information display - Page 370

Anatomy of a .NET Assembly - CLR metadata 2

- by Simon Cooper

Before we look any further at the CLR metadata, we need a quick diversion to understand how the metadata is actually stored. Encoding table information As an example, we'll have a look at a row in the TypeDef table. According to the spec, each TypeDef consists of the following: Flags specifying various properties of the class, including visibility. The name of the type. The namespace of the type. What type this type extends. The field list of this type. The method list of this type. How is all this data actually represented? Offset & RID encoding Most assemblies don't need to use a 4 byte value to specify heap offsets and RIDs everywhere, however we can't hard-code every offset and RID to be 2 bytes long as there could conceivably be more than 65535 items in a heap or more than 65535 fields or types defined in an assembly. So heap offsets and RIDs are only represented in the full 4 bytes if it is required; in the header information at the top of the #~ stream are 3 bits indicating if the #Strings, #GUID, or #Blob heaps use 2 or 4 bytes (the #US stream is not accessed from metadata), and the rowcount of each table. If the rowcount for a particular table is greater than 65535 then all RIDs referencing that table throughout the metadata use 4 bytes, else only 2 bytes are used. Coded tokens Not every field in a table row references a single predefined table. For example, in the TypeDef extends field, a type can extend another TypeDef (a type in the same assembly), a TypeRef (a type in a different assembly), or a TypeSpec (an instantiation of a generic type). A token would have to be used to let us specify the table along with the RID. Tokens are always 4 bytes long; again, this is rather wasteful of space. Cutting the RID down to 2 bytes would make each token 3 bytes long, which isn't really an optimum size for computers to read from memory or disk. However, every use of a token in the metadata tables can only point to a limited subset of the metadata tables. For the extends field, we only need to be able to specify one of 3 tables, which we can do using 2 bits: 0x0: TypeDef 0x1: TypeRef 0x2: TypeSpec We could therefore compress the 4-byte token that would otherwise be needed into a coded token of type TypeDefOrRef. For each type of coded token, the least significant bits encode the table the token points to, and the rest of the bits encode the RID within that table. We can work out whether each type of coded token needs 2 or 4 bytes to represent it by working out whether the maximum RID of every table that the coded token type can point to will fit in the space available. The space available for the RID depends on the type of coded token; a TypeOrMethodDef coded token only needs 1 bit to specify the table, leaving 15 bits available for the RID before a 4-byte representation is needed, whereas a HasCustomAttribute coded token can point to one of 18 different tables, and so needs 5 bits to specify the table, only leaving 11 bits for the RID before 4 bytes are needed to represent that coded token type. For example, a 2-byte TypeDefOrRef coded token with the value 0x0321 has the following bit pattern: 0 3 2 1 0000 0011 0010 0001 The first two bits specify the table - TypeRef; the other bits specify the RID. Because we've used the first two bits, we've got to shift everything along two bits: 000000 1100 1000 This gives us a RID of 0xc8. If any one of the TypeDef, TypeRef or TypeSpec tables had more than 16383 rows (2^14 - 1), then 4 bytes would need to be used to represent all TypeDefOrRef coded tokens throughout the metadata tables. Lists The third representation we need to consider is 1-to-many references; each TypeDef refers to a list of FieldDef and MethodDef belonging to that type. If we were to specify every FieldDef and MethodDef individually then each TypeDef would be very large and a variable size, which isn't ideal. There is a way of specifying a list of references without explicitly specifying every item; if we order the MethodDef and FieldDef tables by the owning type, then the field list and method list in a TypeDef only have to be a single RID pointing at the first FieldDef or MethodDef belonging to that type; the end of the list can be inferred by the field list and method list RIDs of the next row in the TypeDef table. Going back to the TypeDef If we have a look back at the definition of a TypeDef, we end up with the following reprensentation for each row: Flags - always 4 bytes Name - a #Strings heap offset. Namespace - a #Strings heap offset. Extends - a TypeDefOrRef coded token. FieldList - a single RID to the FieldDef table. MethodList - a single RID to the MethodDef table. So, depending on the number of entries in the heaps and tables within the assembly, the rows in the TypeDef table can be as small as 14 bytes, or as large as 24 bytes. Now we've had a look at how information is encoded within the metadata tables, in the next post we can see how they are arranged on disk.

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Implement Tree/Details With Taskflow Regions Using EJB

- by Deepak Siddappa

This article describes on Display Tree/Details using taskflow regions.Use Case DescriptionLet us take scenario where we need to display Tree/Details, left region contains category hierarchy with items listed in a tree structure (ex:- Region-Countries-Locations-Departments in tree format) and right region contains the Employees list.In detail, Here User may drills down through categories using a tree until Employees are listed. Clicking the tree node name displays Employee list in the adjacent pane related to particular tree node. Implementation StepsThe script for creating the tables and inserting the data required for this application CreateSchema.sql Lets create a Java EE Web Application with Entities based on Regions, Countries, Locations, Departments and Employees table. Create a Stateless Session Bean and data control for the Stateless Session Bean. Add the below code to the session bean and expose the method in local/remote interface and generate a data control for that.Note:- Here in the below code "em" is a EntityManager. public List<Employees> empFilteredByTreeNode(String treeNodeType, String paramValue) { String queryString = null; try { if (treeNodeType == "null") { queryString = "select * from Employees emp ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (Pattern.matches("[a-zA-Z]+[_]+[a-zA-Z]+[_]+[[0-9]+]+", treeNodeType)) { queryString = "select * from employees emp INNER JOIN departments dept\n" + "ON emp.department_id = dept.department_id JOIN locations loc\n" + "ON dept.location_id = loc.location_id JOIN countries cont\n" + "ON loc.country_id = cont.country_id JOIN regions reg\n" + "ON cont.region_id = reg.region_id and reg.region_name = '" + paramValue + "' ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (treeNodeType.contains("regionsFindAll_bc_countriesList_1")) { queryString = "select * from employees emp INNER JOIN departments dept \n" + "ON emp.department_id = dept.department_id JOIN locations loc \n" + "ON dept.location_id = loc.location_id JOIN countries cont \n" + "ON loc.country_id = cont.country_id and cont.country_name = '" + paramValue + "' ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (treeNodeType.contains("regionsFindAll_bc_locationsList_1")) { queryString = "select * from employees emp INNER JOIN departments dept ON emp.department_id = dept.department_id JOIN locations loc ON dept.location_id = loc.location_id and loc.city = '" + paramValue + "' ORDER BY emp.employee_id ASC"; } else if (treeNodeType.trim().contains("regionsFindAll_bc_departmentsList_1")) { queryString = "select * from Employees emp INNER JOIN Departments dept ON emp.DEPARTMENT_ID = dept.DEPARTMENT_ID and dept.DEPARTMENT_NAME = '" + paramValue + "'"; } } catch (NullPointerException e) { System.out.println(e.getMessage()); } return em.createNativeQuery(queryString, Employees.class).getResultList(); } In the ViewController project, create two ADF taskflow with page Fragments and name them as FirstTaskflow and SecondTaskflow respectively. Open FirstTaskflow,from component palette drop view(Page Fragment) name it as TreeList.jsff. Open SeconfTaskflow, from component palette drop view(Page Fragment) name it as EmpList.jsff and create two paramters in its overview parameters tab as shown in below image. Open TreeList.jsff , from data control palette drop regionsFindAll->Tree as ADF Tree. In Edit Tree Binding dialog, for Tree Level Rules select the display attributes as follows:-model.Regions - regionNamemodel.Countries - countryNamemodel.Locations - citymodel.Departments - departmentName In structure panel, click on af:Tree - t1 and select selectionListener with edit property. Create a "TreeBean" managed bean with scope as "session" as shown in below Image. Create new method as getTreeNodeSelectedValue and click ok. Open TreeBean managed bean and add the below code: private String treeNodeType; private String paramValue; public void getTreeNodeSelectedValue(SelectionEvent selectionEvent) { RichTree tree = (RichTree)selectionEvent.getSource(); RowKeySet addedSet = selectionEvent.getAddedSet(); Iterator i = addedSet.iterator(); TreeModel model = (TreeModel)tree.getValue(); model.setRowKey(i.next()); JUCtrlHierNodeBinding node = (JUCtrlHierNodeBinding)tree.getRowData(); //oracle.jbo.Row Row rw = node.getRow(); Object selectedTreeNode = node.getAttribute(0); Object treeListType = node.getBindings(); String treeNodeType = treeListType.toString(); this.setParamValue(selectedTreeNode.toString()); this.setTreeNodeType(treeNodeType); } public void setTreeNodeType(String treeNodeType) { this.treeNodeType = treeNodeType; } public String getTreeNodeType() { return treeNodeType; } public void setParamValue(String paramValue) { this.paramValue = paramValue; } public String getParamValue() { return paramValue; }<br /> Open EmpList.jsff , from data control palette drop empFilteredByTreeNode->Employees->Table as ADF Read-only Table. After selecting the Employees result set, in Edit Action Binding dialog window pass the pageFlowScope parameters as shown in below Image. In empList.jsff page, click Binding tab and click on Create Executable binding and select Invoke action and follow as shown in below image. Edit executeEmpFiltered invoke action properties and set the Refresh to ifNeeded, So when ever the page needs the method will be executed. Create Main.jspx page with page template as Oracle Three Column Layout. Drop FirstTaskflow as Region in start facet and drop SecondTaskflow as Region in center facet, Edit task Flow Binding dialog window pass the Input Paramters as shown in below Image. Run the Main.jspx, tree will be displayed in left region and emp details will displyaed on the right region. Click on the Americas in tree node, all emp related to the Americas related will be displayed. Click on Americas->United States of America->South San Francisco->Accounting, only employee belongs to the Accounting department will be displayed.

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Ok it has been pointed out to me

- by Ratman21

That it seems my blog is more of poor me or pity me or I deserve a job blog. Hmmm I wont say, I have not wined here as I have used this blog to vent my frustration on the whole out of work thing (lack of money, self worth, family issues and the never end bills coming my way) but, it was also me trying to reach to others in the same boat as well as advertising, hay I am out here, employers. It was also said, that I don’t have any thing listed here on me, like a cover letter or resume. Well there is but, it was so many months and post ago. Also what I had posted is not current. So here is my most current cover and resume. Scott L Newman 45219 Dutton Way Callahan, Fl. 32011 To Whom It May Concern: I am really interested in the IT vacancie that you have listed for your company. Maybe I don’t have all the qualifications you want (hold on don’t hit delete yet) yet! But maybe I do, as I have over 20 + years experience in "IT” RIGHT NOW. Read the rest of my cover and my resume. You will see what my “IT” skills are and it will Show that I can to this work! I can bring to your company along with my, can do attitude, a broad range of skills, including: Certified CompTIA A+, Security+ and Network+ Technician § 2.5 years (NOC) Network experience on large Cisco based Wan – UK to Austria § 20 years experience MIS/DP – Yes I can do IBM mainframes and Tandem non-stops too § 18 years experience as technical Help Desk support – panicking users, no problem § 18 years experience with PC/Server based system, intranet and internet systems § 10+ years experienced on: Microsoft Office, Windows XP and Data Network Fundamentals (YES I do windows) § Strong trouble shooting skills for software, hard ware and circuit issues (and I can tell you what kind of horrors I had to face on all of them). § Very experienced on working with customers on problems – again panicking users, no problem § Working experience with Remote Access (VPN/SecurID) – I didn’t just study them I worked on/with them § Skilled in getting info for and creating documentation for Operation procedures (I don’t just wait for them to give it to me I go out and get it. Waiting for info on working applications is, well dumb) Multiple software languages (Hey I have done some programming) And much more experiences in “IT” (Mortgage, stocks and financial information systems experience and have worked “IT” in a hospital) Can multitask, also have ability to adapt to change and learn quickly. (once was put in charge of a system that I had not worked with for over two years. Talk about having to relearn and adapt to changes but, I did it.) I would welcome the opportunity to further discuss this position with you. If you have questions or would like to schedule an interview, please contact me by phone at 904-879-4880 or on my cell 352-356-0945 or by e-mail at [email protected] or leave a message on my web site (http://beingscottnewman.webs.com/). I have enclosed/attached my resume for your review and I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for taking a moment to consider my cover letter and resume. I appreciate how busy you are. Sincerely, Scott L. Newman Scott L. Newman 45219 Dutton Way, Callahan, FL 32011? H (904)879-4880 C (352)356-0945 ? [email protected] Web - http://beingscottnewman.webs.com/ ______ OBJECTIVE To obtain a Network Operation or Helpdesk position. PROFILE Information Technology Professional with 20+ years of experience. Volunteer website creator and back-up sound technician at True Faith Christian Fellowship. CompTIA A+, Network+ and Security+ Certified. TECHNICAL AND PROFESSIONAL SKILLS § Technical Support § Frame Relay § Microsoft Office Suite § Inventory Management § ISDN § Windows NT/98/XP § Client/Vendor Relations § CICS § Cisco Routers/Switches § Networking/Administration § RPG § Helpdesk § Website Design/Dev./Management § Assembler § Visio § Programming § COBOL IV § EDUCATION ? New HorizonsComputerLearningCenter, Jacksonville, Florida – CompTIA A+, Security+ and Network+ Certified. Currently working on CCNA Certification ?MottCommunity College, Flint, Michigan – Associates Degree - Data Processing and General Education ? Currently studying Japanese PROFESSIONAL TrueFaithChristianFellowshipChurch – Callahan, FL, October 2009 – Present Web site Tech · Web site Creator/tech, back up song leader and back up sound technician. Note church web site is (http://ambassadorsforjesuschrist.webs.com/) U.S. Census (temp employee) Feb. 23 to March 8, 2010 · Enumerator for NassauCounty ThomasCreekBaptistChurch – Callahan, FL, June 2008 – September 2009 Churchsound and video technician · sound and video technician Fidelity National Information Services ? Jacksonville, FL ? February 01, 2005 to October 28, 2008 Client Server Dev/Analyst I · Monitored Multiple Debit Card sites, Check Authorization customers and the Card Auth system (AuthNet) for problems with the sites, connections, servers (on our LAN) and/or applications · Night (NOC) Network operator for a large Wide Area Network (WAN) · Monitored Multiple Check Authorization customers for problems with circuits, routers and applications · Resolved circuit and/or router issues or assist circuit carrier in resolving issue · Resolved application problems or assist application support in resolution · Liaison between customer and application support · Maintained and updated the NetOps Operation procedures Guide · Kept the listing of equipment on the raised floor updated · Involved in the training of all Night Check and Card server operation operators · FNIS acquired Certegy in 2005. Was one of 3 kept on. Certegy ? St.Pete, FL ? August 31, 2003 to February 1, 2005 Senior NetOps Operator(FNIS acquired Certegy in 2005 all of above jobs/skills were same as listed in FNIS) · Converting Documentation to Adobe format · Sole trainer of day/night shift System Management Center operators (SMC) · Equifax spun off Card/Check Dept. as Certegy. Certegy terminated contract with EDS. One of six in the whole IT dept that was kept on. EDS (Certegy Account) ? St.Pete, FL ? July 1, 1999 to August 31, 2003 Senior NetOps Operator · Equifax outsourced the NetOps dept. to EDS in 1999. · Same job skills as listed above for FNIS. Equifax ? St.Pete&Tampa, FL ? January 1, 1991 to July 1, 1999 NetOps/Tandem Operator · All of the above for FNIS, except for circuit and router issues · Operated, monitored and trouble shot Tandem mainframe and servers on LAN · Supported in the operation of the Print, Tape and Microfiche rooms · Equifax acquired TelaCredit in 1991. TelaCredit ? Tampa, FL ? June 28, 1989 to January 1, 1991 Tandem Operator · Operated and monitored Tandem Non-stop systems for Card and Check Auths · Operated multiple high-speed Laser printers and Microfiche printers · Mounted, filed and maintained 18 reel-to-reel mainframe tape drives, cartridges tape drives and tape library.

