this does not mean that instances referred to by a property are immutable – for more information check out C#/.NET Fundamentals: Returning Data Immutably in a Mutable World). Thus, if we have the following anonymous type instance: 1: var point = new { X = 13, Y = 42 }; We can get the properties as you’d expect: 1: Console.WriteLine(“The point is: ({0},{1})”, point.X, point.Y); But we cannot alter the property values: 1: // compiler error, properties are readonly 2: point.X = 99; Further, since the anonymous type name is only known by the compiler, there is no easy way to pass anonymous type instances outside of a given scope.  The only real choices are to pass them as object or dynamic.  But really that is not the intention of using anonymous types.  If you find yourself needing to pass an anonymous type outside of a given scope, you should really consider making a POCO (Plain Old CLR Type – i.e. a class that contains just properties to hold data with little/no business logic) instead. Given that, why use them at all?  Couldn’t you always just create a POCO to represent every anonymous type you needed?  Sure you could, but then you might litter your solution with many small POCO classes that have very localized uses. It turns out this is the key to when to use anonymous types to your advantage: when you just need a lightweight type in a local context to store intermediate results, consider an anonymous type – but when that result is more long-lived and used outside of the current scope, consider a POCO instead. So what do we mean by intermediate results in a local context?  Well, a classic example would be filtering down results from a LINQ expression.  For example, let’s say we had a List<Transaction>, where Transaction is defined something like: 1: public class Transaction 2: { 3: public string UserId { get; set; } 4: public DateTime At { get; set; } 5: public decimal Amount { get; set; } 6: // … 7: } And let’s say we had this data in our List<Transaction>: 1: var transactions = new List<Transaction> 2: { 3: new Transaction { UserId = "Jim", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = 2200.00m }, 4: new Transaction { UserId = "Jim", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = -1100.00m }, 5: new Transaction { UserId = "Jim", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-1), Amount = 900.00m }, 6: new Transaction { UserId = "John", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-2), Amount = 300.00m }, 7: new Transaction { UserId = "John", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = -10.00m }, 8: new Transaction { UserId = "Jane", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = 200.00m }, 9: new Transaction { UserId = "Jane", At = DateTime.Now, Amount = -50.00m }, 10: new Transaction { UserId = "Jaime", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-3), Amount = -100.00m }, 11: new Transaction { UserId = "Jaime", At = DateTime.Now.AddDays(-3), Amount = 300.00m }, 12: }; So let’s say we wanted to get the transactions for each day for each user.  That is, for each day we’d want to see the transactions each user performed.  We could do this very simply with a nice LINQ expression, without the need of creating any POCOs: 1: // group the transactions based on an anonymous type with properties UserId and Date: 2: byUserAndDay = transactions 3: .GroupBy(tx => new { tx.UserId, tx.At.Date }) 4: .OrderBy(grp => grp.Key.Date) 5: .ThenBy(grp => grp.Key.UserId); Now, those of you who have attempted to use custom classes as a grouping type before (such as GroupBy(), Distinct(), etc.) may have discovered the hard way that LINQ gets a lot of its speed by utilizing not on Equals(), but also GetHashCode() on the type you are grouping by.  Thus, when you use custom types for these purposes, you generally end up having to write custom Equals() and GetHashCode() implementations or you won’t get the results you were expecting (the default implementations of Equals() and GetHashCode() are reference equality and reference identity based respectively). As we said before, it turns out that anonymous types already do these critical overrides for you.  This makes them even more convenient to use!  Instead of creating a small POCO to handle this grouping, and then having to implement a custom Equals() and GetHashCode() every time, we can just take advantage of the fact that anonymous types automatically override these methods with appropriate implementations that take into account the values of all of the properties. Now, we can look at our results: 1: foreach (var group in byUserAndDay) 2: { 3: // the group’s Key is an instance of our anonymous type 4: Console.WriteLine("{0} on {1:MM/dd/yyyy} did:", group.Key.UserId, group.Key.Date); 5:  6: // each grouping contains a sequence of the items. 7: foreach (var tx in group) 8: { 9: Console.WriteLine("\t{0}", tx.Amount); 10: } 11: } And see: 1: Jaime on 06/18/2012 did: 2: -100.00 3: 300.00 4:  5: John on 06/19/2012 did: 6: 300.00 7:  8: Jim on 06/20/2012 did: 9: 900.00 10:  11: Jane on 06/21/2012 did: 12: 200.00 13: -50.00 14:  15: Jim on 06/21/2012 did: 16: 2200.00 17: -1100.00 18:  19: John on 06/21/2012 did: 20: -10.00 Again, sure we could have just built a POCO to do this, given it an appropriate Equals() and GetHashCode() method, but that would have bloated our code with so many extra lines and been more difficult to maintain if the properties change.  Summary Anonymous types are one of those Little Wonders of the .NET language that are perfect at exactly that time when you need a temporary type to hold a set of properties together for an intermediate result.  While they are not very useful beyond the scope in which they are defined, they are excellent in LINQ expressions as a way to create and us intermediary values for further expressions and analysis. Anonymous types are defined by the compiler based on the number, type, names, and order of properties created, and they automatically implement appropriate Equals() and GetHashCode() overrides (as well as ToString()) which makes them ideal for LINQ expressions where you need to create a set of properties to group, evaluate, etc. Technorati Tags: C#,CSharp,.NET,Little Wonders,Anonymous Types,LINQ