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Oracle Fusion Middleware gives you Choice and Portability for Public and Private Cloud

- by Michelle Kimihira

Author: Margaret Lee, Senior Director, Product Management, Oracle Fusion Middleware Cloud Computing allows customers to quickly develop and deploy applications in a shared environment. The environment can span across hardward (IaaS), foundation layer software (PaaS), and end-user software (SaaS). Cloud Computing provides compelling benefits in terms of business agility and IT cost savings. However, with complex, existing heterogeneous architectures, and concerns for security and manageability, enterprises are challenged to define their Cloud strategy. For most enterprises, the solution is a hybrid of private and public cloud. Fusion Middleware supports customers’ Cloud requirements through choice and portability. Fusion Middleware supports a variety of cloud development and deployment models: Oracle [Public] Cloud; customer private cloud; hybrid of these two, and traditional dedicated, on-premise model Customers can develop applications in any of these models and deployed in another, providing the flexibility and portability they need Oracle Cloud is a public cloud offering. Within Oracle Cloud, Fusion Middleware provides two key offerings include the Developer cloud service and Java cloud deployment service. Developer Cloud Service Simplify Development: Automated provisioned environment; pre-configured and integrated; web-based administration Deploy Automatically: Fully integrated with Oracle Cloud for Java deployment; workflow ensures build & test Collaborate & Manage: Fits any size team; integrated team source repository; continuous integration; task/defect tracking Integrated with all major IDEs: Oracle JDeveloper; NetBeans; Eclipse Java Cloud Service Java Cloud service provides flexible Java deployment environment for departmental applications and development, staging, QA, training, and demo environments. It also supports customizations deployments for SaaS-based Fusion Applications customers. Some key features of Java Cloud Service include: WebLogic Server on Exalogic, secure, highly available infrastructure Database Service & IDE Integration Open, Standard-based Deploy Web Apps, Web Services, REST Services Fully managed and supported by Oracle For more information, please visit Oracle Cloud, Oracle Cloud Java Service and Oracle Cloud Developer Service. If your enterprise prefers a private cloud, for reasons such as security, control, manageability, and complex integration that prevent your applications from being deployed on a public cloud, Fusion Middleware also provide you with the products and tools you need. Sometimes called Private PaaS, private clouds have their predecessors in shared-services arrangements many large companies have been building in the past decade. The difference, however, are in the scope of the services, and depth of their capabilities. In terms of vertical stack depth, private clouds not only provide hardware and software infrastructure to run your applications, they also provide services such as integration and security, that your applications need. Horizontally, private clouds provide monitoring, management, lifecycle, and charge back capabilities out-of-box that shared-services platforms did not have before. Oracle Fusion Middleware includes the complete stack of hardware and software for you to build private clouds: SOA suite and BPM suite to support systems integration and process flow between applications deployed on your private cloud and the rest of your organization Identity and Access Management suite to provide security, provisioning, and access services for applications deployed on your private cloud WebLogic Server to run your applications Enterprise Manager's Cloud Management pack to monitor, manage, upgrade applications running on your private cloud Exalogic or optimized Oracle-Sun hardware to build out your private cloud The most important key differentiator for Oracle's cloud solutions is portability, between private and public clouds. This is unique to Oracle because portability requires the vendor to have product depth and breadth in both public cloud services and private cloud product offerings. Most public cloud vendors cannot provide the infrastructure and tools customers need to build their own private clouds. In reverse, traditional software tools vendors typically do not have the product and expertise breadth to build out and offer a public cloud. Oracle can. It is important for customers that the products and technologies Oracle uses to build its public is the same set that it sells to customers for them to build private clouds. Fundamentally, that enables skills reuse, as well as application portability. For more information on Oracle PaaS offerings, please visit Oracle's product information page. Resources Follow us on Twitter and Facebook Subscribe to our regular Fusion Middleware Newsletter

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Day 1 - Finding Like Minds

- by dapostolov

So, is being a Game Developer any different from being an IT Developer? I picture a poorly lit environment where I get to purchase my own desk lamp; I'm thinking one of those huge lava lamps that pump out so much heat you could fry an egg on it. To my right: a "great wall" of empty coke cans dwarf me. Eating my last slice of pizza I look across my desk to see a fellow developer with a smug look on his face; he's just coded his latest module for the game and it looks like he's in nirvana. My duty, of course, is to remind him to keep focused on the job at hand. So, picking up my trusty elastic and aerodynamically crafted paper bullet I begin a 10 minute war of welts and laughter which is promptly abrupted by our Project Manager demanding more details from our morning Scrum meeting. After providing about 5 minutes of geek speak and several words of comfort to make his eyes glaze over...it hits me, the idea for the module...beckoning my developer friend over, we quickly shoo the Project Manager away and begin our brainstorming frenzy ... now, where'd I put that full can of coke? OK. OK. This isn't probably the most ideal game developer environment, but it definitely sounds fun to me...and from what I gather is nothing like most game development companies. But I'm not doing this blog series to "go pro"; like I stated in my first post I want to make a 2D game from an idea my best friend and I drummed up long, long ago. I'm in this for the passion AND I want to see how easy it is for us .Net Developers to create a game. So where do I start? Where can I find like minded individuals? What technologies are there? What do I need to make a video game? The questions are endless....AND...since I already have an idea ... lets start with ... Technology (yes, I'm a geek, live with it...) Technology OK. Predominantly, games are still made in C++ or even C. I'm not sure how much assembly code is floating around lately, however, that is not my concern. I do know C / C++ from my past, enough to even get me by, but I'm mainly interested in a recent, not-so-new, technology called XNA. What is XNA? XNA allows us .Net Developers to make 2D / 3D games for windows, Xbox*, and Windows Mobile 7*. * = for a nominal fee *cough* The following link is your one stop shop to XNA game development: http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted The above site hosts information such as: - getting started - a sample/instructional shooter game in 2D / 3D with code (if I'm taking too long for you in this blog series) - downloads - starter kits... http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/starterkits/ And of course...forums. You can also subscribe and pay for their premium membership which gets you some pretty awesome tutorials, resources, downloads, and premium community support. Some general Wiki information about XNA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNA_%28Microsoft%29 Community Support OK. Let's move on to industry and community support. Apart from XNA, there are some really cool sites out there, I just haven't found all of them yet. However, I found a really cool Game Development website called Gamastura. You can click on the following link to get you there: http://www.gamasutra.com/ The site is 100% dedicated to "The Art & Business of Making Games". Armed with blogs, twitter, jobs/resumes and most importantly industry news; one could subscribe to the feed and got lost in the wealth of information it provides. On a side note: I remember Gamasutra being around when my best friend and I wanted to make a video game...meaning, they've been around for a while now. I think the most beneficial aspect of this site is to understand the industry you want to get into. Otherwise, it's just a cool site to keep up to date with the industry in general. Another Community Support option is LinkedIn. Amongst the land of extremely bloated achievements and responsibilities lay 3 groups (that I have found) that deal with game development.: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=59205 - Game Developers http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=824817 - DirectX Game Developer Network http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=756587 - DirectX Developers The Game Developers group in LinkedIn is by far the most active of the three and could possibly provide a wealth of support. What I've done thus far: - I lightly researched the XNA technology - I looked around for some community sites to assist me - I downloaded the XNA Game Studio 3.1 on my PC and installed it on my IDE - I even tried both tutorials! http://creators.xna.com/en-US/education/gettingstarted/bgintro/chapter1 Best Regards D.

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Pace Layering Comes Alive

- by Tanu Sood

v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";} Rick Beers is Senior Director of Product Management for Oracle Fusion Middleware. Prior to joining Oracle, Rick held a variety of executive operational positions at Corning, Inc. and Bausch & Lomb. With a professional background that includes senior management positions in manufacturing, supply chain and information technology, Rick brings a unique set of experiences to cover the impact that technology can have on business models, processes and organizations. Rick hosts the IT Leaders Editorial on a monthly basis. By now, readers of this column are quite familiar with Oracle AppAdvantage, a unified framework of middleware technologies, infrastructure and applications utilizing a pace layered approach to enterprise systems platforms. 1. Standardize and Consolidate core Enterprise Applications by removing invasive customizations, costly workarounds and the complexity that multiple instances creates. 2. Move business specific processes and applications to the Differentiate Layer, thus creating greater business agility with process extensions and best of breed applications managed by cross- application process orchestration. 3. The Innovate Layer contains all the business capabilities required for engagement, collaboration and intuitive decision making. This is the layer where innovation will occur, as people engage one another in a secure yet open and informed way. 4. Simplify IT by minimizing complexity, improving performance and lowering cost with secure, reliable and managed systems across the entire Enterprise. But what hasn’t been discussed is the pace layered architecture that Oracle AppAdvantage adopts. What is it, what are its origins and why is it relevant to enterprise scale applications and technologies? It’s actually a fascinating tale that spans the past 20 years and a basic understanding of it provides a wonderful context to what is evolving as the future of enterprise systems platforms. It all begins in 1994 with a book by noted architect Stewart Brand, of ’Whole Earth Catalog’ fame. In his 1994 book How Buildings Learn, Brand popularized the term ‘Shearing Layers’, arguing that any building is actually a hierarchy of pieces, each of which inherently changes at different rates. In 1997 he produced a 6 part BBC Series adapted from the book, in which Part 6 focuses on Shearing Layers. In this segment Brand begins to introduce the concept of ‘pace’. Brand further refined this idea in his subsequent book, The Clock of the Long Now, which began to link the concept of Shearing Layers to computing and introduced the term ‘pace layering’, where he proposes that: “An imperative emerges: an adaptive [system] has to allow slippage between the differently-paced systems … otherwise the slow systems block the flow of the quick ones and the quick ones tear up the slow ones with their constant change. Embedding the systems together may look efficient at first but over time it is the opposite and destructive as well.” In 2000, IBM architects Ian Simmonds and David Ing published a paper entitled A Shearing Layers Approach to Information Systems Development, which applied the concept of Shearing Layers to systems design and development. It argued that at the time systems were still too rigid; that they constrained organizations by their inability to adapt to changes. The findings in the Conclusions section are particularly striking: “Our starting motivation was that enterprises need to become more adaptive, and that an aspect of doing that is having adaptable computer systems. The challenge is then to optimize information systems development for change (high maintenance) rather than stability (low maintenance). Our response is to make it explicit within software engineering the notion of shearing layers, and explore it as the principle that systems should be built to be adaptable in response to the qualitatively different rates of change to which they will be subjected. This allows us to separate functions that should legitimately change relatively slowly and at significant cost from that which should be changeable often, quickly and cheaply.” The problem at the time of course was that this vision of adaptable systems was simply not possible within the confines of 1st generation ERP, which were conceived, designed and developed for standardization and compliance. It wasn’t until the maturity of open, standards based integration, and the middleware innovation that followed, that pace layering became an achievable goal. And Oracle is leading the way. Oracle’s AppAdvantage framework makes pace layering come alive by taking a strategic vision 20 years in the making and transforming it to a reality. It allows enterprises to retain and even optimize their existing ERP systems, while wrapping around those ERP systems three layers of capabilities that inherently adapt as needed, at a pace that’s optimal for the enterprise.

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Content Query Web Part and the Yes/No Field

- by Bil Simser

The Content Query Web Part (CQWP) is a pretty powerful beast. It allows you to do multiple site queries and aggregate the results. This is great for rolling up content and doing some summary type reporting. Here’s a trick to remember about Yes/No fields and using the CQWP. If you’re building a news style site and want to aggregate say all the announcements that people tag a certain way, up onto the home page this might be a solution. First we need to allow a way for users of all our sites to mark an announcement for inclusion on our Intranet Home Page. We’ll do this by just modifying the Announcement Content type and adding a Yes/No field to it. There are alternate ways of doing this like building a new Announcement type or stapling a feature to all sites to add our column but this is pretty low impact and only affects our current site collection so let’s go with it for now, okay? You can berate me in the comments about the proper way I should have done this part. Go to the Site Settings for the Site Collection and click on Site Content Types under the Galleries. This takes you to the gallery for this site and all subsites. Scroll down until you see the List Content Types and click on Announcements. Now we’re modifying the Announcement content type which affects all those announcement lists that are created by default if you’re building sites using the Team Site template (or creating a new Announcements list on any site for that matter). Click on Add from new site column under the Column list. This will allow us to create a new Yes/No field that users will see in Announcement items. This field will allow the user to flag the announcement for inclusion on the home page. Feel free to modify the fields as you see fit for your environment, this is just an example. Now that we’ve added the column to our Announcements Content type we can go into any site that has an announcement list, modify that announcement and flag it to be included on our home page. See the new Featured column? That was the result of modifying our Announcements Content Type on this site collection. Now we can move onto the dirty part, displaying it in a CQWP on the home page. And here is where the fun begins (and the head scratching should end). On our home page we want to drop a Content Query Web Part and aggregate any Announcement that’s been flagged as Featured by the users (we could also add the filter to handle Expires so we don’t show old content so go ahead and do that if you want). First add a CQWP to the page then modify the settings for the web part. In the first section, Query, we want the List Type to be set to Announcements and the Content type to be Announcement so set your options like this: Click Apply and you’ll see the results display all Announcements from any site in the site collection. I have five team sites created each with a unique announcement added to them. Now comes the filtering. We don’t want to include every announcement, only ones users flag using that Featured column we added. At first blush you might scroll down to the Additional Filters part of the Query options and set the Featured column to be equal to Yes: This seems correct doesn’t it? After all, the column is a Yes/No column and looking at an announcement in the site, it displays the field as Yes or No: However after applying the filter you get this result: (I have the announcements from Team Site 1 and Team Site 4 flagged as Featured) Huh? It’s BACKWARDS! Let’s confirm that. Go back in and change the Additional Filters section from Yes to No and hit Apply and you get this: Wait a minute? Shouldn’t I see Team Site 1 and 4 if the logic is backwards? Why am I seeing the same thing as before. What gives… For whatever reason, unknown to me, a Yes/No field (even though it displays as such) really uses 1 and 0 behind the scenes. Yeah, someone was stuck on using integer values for booleans when they wrote SharePoint (probably after a long night of white boarding ways to mess with developers heads) and came up with this. The solution is pretty simple but not very discoverable. Set the filter to include your flagged items like so: And it will filter the items marked as Featured correctly giving you this result: This kind of solution could also be extended and enhanced. Here are a few suggestions and ideas: Modify the ItemStyle.xsl file to add a new style for this aggregation which would include the first few paragraphs of the body (or perhaps add another field to the Content type called Excerpt or Summary and display that instead) Add an Image column to the Announcement Content type to include a Picture field and display it in the summary Add a Category choice field (Employee News, Current Events, Headlines, etc.) and add multiple CQWPs to the home page filtering each one on a different category I know some may find this topic old and dusty but I didn’t see a lot out there specifically on filtering the Yes/No fields and the whole 1/0 trick was a little wonky, so I figured a few pictures would help walk through overcoming yet another SharePoint weirdness. With a little work and some creative juices you can easily us the power of aggregation and the CQWP to build a news site from content on your team sites.

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ADF Business Components

- by Arda Eralp

ADF Business Components and JDeveloper simplify the development, delivery, and customization of business applications for the Java EE platform. With ADF Business Components, developers aren't required to write the application infrastructure code required by the typical Java EE application to: Connect to the database Retrieve data Lock database records Manage transactions ADF Business Components addresses these tasks through its library of reusable software components and through the supporting design time facilities in JDeveloper. Most importantly, developers save time using ADF Business Components since the JDeveloper design time makes typical development tasks entirely declarative. In particular, JDeveloper supports declarative development with ADF Business Components to: Author and test business logic in components which automatically integrate with databases Reuse business logic through multiple SQL-based views of data, supporting different application tasks Access and update the views from browser, desktop, mobile, and web service clients Customize application functionality in layers without requiring modification of the delivered application The goal of ADF Business Components is to make the business services developer more productive. ADF Business Components provides a foundation of Java classes that allow your business-tier application components to leverage the functionality provided in the following areas: Simplifying Data Access Design a data model for client displays, including only necessary data Include master-detail hierarchies of any complexity as part of the data model Implement end-user Query-by-Example data filtering without code Automatically coordinate data model changes with business services layer Automatically validate and save any changes to the database Enforcing Business Domain Validation and Business Logic Declaratively enforce required fields, primary key uniqueness, data precision-scale, and foreign key references Easily capture and enforce both simple and complex business rules, programmatically or declaratively, with multilevel validation support Navigate relationships between business domain objects and enforce constraints related to compound components Supporting Sophisticated UIs with Multipage Units of Work Automatically reflect changes made by business service application logic in the user interface Retrieve reference information from related tables, and automatically maintain the information when the user changes foreign-key values Simplify multistep web-based business transactions with automatic web-tier state management Handle images, video, sound, and documents without having to use code Synchronize pending data changes across multiple views of data Consistently apply prompts, tooltips, format masks, and error messages in any application Define custom metadata for any business components to support metadata-driven user interface or application functionality Add dynamic attributes at runtime to simplify per-row state management Implementing High-Performance Service-Oriented Architecture Support highly functional web service interfaces for business integration without writing code Enforce best-practice interface-based programming style Simplify application security with automatic JAAS integration and audit maintenance "Write once, run anywhere": use the same business service as plain Java class, EJB session bean, or web service Streamlining Application Customization Extend component functionality after delivery without modifying source code Globally substitute delivered components with extended ones without modifying the application ADF Business Components implements the business service through the following set of cooperating components: Entity object An entity object represents a row in a database table and simplifies modifying its data by handling all data manipulation language (DML) operations for you. These are basically your 1 to 1 representation of a database table. Each table in the database will have 1 and only 1 EO. The EO contains the mapping between columns and attributes. EO's also contain the business logic and validation. These are you core data services. They are responsible for updating, inserting and deleting records. The Attributes tab displays the actual mapping between attributes and columns, the mapping has following fields: Name : contains the name of the attribute we expose in our data model. Type : defines the data type of the attribute in our application. Column : specifies the column to which we want to map the attribute with Column Type : contains the type of the column in the database View object A view object represents a SQL query. You use the full power of the familiar SQL language to join, filter, sort, and aggregate data into exactly the shape required by the end-user task. The attributes in the View Objects are actually coming from the Entity Object. In the end the VO will generate a query but you basically build a VO by selecting which EO need to participate in the VO and which attributes of those EO you want to use. That's why you have the Entity Usage column so you can see the relation between VO and EO. In the query tab you can clearly see the query that will be generated for the VO. At this stage we don't need it and just use it for information purpose. In later stages we might use it. Application module An application module is the controller of your data layer. It is responsible for keeping hold of the transaction. It exposes the data model to the view layer. You expose the VO's through the Application Module. This is the abstraction of your data layer which you want to show to the outside word.It defines an updatable data model and top-level procedures and functions (called service methods) related to a logical unit of work related to an end-user task. While the base components handle all the common cases through built-in behavior, customization is always possible and the default behavior provided by the base components can be easily overridden or augmented. When you create EO's, a foreign key will be translated into an association in our model. It defines the type of relation and who is the master and child as well as how the visibility of the association looks like. A similar concept exists to identify relations between view objects. These are called view links. These are almost identical as association except that a view link is based upon attributes defined in the view object. It can also be based upon an association. Here's a short summary: Entity Objects: representations of tables Association: Relations between EO's. Representations of foreign keys View Objects: Logical model View Links: Relationships between view objects Application Model: interface to your application

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WEBLOGIC 12C HANDS-ON BOOTCAMP

- by agallego

Oracle PartnerNetwork | Account | Feedback JOIN THE ORACLE WEBLOGIC PARTNER COMMUNITY AND ATTEND A WEBLOGIC 12C HANDS-ON BOOTCAMP Dear partner As a valued partner we would like to invite you for the WebLogic Partner Community and our WebLogic 12c hands-on Bootcamps – free of charge! Please first login at http://partner.oracle.com and then visit: WebLogic Partner Community. (If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center). The goal of the WebLogic Partner Community is to provide you with the latest information on Oracle's offerings and to facilitate the exchange of experience within community members. Register Now FREE Assessment vouchers to become certified and WebLogic Server 12c 200 new Features and Training Connect and Network WebLogic Blogs WebLogic on Facebook WebLogic on LinkedIn WebLogic on Twitter WebLogic on Oracle Mix WebLogic 12c hands-on Workshops We offer free3 days hands-on WebLogic 12c workshops for Oracle partners who want to become Application Grid Specialized: Register Here! Country Date Location Registration Germany 3-5 April 2012 Oracle Düsseldorf Click here France 24-26 April 2012 Oracle Colombes Click here Spain 08-10 May 2012 Oracle Madrid Click here Netherlands 22-24 May 2012 Oracle Amsterdam Click here United Kingdom 06-08 June 2012 Oracle Reading Click here Italy 19-21 June 2012 Oracle Cinisello Balsamo Click here Portugal 10-12 July 2012 Oracle Lisbon Click here Skill requirements Attendees need to have the following skills as this is required by the product-set and to make sure they get the most out of the training: Basic knowledge in Java and JavaEE Understanding the Application Server concept Basic knowledge in older releases of WebLogic Server would be beneficial Member of WebLogic Partner Community for registration please vist http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea Hardware requirements Every participant works on his own notebook. The minimal hardware requirements are: 4Gb physical RAM (we will boot the image with 2Gb RAM) dual core CPU 15 GB HD Software requirements Please install Oracle VM VirtualBox 4.1.8 Follow-up and certification With the workshop registration you agree to the following next steps Follow-up training attend and pass the Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist Registration For details and registration please visit Register Here Free WebLogic Certification (Free assessment voucher to become certified) For all WebLogic experts, we offer free vouchers worth $195 for the Oracle Application Grid Certified Implementation Specialist assessment. To demonstrate your WebLogic knowledge you first have to pass the free online assessment Oracle Application Grid PreSales Specialist. For free vouchers, please send an e-mail with the screenshot of your Oracle Application Grid PreSales certirficate to [email protected] including your Name, Company, E-mail and Country. Note: This offer is limited to partners from Europe Middle East and Africa. Partners from other countries please contact your Oracle partner manager. WebLogic Specialization To become specialized in Application Grid, please make sure that you access the: Application Grid Specialization Guide Application Grid Specialization Checklist If you have any questions please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Oracle WebLogic Server 12c Key New Capabilities Java EE 6 and Developer Productivity Simplified Deployment and Management with Virtualization Integrated Traffic Management Enhanced High Availability and Disaster Recovery Much Higher Performance For more information please visit: Presentation from the WebLogic 12c launch Technical Presentation from the WebLogic 12c launch WebLogic OTN Website WebLogic 12c Virtual Conference Environment WebLogic Partner Community For regular information become a member in the WebLogic Partner Community please visit: http://www.oracle.com/partners/goto/wls-emea (OPN account required). If you need support with your account please contact the Oracle Partner Business Center. Best regards, Jürgen Kress WebLogic Partner Adoption EMEA Tel. +49 89 1430 1479 E-Mail: [email protected] Copyright © 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Contact PBC | Legal Notices and Terms of Use | Privacy Statement Oracle Corporation - Worldwide Headquarters, 500 Oracle Parkway, OPL - E-mail Services, Redwood Shores, CA 94065, United States Your privacy is important to us. You can login to your account to update your e-mail subscriptions or you can opt-out of all Oracle Marketing e-mails at any time. Please note that opting-out of Marketing communications does not affect your receipt of important business communications related to your current relationship with Oracle such as Security Updates, Event Registration notices, Account Management and Support/Service communications.

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Space invaders clone not moving properly

- by ThePlan

I'm trying to make a basic space invaders clone in allegro 5, I've got my game set up, basic events and such, here is the code: #include <allegro5/allegro.h> #include <allegro5/allegro_image.h> #include <allegro5/allegro_primitives.h> #include <allegro5/allegro_font.h> #include <allegro5/allegro_ttf.h> #include "Entity.h" // GLOBALS ========================================== const int width = 500; const int height = 500; const int imgsize = 3; bool key[5] = {false, false, false, false, false}; bool running = true; bool draw = true; // FUNCTIONS ======================================== void initSpaceship(Spaceship &ship); void moveSpaceshipRight(Spaceship &ship); void moveSpaceshipLeft(Spaceship &ship); void initInvader(Invader &invader); void moveInvaderRight(Invader &invader); void moveInvaderLeft(Invader &invader); void initBullet(Bullet &bullet); void fireBullet(); void doCollision(); void updateInvaders(); void drawText(); enum key_t { UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, SPACE }; enum source_t { INVADER, DEFENDER }; int main(void) { if(!al_init()) { return -1; } Spaceship ship; Invader invader; Bullet bullet; al_init_image_addon(); al_install_keyboard(); al_init_font_addon(); al_init_ttf_addon(); ALLEGRO_DISPLAY *display = al_create_display(width, height); ALLEGRO_EVENT_QUEUE *event_queue = al_create_event_queue(); ALLEGRO_TIMER *timer = al_create_timer(1.0 / 60); ALLEGRO_BITMAP *images[imgsize]; ALLEGRO_FONT *font1 = al_load_font("arial.ttf", 20, 0); al_register_event_source(event_queue, al_get_keyboard_event_source()); al_register_event_source(event_queue, al_get_display_event_source(display)); al_register_event_source(event_queue, al_get_timer_event_source(timer)); images[0] = al_load_bitmap("defender.bmp"); images[1] = al_load_bitmap("invader.bmp"); images[2] = al_load_bitmap("explosion.bmp"); al_convert_mask_to_alpha(images[0], al_map_rgb(0, 0, 0)); al_convert_mask_to_alpha(images[1], al_map_rgb(0, 0, 0)); al_convert_mask_to_alpha(images[2], al_map_rgb(0, 0, 0)); initSpaceship(ship); initBullet(bullet); initInvader(invader); al_start_timer(timer); while(running) { ALLEGRO_EVENT ev; al_wait_for_event(event_queue, &ev); if(ev.type == ALLEGRO_EVENT_TIMER) { draw = true; if(key[RIGHT] == true) moveSpaceshipRight(ship); if(key[LEFT] == true) moveSpaceshipLeft(ship); } else if(ev.type == ALLEGRO_EVENT_DISPLAY_CLOSE) running = false; else if(ev.type == ALLEGRO_EVENT_KEY_DOWN) { switch(ev.keyboard.keycode) { case ALLEGRO_KEY_ESCAPE: running = false; break; case ALLEGRO_KEY_LEFT: key[LEFT] = true; break; case ALLEGRO_KEY_RIGHT: key[RIGHT] = true; break; case ALLEGRO_KEY_SPACE: key[SPACE] = true; break; } } else if(ev.type == ALLEGRO_KEY_UP) { switch(ev.keyboard.keycode) { case ALLEGRO_KEY_LEFT: key[LEFT] = false; break; case ALLEGRO_KEY_RIGHT: key[RIGHT] = false; break; case ALLEGRO_KEY_SPACE: key[SPACE] = false; break; } } if(draw && al_is_event_queue_empty(event_queue)) { draw = false; al_draw_bitmap(images[0], ship.pos_x, ship.pos_y, 0); al_flip_display(); al_clear_to_color(al_map_rgb(0, 0, 0)); } } al_destroy_font(font1); al_destroy_event_queue(event_queue); al_destroy_timer(timer); for(int i = 0; i < imgsize; i++) al_destroy_bitmap(images[i]); al_destroy_display(display); } // FUNCTION LOGIC ====================================== void initSpaceship(Spaceship &ship) { ship.lives = 3; ship.speed = 2; ship.pos_x = width / 2; ship.pos_y = height - 20; } void initInvader(Invader &invader) { invader.health = 100; invader.count = 40; invader.speed = 0.5; invader.pos_x = 300; invader.pos_y = 300; } void initBullet(Bullet &bullet) { bullet.speed = 10; } void moveSpaceshipRight(Spaceship &ship) { ship.pos_x += ship.speed; if(ship.pos_x >= width) ship.pos_x = width-30; } void moveSpaceshipLeft(Spaceship &ship) { ship.pos_x -= ship.speed; if(ship.pos_x <= 0) ship.pos_x = 0+30; } However it's not behaving the way I want it to behave, in fact the behavior for the ship movement is un-normal. Basically I specified that the ship only moves when the right/left key is down, however the ship is moving constantly to the direction of the key pressed, it never stops although it should only move while my key is down. Even more weird behavior, when I press the opposite key the ship completely stops no matter what else I press. What's wrong with the code? Why does the ship move constantly even after I specified it only moves when a key is down?