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• Is Social Media The Vital Skill You Aren’t Tracking?

  - by HCM-Oracle

  By Mark Bennett - Originally featured in Talent Management Excellence The ever-increasing presence of the workforce on social media presents opportunities as well as risks for organizations. While on the one hand, we read about social media embarrassments happening to organizations, on the other we see that social media activities by workers and candidates can enhance a company’s brand and provide insight into what individuals are, or can become, influencers in the social media sphere. HR can play a key role in helping organizations make the most value out of the activities and presence of workers and candidates, while at the same time also helping to manage the risks that come with the permanence and viral nature of social media. What is Missing from Understanding Our Workforce? “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three-times more productive.”  Lew Platt, Former Chairman, President, CEO, Hewlett-Packard  What Lew Platt recognized was that organizations only have a partial understanding of what their workforce is capable of. This lack of understanding impacts the company in several negative ways: 1. A particular skill that the company needs to access in one part of the organization might exist somewhere else, but there is no record that the skill exists, so the need is unfulfilled. 2. As market conditions change rapidly, the company needs to know strategic options, but some options are missed entirely because the company doesn’t know that sufficient capability already exists to enable those options. 3. Employees may miss out on opportunities to demonstrate how their hidden skills could create new value to the company. Why don’t companies have that more complete picture of their workforce capabilities – that is, not know what they know? One very good explanation is that companies put most of their efforts into rating their workforce according to the jobs and roles they are filling today. This is the essence of two important talent management processes: recruiting and performance appraisals.  In recruiting, a set of requirements is put together for a job, either explicitly or indirectly through a job description. During the recruiting process, much of the attention is paid towards whether the candidate has the qualifications, the skills, the experience and the cultural fit to be successful in the role. This makes a lot of sense.  In the performance appraisal process, an employee is measured on how well they performed the functions of their role and in an effort to help the employee do even better next time, they are also measured on proficiency in the competencies that are deemed to be key in doing that job. Again, the logic is impeccable.  But in both these cases, two adages come to mind: 1. What gets measured is what gets managed. 2. You only see what you are looking for. In other words, the fact that the current roles the workforce are performing are the basis for measuring which capabilities the workforce has, makes them the only capabilities to be measured. What was initially meant to be a positive, i.e. identify what is needed to perform well and measure it, in order that it can be managed, comes with the unintended negative consequence of overshadowing the other capabilities the workforce has. This also comes with an employee engagement price, for the measurements and management of workforce capabilities is to typically focus on where the workforce comes up short. Again, it makes sense to do this, since improving a capability that appears to result in improved performance benefits, both the individual through improved performance ratings and the company through improved productivity. But this is based on the assumption that the capabilities identified and their required proficiencies are the only attributes of the individual that matter. Anything else the individual brings that results in high performance, while resulting in a desired performance outcome, often goes unrecognized or underappreciated at best. As social media begins to occupy a more important part in current and future roles in organizations, businesses must incorporate social media savvy and innovation into job descriptions and expectations. These new measures could provide insight into how well someone can use social media tools to influence communities and decision makers; keep abreast of trends in fast-moving industries; present a positive brand image for the organization around thought leadership, customer focus, social responsibility; and coordinate and collaborate with partners. These measures should demonstrate the “social capital” the individual has invested in and developed over time. Without this dimension, “short cut” methods may generate a narrow set of positive metrics that do not have real, long-lasting benefits to the organization. How Workforce Reputation Management Helps HR Harness Social Media With hundreds of petabytes of social media data flowing across Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, businesses are tapping technology solutions to effectively leverage social for HR. Workforce reputation management technology helps organizations discover, mobilize and retain talent by providing insight into the social reputation and influence of the workforce while also helping organizations monitor employee social media policy compliance and mitigate social media risk.  There are three major ways that workforce reputation management technology can play a strategic role to support HR: 1. Improve Awareness and Decisions on Talent Many organizations measure the skills and competencies that they know they need today, but are unaware of what other skills and competencies their workforce has that could be essential tomorrow. How about whether your workforce has the reputation and influence to make their skills and competencies more effective? Many organizations don’t have insight into the social media “reach” their workforce has, which is becoming more critical to business performance. These features help organizations, managers, and employees improve many talent processes and decision making, including the following: Hiring and Assignments. People and teams with higher reputations are considered more valuable and effective workers. Someone with high reputation who refers a candidate also can have high credibility as a source for hires.   Training and Development. Reputation trend analysis can impact program decisions regarding training offerings by showing how reputation and influence across the workforce changes in concert with training. Worker reputation impacts development plans and goal choices by helping the individual see which development efforts result in improved reputation and influence.   Finding Hidden Talent. Managers can discover hidden talent and skills amongst employees based on a combination of social profile information and social media reputation. Employees can improve their personal brand and accelerate their career development.  2. Talent Search and Discovery The right technology helps organizations find information on people that might otherwise be hidden. By leveraging access to candidate and worker social profiles as well as their social relationships, workforce reputation management provides companies with a more complete picture of what their knowledge, skills, and attributes are and what they can in turn access. This more complete information helps to find the right talent both outside the organization as well as the right, perhaps previously hidden talent, within the organization to fill roles and staff projects, particularly those roles and projects that are required in reaction to fast-changing opportunities and circumstances. 3. Reputation Brings Credibility Workforce reputation management technology provides a clearer picture of how candidates and workers are viewed by their peers and communities across a wide range of social reputation and influence metrics. This information is less subject to individual bias and can impact critical decision-making. Knowing the individual’s reputation and influence enables the organization to predict how well their capabilities and behaviors will have a positive effect on desired business outcomes. Many roles that have the highest impact on overall business performance are dependent on the individual’s influence and reputation. In addition, reputation and influence measures offer a very tangible source of feedback for workers, providing them with insight that helps them develop themselves and their careers and see the effectiveness of those efforts by tracking changes over time in their reputation and influence. The following are some examples of the different reputation and influence measures of the workforce that Workforce Reputation Management could gather and analyze: Generosity – How often the user reposts other’s posts. Influence – How often the user’s material is reposted by others.  Engagement – The ratio of recent posts with references (e.g. links to other posts) to the total number of posts.  Activity – How frequently the user posts. (e.g. number per day)  Impact – The size of the users’ social networks, which indicates their ability to reach unique followers, friends, or users.   Clout – The number of references and citations of the user’s material in others’ posts.  The Vital Ingredient of Workforce Reputation Management: Employee Participation “Nothing about me, without me.” Valerie Billingham, “Through the Patient’s Eyes”, Salzburg Seminar Session 356, 1998 Since data resides primarily in social media, a question arises: what manner is used to collect that data? While much of social media activity is publicly accessible (as many who wished otherwise have learned to their chagrin), the social norms of social media have developed to put some restrictions on what is acceptable behavior and by whom. Disregarding these norms risks a repercussion firestorm. One of the more recognized norms is that while individuals can follow and engage with other individual’s public social activity (e.g. Twitter updates) fairly freely, the more an organization does this unprompted and without getting permission from the individual beforehand, the more likely the organization risks a totally opposite outcome from the one desired. Instead, the organization must look for permission from the individual, which can be met with resistance. That resistance comes from not knowing how the information will be used, how it will be