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Avoiding coupling

- by Seralize

It is also true that a system may become so coupled, where each class is dependent on other classes that depend on other classes, that it is no longer possible to make a change in one place without having a ripple effect and having to make subsequent changes in many places.[1] This is why using an interface or an abstract class can be valuable in any object-oriented software project. Quote from Wikipedia Starting from scratch I'm starting from scratch with a project that I recently finished because I found the code to be too tightly coupled and hard to refactor, even when using MVC. I will be using MVC on my new project aswell but want to try and avoid the pitfalls this time, hopefully with your help. Project summary My issue is that I really wish to keep the Controller as clean as possible, but it seems like I can't do this. The basic idea of the program is that the user picks wordlists which is sent to the game engine. It will pick random words from the lists until there are none left. Problem at hand My main problem is that the game will have 'modes', and need to check the input in different ways through a method called checkWord(), but exactly where to put this and how to abstract it properly is a challenge to me. I'm new to design patterns, so not sure whether there exist any might fit my problem. My own attempt at abstraction Here is what I've gotten so far after hours of 'refactoring' the design plans, and I know it's long, but it's the best I could do to try and give you an overview (Note: As this is the sketch, anything is subject to change, all help and advice is very welcome. Also note the marked coupling points): Wordlist class Wordlist { // Basic CRUD etc. here! // Other sample methods: public function wordlistCount($user_id) {} // Returns count of how many wordlists a user has public function getAll($user_id) {} // Returns all wordlists of a user } Word class Word { // Basic CRUD etc. here! // Other sample methods: public function wordCount($wordlist_id) {} // Returns count of words in a wordlist public function getAll($wordlist_id) {} // Returns all words from a wordlist public function getWordInfo($word_id) {} // Returns information about a word } Wordpicker class Wordpicker { // The class needs to know which words and wordlists to exclude protected $_used_words = array(); protected $_used_wordlists = array(); // Wordlists to pick words from protected $_wordlists = array(); /* Public Methods */ public function setWordlists($wordlists = array()) {} public function setUsedWords($used_words = array()) {} public function setUsedWordlists($used_wordlists = array()) {} public function getRandomWord() {} // COUPLING POINT! Will most likely need to communicate with both the Wordlist and Word classes /* Protected Methods */ protected function _checkAvailableWordlists() {} // COUPLING POINT! Might need to check if wordlists are deleted etc. protected function _checkAvailableWords() {} // COUPLING POINT! Method needs to get all words in a wordlist from the Word class } Game class Game { protected $_session_id; // The ID of a game session which gets stored in the database along with game details protected $_game_info = array(); // Game instantiation public function __construct($user_id) { if (! $this->_session_id = $this->_gameExists($user_id)) { // New game } else { // Resume game } } // This is the method I tried to make flexible by using abstract classes etc. // Does it even belong in this class at all? public function checkWord($answer, $native_word, $translation) {} // This method checks the answer against the native word / translation word, depending on game mode public function getGameInfo() {} // Returns information about a game session, or creates it if it does not exist public function deleteSession($session_id) {} // Deletes a game session from the database // Methods dealing with game session information protected function _gameExists($user_id) {} protected function _getProgress($session_id) {} protected function _updateProgress($game_info = array()) {} } The Game /* CONTROLLER */ /* "Guess the word" page */ // User input $game_type = $_POST['game_type']; // Chosen with radio buttons etc. $wordlists = $_POST['wordlists']; // Chosen with checkboxes etc. // Starts a new game or resumes one from the database $game = new Game($_SESSION['user_id']); $game_info = $game->getGameInfo(); // Instantiates a new Wordpicker $wordpicker = new Wordpicker(); $wordpicker->setWordlists((isset($game_info['wordlists'])) ? $game_info['wordlists'] : $wordlists); $wordpicker->setUsedWordlists((isset($game_info['used_wordlists'])) ? $game_info['used_wordlists'] : NULL); $wordpicker->setUsedWords((isset($game_info['used_words'])) ? $game_info['used_words'] : NULL); // Fetches an available word if (! $word_id = $wordpicker->getRandomWord()) { // No more words left - game over! $game->deleteSession($game_info['id']); redirect(); } else { // Presents word details to the user $word = new Word(); $word_info = $word->getWordInfo($word_id); } The Bit to Finish /* CONTROLLER */ /* "Check the answer" page */ // ?????????????????? ( http://pastebin.com/cc6MtLTR ) Make sure you toggle the 'Layout Width' to the right for a better view. Thanks in advance. Questions To which extent should objects be loosely coupled? If object A needs info from object B, how is it supposed to get this without losing too much cohesion? As suggested in the comments, models should hold all business logic. However, as objects should be independent, where to glue them together? Should the model contain some sort of "index" or "client" area which connects the dots? Edit: So basically what I should do for a start is to make a new model which I can more easily call with oneliners such as $model->doAction(); // Lots of code in here which uses classes! How about the method for checking words? Should it be it's own object? I'm not sure where I should put it as it's pretty much part of the 'game'. But on another hand, I could just leave out the 'abstraction and OOPness' and make it a method of the 'client model' which will be encapsulated from the controller anyway. Very unsure about this.

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R12.0 Cash Management Consolidated Patch Collection (CPC) And R12.1 Cash Management Recommended Patch Collection (RPC)

- by user793553

If you have Oracle E-Business Suite's Cash Management (CE) application installed, you'll want to be sure to install the latest CPC (Consolidated Patch Collection) if you are using a R12.0 version of the apps, or the latest RPC (Recommended Patch Collection) for the R12.1 version of the apps. These collections give you all the fixes currently available for known issues in the specified versions of the application, including all of the latest Root Cause Analysis Fixes (RCAs)! What is an "RPC" (for R12.1 users)? Since the release of 12.1, a number of recommended patches for Oracle Cash Management have been made available as standalone patches to help address important business process issues. Adoption of these patches was highly recommended at the time, but not always implemented, so to further facilitate adoption of these patches, Oracle consolidated them into product-specific Recommended Patch Collections (RPCs) - a collection of recommended patches. They were created by Oracle Development with the following goals in mind: Stability: To address data integrity issues that have been identified by Oracle Development and Oracle Software Support as having the potential to interfere with the normal completion of important business processes (such as, period close, etc.). Root Cause Fixes (RCAs): To make available root cause fixes for known data integrity issues. Compact: To keep the file footprint as small as possible to help facilitate the install process and minimize testing. Granular: To compile the collection of patches based on functional areas, allowing a customer to apply multiple RPCs at once, or in phases (based on individual needs and goals). Where to start ALL R12 Cash Management users (R12.0 and R12.1 users) should start with the following Note on My Oracle Support (MOS): Doc ID 1367845.1: R12: Cash Management Recommended Patch Collections It's a great place for important implementation information about both sets of critical patch collections! For R12.1x users R12.1 users should also take a look at the documents below for even more information about the RPC for the R12.1.x versions of the Cash Management application, and other related available RPCs: Note Number Title 1489997.1 Master Troubleshooting Guide for CE: Reconciliation & Clearing [VIDEO] 954704.1 EBS: R12.1 Oracle Financials Recommended Patch Collections (RPCs) 1316506.1 R12: Oracle CE: Upgrading from R11i to R12.1: Latest Recommended Patches Patch Wizard Utility While a patch may contain several hundred files, the impact on your system may actually be minimal. Patches contain hard prerequisites that are intended to make a patch work on a very low code baseline. The Patch Wizard Utility will give you a detailed analysis of the patch’s impact on your instance BEFORE it’s applied, so you’ll know exactly what to expect from the application. Please refer to Doc ID 976188.1 for more information on this important utility

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How to fix Ubuntu 12.04.3 boot to black screen full of errors in white text, after upgrading on dell inspiron 1501

- by Ibuntu

I am running a Dell Inspiron 1501 I use Linux only. No Microsoft or Apple operating systems (or really anything closed-source). I've only been using Linux for a little over a year but I'm starting to gain a comfortable level of familiarity with the system and terminology. I've been having some issues with Quantel Quetzal and Raring Ringtail, especially with older hardware, so I opted to install Ubuntu 12.04.3 Precise Pangolin on the Inspiron 1501. I checked my MD5 sum after downloading my ISO and all was good. I have in fact used this iso/dvd to install Precise Pangolin successfully on a few other systems (some of which are even older than this laptop). Install goes fine. The wireless card doesn't work out of the box but this is a known issue which is fairly easy to fix. So, first thing I did was open up a terminal and run sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade which, part way through, crashed (I assume lightdm and possibly X) and took me to a black screen filled with white lines of text that were either errors or just the ouputs of commands. The reason I say that is because I was unable to gleam any useful information from the output on the screen. I did take a picture however and will post a link. After that, every time I boot the system it goes right to that black screen posting all the error messages or output in white text. I never get a purple Ubuntu splash, so from what I can tell after reading this wiki article: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Troubleshooting/BlankScreen That means that after the kernel is selected, it is unable to correctly implement the settings it needs. If the purple splash never shows, the frame buffer was never set correctly right? This leads me to believe that it could be a kernel issue? The wiki suggested to try and pinpoint the issue by rolling back kernels until I find one that works. Is this my best option? I think I'm going to give it a try anyways and will let everyone know if I am able to solve the issue this way. I have since done a few reinstalls and some trouble-shooting including a couple hours scouring the net for anyone with any kind of similar issue. Most of the issues I could find involved getting a black screen after login and none of them said anything about any information output on this black screen. My reinstalls have taught me that there is no issue updating, but as soon as I run sudo apt-get upgrade my system goes to the black screen and every time I boot it up it does the same thing. The only way to fix is by reinstall. I never get any ability to log in. After a hard power off to the laptop (because I cannot use ctrl+alt+del to reboot) when it boots again it goes to the grub boot menu and I can select between regular boot, recovery mode and the two memtest options. I never tried the memtest options but the other two both lead to the same black screen. Some people having a black/blank screen issue claim to have fixed it by using 12.10 or 13.04 but I believe they were having a different issue where they got a black/blank screen after logging in. I think I will still give these images a try, but mostly figured I would just wait another day or two for 13.10. Other things I figured I would try from the following three articles: After logging in, there's a black screen and my cursor, nothing else! in Ubuntu 12.10 Black Screen on Login After Upgrading to 12.04 I can't get to the login screen include opening a terminal using ctrl+alt+f1 and trying a variety of reseting unity, x settings, lightdm (or switching to gdm); but I doubt this will work or that I will even be able to access a terminal. I'm pretty sure the whole system is stuck after it loads the last line on the black screen. I will try these things and post more information when I have. Hopefully someone has an idea in the meantime and I will keep checking back trying to find a solution. Thank you. Here are 3 different pictures of the error message. I had to take with my phone: http://ubuntuone.com/album/0TBBkxmVajJIQQtoN9mVdN