shared with others, and not receiving enough benefit in return for granting permission. As the quote above about patient concerns and rights succinctly states, no one likes not feeling in control of the information about themselves, or the uncertainty about where it will be used. This is well understood in consumer social media (i.e. permission-based marketing) and is applicable to workforce reputation management. However, asking permission leaves open the very real possibility that no one, or so few, will grant permission, resulting in a small set of data with little usefulness for the company. Connecting Individual Motivation to Organization Needs So what is it that makes an individual decide to grant an organization access to the data it wants? It is when the individual’s own motivations are in alignment with the organization’s objectives. In the case of workforce reputation management, when the individual is motivated by a desire for increased visibility and career growth opportunities to advertise their skills and level of influence and reputation, they are aligned with the organizations’ objectives; to fill resource needs or strategically build better awareness of what skills are present in the workforce, as well as levels of influence and reputation. Individuals can see the benefit of granting access permission to the company through multiple means. One is through simple social awareness; they begin to discover that peers who are getting more career opportunities are those who are signed up for workforce reputation management. Another is where companies take the message directly to the individual; we think you would benefit from signing up with our workforce reputation management solution. Another, more strategic approach is to make reputation management part of a larger Career Development effort by the company; providing a wide set of tools to help the workforce find ways to plan and take action to achieve their career aspirations in the organization. An effective mechanism, that facilitates connecting the visibility and career growth motivations of the workforce with the larger context of the organization’s business objectives, is to use game mechanics to help individuals transform their career goals into concrete, actionable steps, such as signing up for reputation management. This works in favor of companies looking to use workforce reputation because the workforce is more apt to see how it fits into achieving their overall career goals, as well as seeing how other participation brings additional benefits.  Once an individual has signed up with reputation management, not only have they made themselves more visible within the organization and increased their career growth opportunities, they have also enabled a tool that they can use to better understand how their actions and behaviors impact their influence and reputation. Since they will be able to see their reputation and influence measurements change over time, they will gain better insight into how reputation and influence impacts their effectiveness in a role, as well as how their behaviors and skill levels in turn affect their influence and reputation. This insight can trigger much more directed, and effective, efforts by the individual to improve their ability to perform at a higher level and become more productive. The increased sense of autonomy the individual experiences, in linking the insight they gain to the actions and behavior changes they make, greatly enhances their engagement with their role as well as their career prospects within the company. Workforce reputation management takes the wide range of disparate data about the workforce being produced across various social media platforms and transforms it into accessible, relevant, and actionable information that helps the organization achieve its desired business objectives. Social media holds untapped insights about your talent, brand and business, and workforce reputation management can help unlock them. Imagine - if you could find the hidden secrets of your businesses, how much more productive and efficient would your organization be? Mark Bennett is a Director of Product Strategy at Oracle. Mark focuses on setting the strategic vision and direction for tools that help organizations understand, shape, and leverage the capabilities of their workforce to achieve business objectives, as well as help individuals work effectively to achieve their goals and navigate their own growth. His combination of a deep technical background in software design and development, coupled with a broad knowledge of business challenges and thinking in today’s globalized, rapidly changing, technology accelerated economy, has enabled him to identify and incorporate key innovations that are central to Oracle Fusion’s unique value proposition. Mark has over the course of his career been in charge of the design, development, and strategy of Talent Management products and the design and development of cutting edge software that is better equipped to handle the increasingly complex demands of users while also remaining easy to use. Follow him @mpbennett

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• AngularJs ng-cloak Problems on large Pages

  - by Rick Strahl

  I’ve been working on a rather complex and large Angular page. Unlike a typical AngularJs SPA style ‘application’ this particular page is just that: a single page with a large amount of data on it that has to be visible all at once. The problem is that when this large page loads it flickers and displays template markup briefly before kicking into its actual content rendering. This is is what the Angular ng-cloak is supposed to address, but in this case I had no luck getting it to work properly. This application is a shop floor app where workers need to see all related information in one big screen view, so some of the benefits of Angular’s routing and view swapping features couldn’t be applied. Instead, we decided to have one very big view but lots of ng-controllers and directives to break out the logic for code separation. For code separation this works great – there are a number of small controllers that deal with their own individual and isolated application concerns. For HTML separation we used partial ASP.NET MVC Razor Views which made breaking out the HTML into manageable pieces super easy and made migration of this page from a previous server side Razor page much easier. We were also able to leverage most of our server side localization without a lot of  changes as a bonus. But as a result of this choice the initial HTML document that loads is rather large – even without any data loaded into it, resulting in a fairly large DOM tree that Angular must manage. Large Page and Angular Startup The problem on this particular page is that there’s quite a bit of markup – 35k’s worth of markup without any data loaded, in fact. It’s a large HTML page with a complex DOM tree. There are quite a lot of Angular {{ }} markup expressions in the document. Angular provides the ng-cloak directive to try and hide the element it cloaks so that you don’t see the flash of these markup expressions when the page initially loads before Angular has a chance to render the data into the markup expressions.<div id="mainContainer" class="mainContainer boxshadow" ng-app="app" ng-cloak> Note the ng-cloak attribute on this element, which here is an outer wrapper element of the most of this large page’s content. ng-cloak is supposed to prevent displaying the content below it, until Angular has taken control and is ready to render the data into the templates. Alas, with this large page the end result unfortunately is a brief flicker of un-rendered markup which looks like this: It’s brief, but plenty ugly – right?  And depending on the speed of the machine this flash gets more noticeable with slow machines that take longer to process the initial HTML DOM. ng-cloak Styles ng-cloak works by temporarily hiding the marked up element and it does this by essentially applying a style that does this:[ng\:cloak], [ng-cloak], [data-ng-cloak], [x-ng-cloak], .ng-cloak, .x-ng-cloak { display: none !important; } This style is inlined as part of AngularJs itself. If you looking at the angular.js source file you’ll find this at the very end of the file:!angular.$$csp() && angular.element(document) .find('head') .prepend('<style type="text/css">@charset "UTF-8";[ng\\:cloak],[ng-cloak],' + '[data-ng-cloak],[x-ng-cloak],.ng-cloak,.x-ng-cloak,' + '.ng-hide{display:none !important;}ng\\:form{display:block;}' '.ng-animate-block-transitions{transition:0s all!important;-webkit-transition:0s all!important;}' + '</style>'); This is is meant to initially hide any elements that contain the ng-cloak attribute or one of the other Angular directive permutation markup. Unfortunately on this particular web page ng-cloak had no effect – I still see the flicker. Why doesn’t ng-cloak work? The problem is of course – timing. The problem is that Angular actually needs to get control of the page before it ever starts doing anything like process even the ng-cloak attribute (or style etc). Because this page is rather large (about 35k of non-data HTML) it takes a while for the DOM to actually plow through the HTML. With the Angular <script> tag defined at the bottom of the page after the HTML DOM content there’s a slight delay which causes the flicker. For smaller pages the initial DOM load/parse cycle is so fast that the markup never shows, but with larger content pages it may show and become an annoying problem. Workarounds There a number of simple ways around this issue and some of them are hinted on in the Angular documentation. Load Angular Sooner One obvious thing that would help with this is to load Angular at the top of the page  BEFORE the DOM loads and that would give it much earlier control. The old ng-cloak documentation actually recommended putting the Angular.js script into the header of the page (apparently this was recently removed), but generally it’s not a good practice to load scripts in the header for page load performance. This is especially true if you load other libraries like jQuery which should be loaded prior to loading Angular so it can use jQuery rather than its own jqLite subset. This is not something I normally would like to do and also something that I’d likely forget in the future and end up right back here :-). Use ng-include for Child Content Angular supports nesting of child templates via the ng-include directive which essentially delay loads HTML content. This helps by removing a lot of the template content out of the main page and so getting control to Angular a lot sooner in order to hide the markup template content. In the application in question, I realize that in hindsight it might have been smarter to break this page out with client side ng-include directives instead of MVC Razor partial views we used to break up the page sections. Razor partial views give that nice separation as well, but in the end Razor puts humpty dumpty (ie. the HTML) back together into a whole single and rather large HTML document. Razor provides the logical separation, but still results in a large physical