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Data Source Security Part 1

- by Steve Felts

I’ve written a couple of articles on how to store data source security credentials using the Oracle wallet. I plan to write a few articles on the various types of security available to WebLogic Server (WLS) data sources. There are more options than you might think! There have been several enhancements in this area in WLS 10.3.6. There are a couple of more enhancements planned for release WLS 12.1.2 that I will include here for completeness. This isn’t intended as a teaser. If you call your Oracle support person, you can get them now as minor patches to WLS 10.3.6. The current security documentation is scattered in a few places, has a few incorrect statements, and is missing a few topics. It also seems that the knowledge of how to apply some of these features isn’t written down. The goal of these articles is to talk about WLS data source security in a unified way and to introduce some approaches to using the available features. Introduction to WebLogic Data Source Security Options By default, you define a single database user and password for a data source. You can store it in the data source descriptor or make use of the Oracle wallet. This is a very simple and efficient approach to security. All of the connections in the connection pool are owned by this user and there is no special processing when a connection is given out. That is, it’s a homogeneous connection pool and any request can get any connection from a security perspective (there are other aspects like affinity). Regardless of the end user of the application, all connections in the pool use the same security credentials to access the DBMS. No additional information is needed when you get a connection because it’s all available from the data source descriptor (or wallet). java.sql.Connection conn = mydatasource.getConnection(); Note: You can enter the password as a name-value pair in the Properties field (this not permitted for production environments) or you can enter it in the Password field of the data source descriptor. The value in the Password field overrides any password value defined in the Properties passed to the JDBC Driver when creating physical database connections. It is recommended that you use the Password attribute in place of the password property in the properties string because the Password value is encrypted in the configuration file (stored as the password-encrypted attribute in the jdbc-driver-params tag in the module file) and is hidden in the administration console. The Properties and Password fields are located on the administration console Data Source creation wizard or Data Source Configuration tab. The JDBC API can also be used to programmatically specify a database user name and password as in the following. java.sql.Connection conn = mydatasource.getConnection(“user”, “password”); According to the JDBC specification, it’s supposed to take a database user and associated password but different vendors implement this differently. WLS, by default, treats this as an application server user and password. The pair is authenticated to see if it’s a valid user and that user is used for WLS security permission checks. By default, the user is then mapped to a database user and password using the data source credential mapper, so this API sort of follows the specification but database credentials are one-step removed from the application code. More details and the rationale are described later. While the default approach is simple, it does mean that only one database user is doing all of the work. You can’t figure out who actually did the update and you can’t restrict SQL operations by who is running the operation, at least at the database level. Any type of per-user logic will need to be in the application code instead of having the database do it. There are various WLS data source features that can be configured to provide some per-user information about the operations to the database. WebLogic Data Source Security Options This table describes the features available for WebLogic data sources to configure database security credentials and a brief description. It also captures information about the compatibility of these features with one another. Feature Description Can be used with Can’t be used with User authentication (default) Default getConnection(user, password) behavior – validate the input and use the user/password in the descriptor. Set client identifier Proxy Session, Identity pooling, Use database credentials Use database credentials Instead of using the credential mapper, use the supplied user and password directly. Set client identifier, Proxy session, Identity pooling User authentication, Multi Data Source Set Client Identifier Set a client identifier property associated with the connection (Oracle and DB2 only). Everything Proxy Session Set a light-weight proxy user associated with the connection (Oracle-only). Set client identifier, Use database credentials Identity pooling, User authentication Identity pooling Heterogeneous pool of connections owned by specified users. Set client identifier, Use database credentials Proxy session, User authentication, Labeling, Multi-datasource, Active GridLink Note that all of these features are available with both XA and non-XA drivers. Currently, the Proxy Session and Use Database Credentials options are on the Oracle tab of the Data Source Configuration tab of the administration console (even though the Use Database Credentials feature is not just for Oracle databases – oops). The rest of the features are on the Identity tab of the Data Source Configuration tab in the administration console (plan on seeing them all in one place in the future). The subsequent articles will describe these features in more detail. Keep referring back to this table to see the big picture.

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How to move a rectangle properly?

- by bodycountPP

I recently started to learn OpenGL. Right now I finished the first chapter of the "OpenGL SuperBible". There were two examples. The first had the complete code and showed how to draw a simple triangle. The second example is supposed to show how to move a rectangle using SpecialKeys. The only code provided for this example was the SpecialKeys method. I still tried to implement it but I had two problems. In the previous example I declared and instaciated vVerts in the SetupRC() method. Now as it is also used in the SpecialKeys() method, I moved the declaration and instantiation to the top of the code. Is this proper c++ practice? I copied the part where vertex positions are recalculated from the book, but I had to pick the vertices for the rectangle on my own. So now every time I press a key for the first time the rectangle's upper left vertex is moved to (-0,5:-0.5). This ok because of GLfloat blockX = vVerts[0]; //Upper left X GLfloat blockY = vVerts[7]; // Upper left Y But I also think that this is the reason why my rectangle is shifted in the beginning. After the first time a key was pressed everything works just fine. Here is my complete code I hope you can help me on those two points. GLBatch squareBatch; GLShaderManager shaderManager; //Load up a triangle GLfloat vVerts[] = {-0.5f,0.5f,0.0f, 0.5f,0.5f,0.0f, 0.5f,-0.5f,0.0f, -0.5f,-0.5f,0.0f}; //Window has changed size, or has just been created. //We need to use the window dimensions to set the viewport and the projection matrix. void ChangeSize(int w, int h) { glViewport(0,0,w,h); } //Called to draw the scene. void RenderScene(void) { //Clear the window with the current clearing color glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT|GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT|GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT); GLfloat vRed[] = {1.0f,0.0f,0.0f,1.0f}; shaderManager.UseStockShader(GLT_SHADER_IDENTITY,vRed); squareBatch.Draw(); //perform the buffer swap to display the back buffer glutSwapBuffers(); } //This function does any needed initialization on the rendering context. //This is the first opportunity to do any OpenGL related Tasks. void SetupRC() { //Blue Background glClearColor(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f,1.0f); shaderManager.InitializeStockShaders(); squareBatch.Begin(GL_QUADS,4); squareBatch.CopyVertexData3f(vVerts); squareBatch.End(); } //Respond to arrow keys by moving the camera frame of reference void SpecialKeys(int key,int x,int y) { GLfloat stepSize = 0.025f; GLfloat blockSize = 0.5f; GLfloat blockX = vVerts[0]; //Upper left X GLfloat blockY = vVerts[7]; // Upper left Y if(key == GLUT_KEY_UP) { blockY += stepSize; } if(key == GLUT_KEY_DOWN){blockY -= stepSize;} if(key == GLUT_KEY_LEFT){blockX -= stepSize;} if(key == GLUT_KEY_RIGHT){blockX += stepSize;} //Recalculate vertex positions vVerts[0] = blockX; vVerts[1] = blockY - blockSize*2; vVerts[3] = blockX + blockSize * 2; vVerts[4] = blockY - blockSize *2; vVerts[6] = blockX+blockSize*2; vVerts[7] = blockY; vVerts[9] = blockX; vVerts[10] = blockY; squareBatch.CopyVertexData3f(vVerts); glutPostRedisplay(); } //Main entry point for GLUT based programs int main(int argc, char** argv) { //Sets the working directory. Not really needed gltSetWorkingDirectory(argv[0]); //Passes along the command-line parameters and initializes the GLUT library. glutInit(&argc,argv); //Tells the GLUT library what type of display mode to use, when creating the window. //Double buffered window, RGBA-Color mode,depth-buffer as part of our display, stencil buffer also available glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_DOUBLE|GLUT_RGBA|GLUT_DEPTH|GLUT_STENCIL); //Window size glutInitWindowSize(800,600); glutCreateWindow("MoveRect"); glutReshapeFunc(ChangeSize); glutDisplayFunc(RenderScene); glutSpecialFunc(SpecialKeys); //initialize GLEW library GLenum err = glewInit(); //Check that nothing goes wrong with the driver initialization before we try and do any rendering. if(GLEW_OK != err) { fprintf(stderr,"Glew Error: %s\n",glewGetErrorString); return 1; } SetupRC(); glutMainLoop(); return 0; }

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option page form in my wordpress theme [migrated]

- by Templategraphy

here its is my option page code containing no of fields like logo, slider after filling all the information in option page form i want to things After submitting all the form details save information must retain there. Using get_option() extract each input tag value and show that value in front hand like slider image, slider heading, slider description OPTION PAGE CODE: <?php class MySettingsPage { private $options; public function __construct() { add_action( 'admin_menu', array( $this, 'bguru_register_options_page' ) ); add_action( 'admin_init', array( $this, 'bguru_register_settings' ) ); } public function bguru_register_options_page() { // This page will be under "Settings" add_theme_page('Business Guru Options', 'Theme Customizer', 'edit_theme_options', 'bguru-options', array( $this, 'bguru_options_page') ); } public function bguru_options_page() { // Set class property $this->options = get_option( 'bguru_logo' ); $this->options = get_option( 'bguru_vimeo' ); $this->options = get_option( 'bguru_slide_one_image' ); $this->options = get_option( 'bguru_slide_one_heading' ); $this->options = get_option( 'bguru_slide_one_text' ); $this->options = get_option( 'bguru_slogan_heading' ); $this->options = get_option( 'bguru_slogan_description' ); ?> <div class="wrap"> <?php screen_icon(); ?> <h1>Business Guru Options</h1> <form method="post" action="options.php"> <table class="form-table"> <?php // This prints out all hidden setting fields settings_fields( 'defaultbg' ); do_settings_sections( 'defaultbg' ); submit_button(); ?> </table> </form> </div> <?php } /** * Register and add settings */ public function bguru_register_settings() { register_setting('defaultbg','bguru_logo', array( $this, 'sanitize' ) ); register_setting('defaultbg', 'bguru_vimeo', array( $this, 'sanitize' )); register_setting('defaultbg', 'bguru_slide_one_image', array( $this, 'sanitize' )); register_setting('defaultbg', 'bguru_slide_one_heading', array( $this, 'sanitize' )); register_setting('defaultbg', 'bguru_slide_one_text', array( $this, 'sanitize' )); register_setting('defaultbg', 'bguru_slogan_heading', array( $this, 'sanitize' )); register_setting('defaultbg', 'bguru_slogan_description', array( $this, 'sanitize' )); add_settings_section( 'setting_section_id', // ID '<h2>General</h2>', array( $this, 'print_section_info' ), // Callback 'defaultbg' // Page ); add_settings_field( 'bguru_logo', // ID '<label for="bguru_logo">Logo</label>', // Title array($this,'logo_callback' ), // Callback 'defaultbg', // Page 'setting_section_id'// Section ); add_settings_field( 'bguru_vimeo', // ID 'Vimeo', // Vimeo array( $this, 'socialv_callback' ), // Callback 'defaultbg', // Page 'setting_section_id' // Section ); add_settings_field( 'bguru_slide_one_image', // ID 'Slide 1 Image', // Slide 1 Image array( $this, 'slider1img_callback' ), // Callback 'defaultbg', // Page 'setting_section_id' // Section ); add_settings_field( 'bguru_slide_one_heading', // ID 'Slide 1 Heading', // Slide 1 Heading array( $this, 'slider1head_callback' ), // Callback 'defaultbg', // Page 'setting_section_id' // Section ); add_settings_field( 'bguru_slide_one_text', // ID 'Slide 1 Description', // Slide 1 Description array( $this, 'slider1text_callback' ), // Callback 'defaultbg', // Page 'setting_section_id' // Section ); add_settings_field( 'bguru_slogan_heading', // ID 'Slogan Heading', // Slogan Heading array( $this, 'slogan_head_callback' ), // Callback 'defaultbg', // Page 'setting_section_id' // Section ); add_settings_field( 'bguru_slogan_description', // ID 'Slogan Container', // Slogan Container array( $this, 'slogan_descr_callback' ), // Callback 'defaultbg', // Page 'setting_section_id' // Section ); } public function sanitize( $input ) { $new_input = array(); if( isset( $input['bguru_logo'] ) ) $new_input['bguru_logo'] = sanitize_text_field( $input['bguru_logo'] ); if( isset( $input['bguru_vimeo'] ) ) $new_input['bguru_vimeo'] = sanitize_text_field( $input['bguru_vimeo'] ); if( isset( $input['bguru_slide_one_image'] ) ) $new_input['bguru_slide_one_image'] = sanitize_text_field( $input['bguru_slide_one_image'] ); if( isset( $input['bguru_slide_one_heading'] ) ) $new_input['bguru_slide_one_heading'] = sanitize_text_field( $input['bguru_slide_one_heading'] ); if( isset( $input['bguru_slide_one_text'] ) ) $new_input['bguru_slide_one_text'] = sanitize_text_field( $input['bguru_slide_one_text'] ); if( isset( $input['bguru_slogan_heading'] ) ) $new_input['bguru_slogan_heading'] = sanitize_text_field( $input['bguru_slogan_heading'] ); if( isset( $input['bguru_slogan_description'] ) ) $new_input['bguru_slogan_description'] = sanitize_text_field( $input['bguru_slogan_description'] ); return $new_input; } public function print_section_info() { print 'Enter your settings below:'; } public function logo_callback() { printf( '<input type="text" id="bguru_logo" size="50" name="bguru_logo" value="%s" />', isset( $this->options['bguru_logo'] ) ? esc_attr( $this->options['bguru_logo']) : '' ); } public function socialv_callback() { printf( '<input type="text" id="bguru_vimeo" size="50" name="bguru_vimeo" value="%s" />', isset( $this->options['bguru_vimeo'] ) ? esc_attr( $this->options['bguru_vimeo']) : '' ); } public function slider1img_callback() { printf( '<input type="text" id="bguru_slide_one_image" size="50" name="bguru_slide_one_image" value="%s" />', isset( $this->options['bguru_slide_one_image'] ) ? esc_attr( $this->options['bguru_slide_one_image']) : '' ); } public function slider1head_callback() { printf( '<input type="text" id="bguru_slide_one_heading" size="50" name="bguru_slide_one_heading" value="%s" />', isset( $this->options['bguru_slide_one_heading'] ) ? esc_attr( $this->options['bguru_slide_one_heading']) : '' ); } public function slider1text_callback() { printf( '<input type="text" id="bguru_slide_one_text" size="50" name="bguru_slide_one_text" value="%s" />', isset( $this->options['bguru_slide_one_text'] ) ? esc_attr( $this->options['bguru_slide_one_text']) : '' ); } public function slogan_head_callback() { printf( '<input type="text" id="bguru_slogan_heading" size="50" name="bguru_slogan_heading" value="%s" />', isset( $this->options['bguru_slogan_heading'] ) ? esc_attr( $this->options['bguru_slogan_heading']) : '' ); } public function slogan_descr_callback() { printf( '<input type="text" id="bguru_slogan_description" size="50" name="bguru_slogan_description" value="%s" />', isset( $this->options['bguru_slogan_description'] ) ? esc_attr( $this->options['bguru_slogan_description']) : '' ); } } if( is_admin() ) $my_settings_page = new MySettingsPage(); here its my header.php code where i display all the information of option form $bguru_logo_image = get_option('bguru_logo'); if (!empty($bguru_logo_image)) { echo '<div id="logo"><a href="' . home_url() . '"><img src="' . $bguru_logo_image . '" width="218" alt="logo" /></a></div>'; } else { echo '<div id="logo"><a href="' . home_url() . '"><h1>'. get_bloginfo('name') . '</h1></a></div>'; }?> $bguru_social_vimeo = get_option('bguru_vimeo'); if (!empty($bguru_social_vimeo)) { echo '<li class="vimeo"><a target="_blank" href="'.$bguru_social_vimeo.'">Vimeo</a></li>'; }?> same as for slider image, slider heading, slider description please suggest some solutions

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Announcing the Release of Visual Studio 2013 and Great Improvements to ASP.NET and Entity Framework

- by ScottGu

Today we released VS 2013 and .NET 4.5.1. These releases include a ton of great improvements, and include some fantastic enhancements to ASP.NET and the Entity Framework. You can download and start using them now. Below are details on a few of the great ASP.NET, Web Development, and Entity Framework improvements you can take advantage of with this release. Please visit http://www.asp.net/vnext for additional release notes, documentation, and tutorials. One ASP.NET With the release of Visual Studio 2013, we have taken a step towards unifying the experience of using the different ASP.NET sub-frameworks (Web Forms, MVC, Web API, SignalR, etc), and you can now easily mix and match the different ASP.NET technologies you want to use within a single application. When you do a File-New Project with VS 2013 you’ll now see a single ASP.NET Project option: Selecting this project will bring up an additional dialog that allows you to start with a base project template, and then optionally add/remove the technologies you want to use in it. For example, you could start with a Web Forms template and add Web API or Web Forms support for it, or create a MVC project and also enable Web Forms pages within it: This makes it easy for you to use any ASP.NET technology you want within your apps, and take advantage of any feature across the entire ASP.NET technology span. Richer Authentication Support The new “One ASP.NET” project dialog also includes a new Change Authentication button that, when pushed, enables you to easily change the authentication approach used by your applications – and makes it much easier to build secure applications that enable SSO from a variety of identity providers. For example, when you start with the ASP.NET Web Forms or MVC templates you can easily add any of the following authentication options to the application: No Authentication Individual User Accounts (Single Sign-On support with FaceBook, Twitter, Google, and Microsoft ID – or Forms Auth with ASP.NET Membership) Organizational Accounts (Single Sign-On support with Windows Azure Active Directory ) Windows Authentication (Active Directory in an intranet application) The Windows Azure Active Directory support is particularly cool. Last month we updated Windows Azure Active Directory so that developers can now easily create any number of Directories using it (for free and deployed within seconds). It now takes only a few moments to enable single-sign-on support within your ASP.NET applications against these Windows Azure Active Directories. Simply choose the “Organizational Accounts” radio button within the Change Authentication dialog and enter the name of your Windows Azure Active Directory to do this: This will automatically configure your ASP.NET application to use Windows Azure Active Directory and register the application with it. Now when you run the app your users can easily and securely sign-in using their Active Directory credentials within it – regardless of where the application is hosted on the Internet. For more information about the new process for creating web projects, see Creating ASP.NET Web Projects in Visual Studio 2013. Responsive Project Templates with Bootstrap The new default project templates for ASP.NET Web Forms, MVC, Web API and SPA are built using Bootstrap. Bootstrap is an open source CSS framework that helps you build responsive websites which look great on different form factors such as mobile phones, tables and desktops. For example in a browser window the home page created by the MVC template looks like the following: When you resize the browser to a narrow window to see how it would like on a phone, you can notice how the contents gracefully wrap around and the horizontal top menu turns into an icon: When you click the menu-icon above it expands into a vertical menu – which enables a good navigation experience for small screen real-estate devices: We think Bootstrap will enable developers to build web applications that work even better on phones, tablets and other mobile devices – and enable you to easily build applications that can leverage the rich ecosystem of Bootstrap CSS templates already out there. You can learn more about Bootstrap here. Visual Studio Web Tooling Improvements Visual Studio 2013 includes a new, much richer, HTML editor for Razor files and HTML files in web applications. The new HTML editor provides a single unified schema based on HTML5. It has automatic brace completion, jQuery UI and AngularJS attribute IntelliSense, attribute IntelliSense Grouping, and other great improvements. For example, typing “ng-“ on an HTML element will show the intellisense for AngularJS: This support for AngularJS, Knockout.js, Handlebars and other SPA technologies in this release of ASP.NET and VS 2013 makes it even easier to build rich client web applications: The screen shot below demonstrates how the HTML editor can also now inspect your page at design-time to determine all of the CSS classes that are available. In this case, the auto-completion list contains classes from Bootstrap’s CSS file. No more guessing at which Bootstrap element names you need to use: Visual Studio 2013 also comes with built-in support for both CoffeeScript and LESS editing support. The LESS editor comes with all the cool features from the CSS editor and has specific Intellisense for variables and mixins across all the LESS documents in the @import chain. Browser Link – SignalR channel between browser and Visual Studio The new Browser Link feature in VS 2013 lets you run your app within multiple browsers on your dev machine, connect them to Visual Studio, and simultaneously refresh all of them just by clicking a button in the toolbar. You can connect multiple browsers (including IE, FireFox, Chrome) to your development site, including mobile emulators, and click refresh to refresh all the browsers all at the same time. This makes it much easier to easily develop/test against multiple browsers in parallel. Browser Link also exposes an API to enable developers to write Browser Link extensions. By enabling developers to take advantage of the Browser Link API, it becomes possible to create very advanced scenarios that crosses boundaries between Visual Studio and any browser that’s connected to it. Web Essentials takes advantage of the API to create an integrated experience between Visual Studio and the browser’s developer tools, remote controlling mobile emulators and a lot more. You will see us take advantage of this support even more to enable really cool scenarios going forward. ASP.NET Scaffolding ASP.NET Scaffolding is a new code generation framework for ASP.NET Web applications. It makes it easy to add boilerplate code to your project that interacts with a data model. In previous versions of Visual Studio, scaffolding was limited to ASP.NET MVC projects. With Visual Studio 2013, you can now use scaffolding for any ASP.NET project, including Web Forms. When using scaffolding, we ensure that all required dependencies are automatically installed for you in the project. For example, if you start with an ASP.NET Web Forms project and then use scaffolding to add a Web API Controller, the required NuGet packages and references to enable Web API are added to your project automatically. To do this, just choose the Add->New Scaffold Item context menu: Support for scaffolding async controllers uses the new async features from Entity Framework 6. ASP.NET Identity ASP.NET Identity is a new membership system for ASP.NET applications that we are introducing with this release. ASP.NET Identity makes it easy to integrate user-specific profile data with application data. ASP.NET Identity also allows you to choose the persistence model for user profiles in your application. You can store the data in a SQL Server database or another data store, including NoSQL data stores such as Windows Azure Storage Tables. ASP.NET Identity also supports Claims-based authentication, where the user’s identity is represented as a set of claims from a trusted issuer. Users can login by creating an account on the website using username and password, or they can login using social identity providers (such as Microsoft Account, Twitter, Facebook, Google) or using organizational accounts through Windows Azure Active Directory or Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS). To learn more about how to use ASP.NET Identity visit http://www.asp.net/identity. ASP.NET Web API 2 ASP.NET Web API 2 has a bunch of great improvements including: Attribute routing ASP.NET Web API now supports attribute routing, thanks to a contribution by Tim McCall, the author of http://attributerouting.net. With attribute routing you can specify your Web API routes by annotating your actions and controllers like this: OAuth 2.0 support The Web API and Single Page Application project templates now support authorization using OAuth 2.0. OAuth 2.0 is a framework for authorizing client access to protected resources. It works for a variety of clients including browsers and mobile devices. OData Improvements ASP.NET Web API also now provides support for OData endpoints and enables support for both ATOM and JSON-light formats. With OData you get support for rich query semantics, paging, $metadata, CRUD operations, and custom actions over any data source. Below are some of the specific enhancements in ASP.NET Web API 2 OData. Support for $select, $expand, $batch, and $value Improved extensibility Type-less support Reuse an existing model OWIN Integration ASP.NET Web API now fully supports OWIN and can be run on any OWIN capable host. With OWIN integration, you can self-host Web API in your own process alongside other OWIN middleware, such as SignalR. For more information, see Use OWIN to Self-Host ASP.NET Web API. More Web API Improvements In addition to the features above there have been a host of other features in ASP.NET Web API, including CORS support Authentication Filters Filter Overrides Improved Unit Testability Portable ASP.NET Web API Client To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/web-api/ ASP.NET SignalR 2 ASP.NET SignalR is library for ASP.NET developers that dramatically simplifies the process of adding real-time web functionality to your applications. Real-time web functionality is the ability to have server-side code push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes available. SignalR 2.0 introduces a ton of great improvements. We’ve added support for Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) to SignalR 2.0. iOS and Android support for SignalR have also been added using the MonoTouch and MonoDroid components from the Xamarin library (for more information on how to use these additions, see the article Using Xamarin Components from the SignalR wiki). We’ve also added support for the Portable .NET Client in SignalR 2.0 and created a new self-hosting package. This change makes the setup process for SignalR much more consistent between web-hosted and self-hosted SignalR applications. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/signalr. ASP.NET MVC 5 The ASP.NET MVC project templates integrate seamlessly with the new One ASP.NET experience and enable you to integrate all of the above ASP.NET Web API, SignalR and Identity improvements. You can also customize your MVC project and configure authentication using the One ASP.NET project creation wizard. The MVC templates have also been updated to use ASP.NET Identity and Bootstrap as well. An introductory tutorial to ASP.NET MVC 5 can be found at Getting Started with ASP.NET MVC 5. This release of ASP.NET MVC also supports several nice new MVC-specific features including: Authentication filters: These filters allow you to specify authentication logic per-action, per-controller or globally for all controllers. Attribute Routing: Attribute Routing allows you to define your routes on actions or controllers. To learn more go to http://www.asp.net/mvc Entity Framework 6 Improvements Visual Studio 2013 ships with Entity Framework 6, which bring a lot of great new features to the data access space: Async and Task<T> Support EF6’s new Async Query and Save support enables you to perform asynchronous data access and take advantage of the Task<T> support introduced in .NET 4.5 within data access scenarios. This allows you to free up threads that might otherwise by blocked on data access requests, and enable them to be used to process other requests whilst you wait for the database engine to process operations. When the database server responds the thread will be re-queued within your ASP.NET application and execution will continue. This enables you to easily write significantly more scalable server code. Here is an example ASP.NET WebAPI action that makes use of the new EF6 async query methods: Interception and Logging Interception and SQL logging allows you to view – or even change – every command that is sent to the database by Entity Framework. This includes a simple, human readable log – which is great for debugging – as well as some lower level building blocks that give you access to the command and results. Here is an example of wiring up the simple log to Debug in the constructor of an MVC controller: Custom Code-First Conventions The new Custom Code-First Conventions enable bulk configuration of a Code First model – reducing the amount of code you need to write and maintain. Conventions are great when your domain classes don’t match the Code First conventions. For example, the following convention configures all properties that are called ‘Key’ to be the primary key of the entity they belong to. This is different than the default Code First convention that expects Id or <type name>Id. Connection Resiliency The new Connection Resiliency feature in EF6 enables you to register an execution strategy to handle – and potentially retry – failed database operations. This is especially useful when deploying to cloud environments where dropped connections become more common as you traverse load balancers and distributed networks. EF6 includes a built-in execution strategy for SQL Azure that knows about retryable exception types and has some sensible – but overridable – defaults for the number of retries and time between retries when errors occur. Registering it is simple using the new Code-Based Configuration support: These are just some of the new features in EF6. You can visit the release notes section of the Entity Framework site for a complete list of new features. Microsoft OWIN Components Open Web Interface for .NET (OWIN) defines an open abstraction between .NET web servers and web applications, and the ASP.NET “Katana” project brings this abstraction to ASP.NET. OWIN decouples the web application from the server, making web applications host-agnostic. For example, you can host an OWIN-based web application in IIS or self-host it in a custom process. For more information about OWIN and Katana, see What's new in OWIN and Katana. Summary Today’s Visual Studio 2013, ASP.NET and Entity Framework release delivers some fantastic new features that streamline your web development lifecycle. These feature span from server framework to data access to tooling to client-side HTML development. They also integrate some great open-source technology and contributions from our developer community. Download and start using them today! Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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Guide to reduce TFS database growth using the Test Attachment Cleaner