result document. But Razor also ended up being helpful to have a few security related blocks handled via server side template logic that simply excludes certain parts of the UI the user is not allowed to see – something that you can’t really do with client side exclusion like ng-hide/ng-show – client side content is always there whereas on the server side you can simply not send it to the client. Another reason I’m not a huge fan of ng-include is that it adds another HTTP hit to a request as templates are loaded from the server dynamically as needed. Given that this page was already heavy with resources adding another 10 separate ng-include directives wouldn’t be beneficial :-) ng-include is a valid option if you start from scratch and partition your logic. Of course if you don’t have complex pages, having completely separate views that are swapped in as they are accessed are even better, but we didn’t have this option due to the information having to be on screen all at once. Avoid using {{ }}  Expressions The biggest issue that ng-cloak attempts to address isn’t so much displaying the original content – it’s displaying empty {{ }} markup expression tags that get embedded into content. It gives you the dreaded “now you see it, now you don’t” effect where you sometimes see three separate rendering states: Markup junk, empty views, then views filled with data. If we can remove {{ }} expressions from the page you remove most of the perceived double draw effect as you would effectively start with a blank form and go straight to a filled form. To do this you can forego {{ }}  expressions and replace them with ng-bind directives on DOM elements. For example you can turn:<div class="list-item-name listViewOrderNo"> <a href='#'>{{lineItem.MpsOrderNo}}</a> </div>into:<div class="list-item-name listViewOrderNo"> <a href="#" ng-bind="lineItem.MpsOrderNo"></a> </div> to get identical results but because the {{ }}  expression has been removed there’s no double draw effect for this element. Again, not a great solution. The {{ }} syntax sure reads cleaner and is more fluent to type IMHO. In some cases you may also not have an outer element to attach ng-bind to which then requires you to artificially inject DOM elements into the page. This is especially painful if you have several consecutive values like {{Firstname}} {{Lastname}} for example. It’s an option though especially if you think of this issue up front and you don’t have a ton of expressions to deal with. Add the ng-cloak Styles manually You can also explicitly define the .css styles that Angular injects via code manually in your application’s style sheet. By doing so the styles become immediately available and so are applied right when the page loads – no flicker. I use the minimal:[ng-cloak] { display: none !important; } which works for:<div id="mainContainer" class="mainContainer dialog boxshadow" ng-app="app" ng-cloak> If you use one of the other combinations add the other CSS selectors as well or use the full style shown earlier. Angular will still load its version of the ng-cloak styling but it overrides those settings later, but this will do the trick of hiding the content before that CSS is injected into the page. Adding the CSS in your own style sheet works well, and is IMHO by far the best option. The nuclear option: Hiding the Content manually Using the explicit CSS is the best choice, so the following shouldn’t ever be necessary. But I’ll mention it here as it gives some insight how you can hide/show content manually on load for other frameworks or in your own markup based templates. Before I figured out that I could explicitly embed the CSS style into the page, I had tried to figure out why ng-cloak wasn’t doing its job. After wasting an hour getting nowhere I finally decided to just manually hide and show the container. The idea is simple – initially hide the container, then show it once Angular has done its initial processing and removal of the template markup from the page. You can manually hide the content and make it visible after Angular has gotten control. To do this I used:<div id="mainContainer" class="mainContainer boxshadow" ng-app="app" style="display:none"> Notice the display: none style that explicitly hides the element initially on the page. Then once Angular has run its initialization and effectively processed the template markup on the page you can show the content. For Angular this ‘ready’ event is the app.run() function:app.run( function ($rootScope, $location, cellService) { $("#mainContainer").show(); … }); This effectively removes the display:none style and the content displays. By the time app.run() fires the DOM is ready to displayed with filled data or at least empty data – Angular has gotten control. Edge Case Clearly this is an edge case. In general the initial HTML pages tend to be reasonably sized and the load time for the HTML and Angular are fast enough that there’s no flicker between the rendering times. This only becomes an issue as the initial pages get rather large. Regardless – if you have an Angular application it’s probably a good idea to add the CSS style into your application’s CSS (or a common shared one) just to make sure that content is always hidden. You never know how slow of a browser somebody might be running and while your super fast dev machine might not show any flicker, grandma’s old XP box very well might…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2014Posted in Angular  JavaScript  CSS  HTML   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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