- by terje

Recently there has been several reports on TFS databases growing too fast and growing too big. Notable this has been observed when one has started to use more features of the Testing system. Also, the TFS 2010 handles test results differently from TFS 2008, and this leads to more data stored in the TFS databases. As a consequence of this there has been released some tools to remove unneeded data in the database, and also some fixes to correct for bugs which has been found and corrected during this process. Further some preventive practices and maintenance rules should be adopted. A lot of people have blogged about this, among these are: Anu’s very important blog post here describes both the problem and solutions to handle it. She describes both the Test Attachment Cleaner tool, and also some QFE/CU releases to fix some underlying bugs which prevented the tool from being fully effective. Brian Harry’s blog post here describes the problem too This forum thread describes the problem with some solution hints. Ravi Shanker’s blog post here describes best practices on solving this (TBP) Grant Holidays blogpost here describes strategies to use the Test Attachment Cleaner both to detect space problems and how to rectify them. The problem can be divided into the following areas: Publishing of test results from builds Publishing of manual test results and their attachments in particular Publishing of deployment binaries for use during a test run Bugs in SQL server preventing total cleanup of data (All the published data above is published into the TFS database as attachments.) The test results will include all data being collected during the run. Some of this data can grow rather large, like IntelliTrace logs and video recordings. Also the pushing of binaries which happen for automated test runs, including tests run during a build using code coverage which will include all the files in the deployment folder, contributes a lot to the size of the attached data. In order to handle this systematically, I have set up a 3-stage process: Find out if you have a database space issue Set up your TFS server to minimize potential database issues If you have the “problem”, clean up the database and otherwise keep it clean Analyze the data Are your database( s) growing ? Are unused test results growing out of proportion ? To find out about this you need to query your TFS database for some of the information, and use the Test Attachment Cleaner (TAC) to obtain some more detailed information. If you don’t have too many databases you can use the SQL Server reports from within the Management Studio to analyze the database and table sizes. Or, you can use a set of queries . I find queries often faster to use because I can tweak them the way I want them. But be aware that these queries are non-documented and non-supported and may change when the product team wants to change them. If you have multiple Project Collections, find out which might have problems: (Disclaimer: The queries below work on TFS 2010. They will not work on Dev-11, since the table structure have been changed. I will try to update them for Dev-11 when it is released.) Open a SQL Management Studio session onto the SQL Server where you have your TFS Databases. Use the query below to find the Project Collection databases and their sizes, in descending size order. use master select DB_NAME(database_id) AS DBName, (size/128) SizeInMB FROM sys.master_files where type=0 and substring(db_name(database_id),1,4)='Tfs_' and DB_NAME(database_id)<>'Tfs_Configuration' order by size desc Doing this on one of our SQL servers gives the following results: It is pretty easy to see on which collection to start the work Find out which tables are possibly too large Keep a special watch out for the Tfs_Attachment table. Use the script at the bottom of Grant’s blog to find the table sizes in descending size order. In our case we got this result: From Grant’s blog we learnt that the tbl_Content is in the Version Control category, so the major only big issue we have here is the tbl_AttachmentContent. Find out which team projects have possibly too large attachments In order to use the TAC to find and eventually delete attachment data we need to find out which team projects have these attachments. The team project is a required parameter to the TAC. Use the following query to find this, replace the collection database name with whatever applies in your case: use Tfs_DefaultCollection select p.projectname, sum(a.compressedlength)/1024/1024 as sizeInMB from dbo.tbl_Attachment as a inner join tbl_testrun as tr on a.testrunid=tr.testrunid inner join tbl_project as p on p.projectid=tr.projectid group by p.projectname order by sum(a.compressedlength) desc In our case we got this result (had to remove some names), out of more than 100 team projects accumulated over quite some years: As can be seen here it is pretty obvious the “Byggtjeneste – Projects” are the main team project to take care of, with the ones on lines 2-4 as the next ones. Check which attachment types takes up the most space It can be nice to know which attachment types takes up the space, so run the following query: use Tfs_DefaultCollection select a.attachmenttype, sum(a.compressedlength)/1024/1024 as sizeInMB from dbo.tbl_Attachment as a inner join tbl_testrun as tr on a.testrunid=tr.testrunid inner join tbl_project as p on p.projectid=tr.projectid group by a.attachmenttype order by sum(a.compressedlength) desc We then got this result: From this it is pretty obvious that the problem here is the binary files, as also mentioned in Anu’s blog. Check which file types, by their extension, takes up the most space Run the following query use Tfs_DefaultCollection select SUBSTRING(filename,len(filename)-CHARINDEX('.',REVERSE(filename))+2,999)as Extension, sum(compressedlength)/1024 as SizeInKB from tbl_Attachment group by SUBSTRING(filename,len(filename)-CHARINDEX('.',REVERSE(filename))+2,999) order by sum(compressedlength) desc This gives a result like this: Now you should have collected enough information to tell you what to do – if you got to do something, and some of the information you need in order to set up your TAC settings file, both for a cleanup and for scheduled maintenance later. Get your TFS server and environment properly set up Even if you have got the problem or if have yet not got the problem, you should ensure the TFS server is set up so that the risk of getting into this problem is minimized. To ensure this you should install the following set of updates and components. The assumption is that your TFS Server is at SP1 level. Install the QFE for KB2608743 – which also contains detailed instructions on its use, download from here. The QFE changes the default settings to not upload deployed binaries, which are used in automated test runs. Binaries will still be uploaded if: Code coverage is enabled in the test settings. You change the UploadDeploymentItem to true in the testsettings file. Be aware that this might be reset back to false by another user which haven't installed this QFE. The hotfix should be installed to The build servers (the build agents) The machine hosting the Test Controller Local development computers (Visual Studio) Local test computers (MTM) It is not required to install it to the TFS Server, test agents or the build controller – it has no effect on these programs. If you use the SQL Server 2008 R2 you should also install the CU 10 (or later). This CU fixes a potential problem of hanging “ghost” files. This seems to happen only in certain trigger situations, but to ensure it doesn’t bite you, it is better to make sure this CU is installed. There is no such CU for SQL Server 2008 pre-R2 Work around: If you suspect hanging ghost files, they can be – with some mental effort, deduced from the ghost counters using the following SQL query: use master SELECT DB_NAME(database_id) as 'database',OBJECT_NAME(object_id) as 'objectname', index_type_desc,ghost_record_count,version_ghost_record_count,record_count,avg_record_size_in_bytes FROM sys.dm_db_index_physical_stats (DB_ID(N'<DatabaseName>'), OBJECT_ID(N'<TableName>'), NULL, NULL , 'DETAILED') The problem is a stalled ghost cleanup process. Restarting the SQL server after having stopped all components that depends on it, like the TFS Server and SPS services – that is all applications that connect to the SQL server. Then restart the SQL server, and finally start up all dependent processes again. (I would guess a complete server reboot would do the trick too.) After this the ghost cleanup process will run properly again. The fix will come in the next CU cycle for SQL Server R2 SP1. The R2 pre-SP1 and R2 SP1 have separate maintenance cycles, and are maintained individually. Each have its own set of CU’s. When it comes I will add the link here to that CU. The "hanging ghost file” issue came up after one have run the TAC, and deleted enourmes amount of data. The SQL Server can get into this hanging state (without the QFE) in certain cases due to this. And of course, install and set up the Test Attachment Cleaner command line power tool. This should be done following some guidelines from Ravi Shanker: “When you run TAC, ensure that you are deleting small chunks of data at regular intervals (say run TAC every night at 3AM to delete data that is between age 730 to 731 days) – this will ensure that small amounts of data are being deleted and SQL ghosted record cleanup can catch up with the number of deletes performed. “ This rule minimizes the risk of the ghosted hang problem to occur, and further makes it easier for the SQL server ghosting process to work smoothly. “Run DBCC SHRINKDB post the ghosted records are cleaned up to physically reclaim the space on the file system” This is the last step in a 3 step process of removing SQL server data. First they are logically deleted. Then they are cleaned out by the ghosting process, and finally removed using the shrinkdb command. Cleaning out the attachments The TAC is run from the command line using a set of parameters and controlled by a settingsfile. The parameters point out a server uri including the team project collection and also point at a specific team project. So in order to run this for multiple team projects regularly one has to set up a script to run the TAC multiple times, once for each team project. When you install the TAC there is a very useful readme file in the same directory. When the deployment binaries are published to the TFS server, ALL items are published up from the deployment folder. That often means much more files than you would assume are necessary. This is a brute force technique. It works, but you need to take care when cleaning up. Grant has shown how their settings file looks in his blog post, removing all attachments older than 180 days , as long as there are no active workitems connected to them. This setting can be useful to clean out all items, both in a clean-up once operation, and in a general There are two scenarios we need to consider: Cleaning up an existing overgrown database Maintaining a server to avoid an overgrown database using scheduled TAC 1. Cleaning up a database which has grown too big due to these attachments. This job is a “Once” job. We do this once and then move on to make sure it won’t happen again, by taking the actions in 2) below. In this scenario you should only consider the large files. Your goal should be to simply reduce the size, and don’t bother about the smaller stuff. That can be left a scheduled TAC cleanup ( 2 below). Here you can use a very general settings file, and just remove the large attachments, or you can choose to remove any old items. Grant’s settings file is an example of the last one. A settings file to remove only large attachments could look like this:  <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun /> <Attachment> <SizeInMB GreaterThan="10" /> </Attachment> </DeletionCriteria> Or like this: If you want only to remove dll’s and pdb’s about that size, add an Extensions-section. Without that section, all extensions will be deleted.  <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun /> <Attachment> <SizeInMB GreaterThan="10" /> <Extensions> <Include value="dll" /> <Include value="pdb" /> </Extensions> </Attachment> </DeletionCriteria> Before you start up your scheduled maintenance, you should clear out all older items. 2. Scheduled maintenance using the TAC If you run a schedule every night, and remove old items, and also remove them in small batches. It is important to run this often, like every night, in order to keep the number of deleted items low. That way the SQL ghost process works better. One approach could be to delete all items older than some number of days, let’s say 180 days. This could be combined with restricting it to keep attachments with active or resolved bugs. Doing this every night ensures that only small amounts of data is deleted.  <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun> <AgeInDays OlderThan="180" /> </TestRun> <Attachment /> <LinkedBugs> <Exclude state="Active" /> <Exclude state="Resolved"/> </LinkedBugs> </DeletionCriteria> In my experience there are projects which are left with active or resolved workitems, akthough no further work is done. It can be wise to have a cleanup process with no restrictions on linked bugs at all. Note that you then have to remove the whole LinkedBugs section. A approach which could work better here is to do a two step approach, use the schedule above to with no LinkedBugs as a sweeper cleaning task taking away all data older than you could care about. Then have another scheduled TAC task to take out more specifically attachments that you are not likely to use. This task could be much more specific, and based on your analysis clean out what you know is troublesome data.  <DeletionCriteria> <TestRun > <AgeInDays OlderThan="30" /> </TestRun> <Attachment> <SizeInMB GreaterThan="10" /> <Extensions> <Include value="iTrace"/> <Include value="dll"/> <Include value="pdb"/> <Include value="wmv"/> </Extensions> </Attachment> <LinkedBugs> <Exclude state="Active" /> <Exclude state="Resolved" /> </LinkedBugs> </DeletionCriteria> The readme document for the TAC says that it recognizes “internal” extensions, but it does recognize any extension. To run the tool do the following command: tcmpt attachmentcleanup /collection:your_tfs_collection_url /teamproject:your_team_project /settingsfile:path_to_settingsfile /outputfile:%temp%/teamproject.tcmpt.log /mode:delete Shrinking the database You could run a shrink database command after the TAC has run in cases where there are a lot of data being deleted. In this case you SHOULD do it, to free up all that space. But, after the shrink operation you should do a rebuild indexes, since the shrink operation will leave the database in a very fragmented state, which will reduce performance. Note that you need to rebuild indexes, reorganizing is not enough. For smaller amounts of data you should NOT shrink the database, since the data will be reused by the SQL server when it need to add more records. In fact, it is regarded as a bad practice to shrink the database regularly. So on a daily maintenance schedule you should NOT shrink the database. To shrink the database you do a DBCC SHRINKDATABASE command, and then follow up with a DBCC INDEXDEFRAG afterwards. I find the easiest way to do this is to create a SQL Maintenance plan including the Shrink Database Task and the Rebuild Index Task and just execute it when you need to do this.

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Using an alternate search platform in Commerce Server 2009

- by Lewis Benge

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

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Coding With Windows Azure IaaS

- by Hisham El-bereky

This post will focus on some advanced programming topics concerned with IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) which provided as windows azure virtual machine (with its related resources like virtual disk and virtual network), you know that windows azure started as PaaS cloud platform but regarding to some business cases which need to have full control over their virtual machine, so windows azure directed toward providing IaaS. Sometimes you will need to manage your cloud IaaS through code may be for these reasons: Working on hyper-cloud system by providing bursting connector to windows azure virtual machines Providing multi-tenant system which consume windows azure virtual machine Automated process on your on-premises or cloud service which need to utilize some virtual resources We are going to implement the following basic operation using C# code: List images Create virtual machine List virtual machines Restart virtual machine Delete virtual machine Before going to implement the above operations we need to prepare client side and windows azure subscription to communicate correctly by providing management certificate (x.509 v3 certificates) which permit client access to resources in your Windows Azure subscription, whilst requests made using the Windows Azure Service Management REST API require authentication against a certificate that you provide to Windows Azure More info about setting management certificate located here. And to install .cer on other client machine you will need the .pfx file, or if not exist by exporting .cer as .pfx Note: You will need to install .net 4.5 on your machine to try the code So let start This post built on the post sent by Michael Washam "Advanced Windows Azure IaaS – Demo Code", so I'm here to declare some points and to add new operation which is not exist in Michael's demo The basic C# class object used here as client to azure REST API for IaaS service is HttpClient (Provides a base class for sending HTTP requests and receiving HTTP responses from a resource identified by a URI) this object must be initialized with the required data like certificate, headers and content if required. Also I'd like to refer here that the code is based on using Asynchronous programming with calls to azure which enhance the performance and gives us the ability to work with complex calls which depends on more than one sub-call to achieve some operation The following code explain how to get certificate and initializing HttpClient object with required data like headers and content HttpClient GetHttpClient() { X509Store certificateStore = null; X509Certificate2 certificate = null; try { certificateStore = new X509Store(StoreName.My, StoreLocation.CurrentUser); certificateStore.Open(OpenFlags.ReadOnly); string thumbprint = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["CertThumbprint"]; var certificates = certificateStore.Certificates.Find(X509FindType.FindByThumbprint, thumbprint, false); if (certificates.Count > 0) { certificate = certificates[0]; } } finally { if (certificateStore != null) certificateStore.Close(); } WebRequestHandler handler = new WebRequestHandler(); if (certificate!= null) { handler.ClientCertificates.Add(certificate); HttpClient httpClient = new HttpClient(handler); //And to set required headers lik x-ms-version httpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Add("x-ms-version", "2012-03-01"); httpClient.DefaultRequestHeaders.Accept.Add(new MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("application/xml")); return httpClient; } return null; } Let us keep the object httpClient as reference object used to call windows azure REST API IaaS service. For each request operation we need to define: Request URI HTTP Method Headers Content body (1) List images The List OS Images operation retrieves a list of the OS images from the image repository Request URI https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/images] Replace <subscription-id> with your windows Id HTTP Method GET (HTTP 1.1) Headers x-ms-version: 2012-03-01 Body None. C# Code List<String> imageList = new List<String>(); //replace _subscriptionid with your WA subscription String uri = String.Format("https://management.core.windows.net/{0}/services/images", _subscriptionid); HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); Stream responseStream = await http.GetStreamAsync(uri); if (responseStream != null) { XDocument xml = XDocument.Load(responseStream); var images = xml.Root.Descendants(ns + "OSImage").Where(i => i.Element(ns + "OS").Value == "Windows"); foreach (var image in images) { string img = image.Element(ns + "Name").Value; imageList.Add(img); } } More information about the REST call (Request/Response) located here on this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj157191.aspx (2) Create Virtual Machine Creating virtual machine required service and deployment to be created first, so creating VM should be done through three steps incase hosted service and deployment is not created yet Create hosted service, a container for service deployments in Windows Azure. A subscription may have zero or more hosted services Create deployment, a service that is running on Windows Azure. A deployment may be running in either the staging or production deployment environment. It may be managed either by referencing its deployment ID, or by referencing the deployment environment in which it's running. Create virtual machine, the previous two steps info required here in this step I suggest here to use the same name for service, deployment and service to make it easy to manage virtual machines Note: A name for the hosted service that is unique within Windows Azure. This name is the DNS prefix name and can be used to access the hosted service. For example: http://ServiceName.cloudapp.net// 2.1 Create service Request URI https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/hostedservices HTTP Method POST (HTTP 1.1) Header x-ms-version: 2012-03-01 Content-Type: application/xml Body More details about request body (and other information) are located here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/gg441304.aspx C# code The following method show how to create hosted service async public Task<String> NewAzureCloudService(String ServiceName, String Location, String AffinityGroup, String subscriptionid) { String requestID = String.Empty; String uri = String.Format("https://management.core.windows.net/{0}/services/hostedservices", subscriptionid); HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); System.Text.ASCIIEncoding ae = new System.Text.ASCIIEncoding(); byte[] svcNameBytes = ae.GetBytes(ServiceName); String locationEl = String.Empty; String locationVal = String.Empty; if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(Location) == false) { locationEl = "Location"; locationVal = Location; } else { locationEl = "AffinityGroup"; locationVal = AffinityGroup; } XElement srcTree = new XElement("CreateHostedService", new XAttribute(XNamespace.Xmlns + "i", ns1), new XElement("ServiceName", ServiceName), new XElement("Label", Convert.ToBase64String(svcNameBytes)), new XElement(locationEl, locationVal) ); ApplyNamespace(srcTree, ns); XDocument CSXML = new XDocument(srcTree); HttpContent content = new StringContent(CSXML.ToString()); content.Headers.ContentType = new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/xml"); HttpResponseMessage responseMsg = await http.PostAsync(uri, content); if (responseMsg != null) { requestID = responseMsg.Headers.GetValues("x-ms-request-id").FirstOrDefault(); } return requestID; } 2.2 Create Deployment Request URI https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/hostedservices/<service-name>/deploymentslots/<deployment-slot-name> <deployment-slot-name> with staging or production, depending on where you wish to deploy your service package <service-name> provided as input from the previous step HTTP Method POST (HTTP 1.1) Header x-ms-version: 2012-03-01 Content-Type: application/xml Body More details about request body (and other information) are located here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee460813.aspx C# code The following method show how to create hosted service deployment async public Task<String> NewAzureVMDeployment(String ServiceName, String VMName, String VNETName, XDocument VMXML, XDocument DNSXML) { String requestID = String.Empty; String uri = String.Format("https://management.core.windows.net/{0}/services/hostedservices/{1}/deployments", _subscriptionid, ServiceName); HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); XElement srcTree = new XElement("Deployment", new XAttribute(XNamespace.Xmlns + "i", ns1), new XElement("Name", ServiceName), new XElement("DeploymentSlot", "Production"), new XElement("Label", ServiceName), new XElement("RoleList", null) ); if (String.IsNullOrEmpty(VNETName) == false) { srcTree.Add(new XElement("VirtualNetworkName", VNETName)); } if(DNSXML != null) { srcTree.Add(new XElement("DNS", new XElement("DNSServers", DNSXML))); } XDocument deploymentXML = new XDocument(srcTree); ApplyNamespace(srcTree, ns); deploymentXML.Descendants(ns + "RoleList").FirstOrDefault().Add(VMXML.Root); String fixedXML = deploymentXML.ToString().Replace(" xmlns=\"\"", ""); HttpContent content = new StringContent(fixedXML); content.Headers.ContentType = new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/xml"); HttpResponseMessage responseMsg = await http.PostAsync(uri, content); if (responseMsg != null) { requestID = responseMsg.Headers.GetValues("x-ms-request-id").FirstOrDefault(); } return requestID; } 2.3 Create Virtual Machine Request URI https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/hostedservices/<cloudservice-name>/deployments/<deployment-name>/roles <cloudservice-name> and <deployment-name> are provided as input from the previous steps Http Method POST (HTTP 1.1) Header x-ms-version: 2012-03-01 Content-Type: application/xml Body More details about request body (and other information) located here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj157186.aspx C# code async public Task<String> NewAzureVM(String ServiceName, String VMName, XDocument VMXML) { String requestID = String.Empty; String deployment = await GetAzureDeploymentName(ServiceName); String uri = String.Format("https://management.core.windows.net/{0}/services/hostedservices/{1}/deployments/{2}/roles", _subscriptionid, ServiceName, deployment); HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); HttpContent content = new StringContent(VMXML.ToString()); content.Headers.ContentType = new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/xml"); HttpResponseMessage responseMsg = await http.PostAsync(uri, content); if (responseMsg != null) { requestID = responseMsg.Headers.GetValues("x-ms-request-id").FirstOrDefault(); } return requestID; } (3) List Virtual Machines To list virtual machine hosted on windows azure subscription we have to loop over all hosted services to get its hosted virtual machines To do that we need to execute the following operations: listing hosted services listing hosted service Virtual machine 3.1 Listing Hosted Services Request URI https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/hostedservices HTTP Method GET (HTTP 1.1) Headers x-ms-version: 2012-03-01 Body None. More info about this HTTP request located here on this link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee460781.aspx C# Code async private Task<List<XDocument>> GetAzureServices(String subscriptionid) { String uri = String.Format("https://management.core.windows.net/{0}/services/hostedservices ", subscriptionid); List<XDocument> services = new List<XDocument>(); HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); Stream responseStream = await http.GetStreamAsync(uri); if (responseStream != null) { XDocument xml = XDocument.Load(responseStream); var svcs = xml.Root.Descendants(ns + "HostedService"); foreach (XElement r in svcs) { XDocument vm = new XDocument(r); services.Add(vm); } } return services; } 3.2 Listing Hosted Service Virtual Machines Request URI https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/hostedservices/<service-name>/deployments/<deployment-name>/roles/<role-name> HTTP Method GET (HTTP 1.1) Headers x-ms-version: 2012-03-01 Body None. More info about this HTTP request here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj157193.aspx C# Code async public Task<XDocument> GetAzureVM(String ServiceName, String VMName, String subscriptionid) { String deployment = await GetAzureDeploymentName(ServiceName); XDocument vmXML = new XDocument(); String uri = String.Format("https://management.core.windows.net/{0}/services/hostedservices/{1}/deployments/{2}/roles/{3}", subscriptionid, ServiceName, deployment, VMName); HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); Stream responseStream = await http.GetStreamAsync(uri); if (responseStream != null) { vmXML = XDocument.Load(responseStream); } return vmXML; } So the final method which can be used to list all virtual machines is: async public Task<XDocument> GetAzureVMs() { List<XDocument> services = await GetAzureServices(); XDocument vms = new XDocument(); vms.Add(new XElement("VirtualMachines")); ApplyNamespace(vms.Root, ns); foreach (var svc in services) { string ServiceName = svc.Root.Element(ns + "ServiceName").Value; String uri = String.Format("https://management.core.windows.net/{0}/services/hostedservices/{1}/deploymentslots/{2}", _subscriptionid, ServiceName, "Production"); try { HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); Stream responseStream = await http.GetStreamAsync(uri); if (responseStream != null) { XDocument xml = XDocument.Load(responseStream); var roles = xml.Root.Descendants(ns + "RoleInstance"); foreach (XElement r in roles) { XElement svcnameel = new XElement("ServiceName", ServiceName); ApplyNamespace(svcnameel, ns); r.Add(svcnameel); // not part of the roleinstance vms.Root.Add(r); } } } catch (HttpRequestException http) { // no vms with cloud service } } return vms; } (4) Restart Virtual Machine Request URI https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/hostedservices/<service-name>/deployments/<deployment-name>/roles/<role-name>/Operations HTTP Method POST (HTTP 1.1) Headers x-ms-version: 2012-03-01 Content-Type: application/xml Body <RestartRoleOperation xmlns:i="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <OperationType>RestartRoleOperation</OperationType> </RestartRoleOperation> More details about this http request here http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/jj157197.aspx C# Code async public Task<String> RebootVM(String ServiceName, String RoleName) { String requestID = String.Empty; String deployment = await GetAzureDeploymentName(ServiceName); String uri = String.Format("https://management.core.windows.net/{0}/services/hostedservices/{1}/deployments/{2}/roleInstances/{3}/Operations", _subscriptionid, ServiceName, deployment, RoleName); HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); XElement srcTree = new XElement("RestartRoleOperation", new XAttribute(XNamespace.Xmlns + "i", ns1), new XElement("OperationType", "RestartRoleOperation") ); ApplyNamespace(srcTree, ns); XDocument CSXML = new XDocument(srcTree); HttpContent content = new StringContent(CSXML.ToString()); content.Headers.ContentType = new System.Net.Http.Headers.MediaTypeHeaderValue("application/xml"); HttpResponseMessage responseMsg = await http.PostAsync(uri, content); if (responseMsg != null) { requestID = responseMsg.Headers.GetValues("x-ms-request-id").FirstOrDefault(); } return requestID; } (5) Delete Virtual Machine You can delete your hosted virtual machine by deleting its deployment, but I prefer to delete its hosted service also, so you can easily manage your virtual machines from code 5.1 Delete Deployment Request URI https://management.core.windows.net/< subscription-id >/services/hostedservices/< service-name >/deployments/<Deployment-Name> HTTP Method DELETE (HTTP 1.1) Headers x-ms-version: 2012-03-01 Body None. C# code async public Task<HttpResponseMessage> DeleteDeployment( string deploymentName) { string xml = string.Empty; String uri = String.Format("https://management.core.windows.net/{0}/services/hostedservices/{1}/deployments/{2}", _subscriptionid, deploymentName, deploymentName); HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); HttpResponseMessage responseMessage = await http.DeleteAsync(uri); return responseMessage; } 5.2 Delete Hosted Service Request URI https://management.core.windows.net/<subscription-id>/services/hostedservices/<service-name> HTTP Method DELETE (HTTP 1.1) Headers x-ms-version: 2012-03-01 Body None. C# code async public Task<HttpResponseMessage> DeleteService(string serviceName) { string xml = string.Empty; String uri = String.Format("https://management.core.windows.net/{0}/services/hostedservices/{1}", _subscriptionid, serviceName); Log.Info("Windows Azure URI (http DELETE verb): " + uri, typeof(VMManager)); HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); HttpResponseMessage responseMessage = await http.DeleteAsync(uri); return responseMessage; } And the following is the method which can used to delete both of deployment and service async public Task<string> DeleteVM(string vmName) { string responseString = string.Empty; // as a convention here in this post, a unified name used for service, deployment and VM instance to make it easy to manage VMs HttpClient http = GetHttpClient(); HttpResponseMessage responseMessage = await DeleteDeployment(vmName); if (responseMessage != null) { string requestID = responseMessage.Headers.GetValues("x-ms-request-id").FirstOrDefault(); OperationResult result = await PollGetOperationStatus(requestID, 5, 120); if (result.Status == OperationStatus.Succeeded) { responseString = result.Message; HttpResponseMessage sResponseMessage = await DeleteService(vmName); if (sResponseMessage != null) { OperationResult sResult = await PollGetOperationStatus(requestID, 5, 120); responseString += sResult.Message; } } else { responseString = result.Message; } } return responseString; } Note: This article is subject to be updated Hisham References Advanced Windows Azure IaaS – Demo Code Windows Azure Service Management REST API Reference Introduction to the Azure Platform Representational state transfer Asynchronous Programming with Async and Await (C# and Visual Basic) HttpClient Class

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Windows Azure: General Availability of Web Sites + Mobile Services, New AutoScale + Alerts Support, No Credit Card Needed for MSDN

- by ScottGu

This morning we released a major set of updates to Windows Azure. These updates included: Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites with SLA Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services with SLA Auto-Scale: New automatic scaling support for Web Sites, Cloud Services and Virtual Machines Alerts/Notifications: New email alerting support for all Compute Services (Web Sites, Mobile Services, Cloud Services, and Virtual Machines) MSDN: No more credit card requirement for sign-up All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview). Below are more details about them. Web Sites: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Web Sites I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Web Sites. The Windows Azure Web Sites service is perfect for hosting a web presence, building customer engagement solutions, and delivering business web apps. Today’s General Availability release means we are taking off the “preview” tag from the Free and Standard (formerly called reserved) tiers of Windows Azure Web Sites. This means we are providing: A 99.9% monthly SLA (Service Level Agreement) for the Standard tier Microsoft Support available on a 24x7 basis (with plans that range from developer plans to enterprise Premier support) The Free tier runs in a shared compute environment and supports up to 10 web sites. While the Free tier does not come with an SLA, it works great for rapid development and testing and enables you to quickly spike out ideas at no cost. The Standard tier, which was called “Reserved” during the preview, runs using dedicated per-customer VM instances for great performance, isolation and scalability, and enables you to host up to 500 different Web sites within them. You can easily scale your Standard instances on-demand using the Windows Azure Management Portal. You can adjust VM instance sizes from a Small instance size (1 core, 1.75GB of RAM), up to a Medium instance size (2 core, 3.5GB of RAM), or Large instance (4 cores and 7 GB RAM). You can choose to run between 1 and 10 Standard instances, enabling you to easily scale up your web backend to 40 cores of CPU and 70GB of RAM: Today’s release also includes general availability support for custom domain SSL certificate bindings for web sites running using the Standard tier. Customers will be able to utilize certificates they purchase for their custom domains and use either SNI or IP based SSL encryption. SNI encryption is available for all modern browsers and does not require an IP address. SSL certificates can be used for individual sites or wild-card mapped across multiple sites (we charge extra for the use of a SSL cert – but the fee is per-cert and not per site which means you pay once for it regardless of how many sites you use it with). Today’s release also includes the following new features: Auto-Scale support Today’s Windows Azure release adds preview support for Auto-Scaling web sites. This enables you to setup automatic scale rules based on the activity of your instances – allowing you to automatically scale down (and save money) when they are below a CPU threshold you define, and automatically scale up quickly when traffic increases. See below for more details. 64-bit and 32-bit mode support You can now choose to run your standard tier instances in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode (previously they only ran in 32-bit mode). This enables you to address even more memory within individual web applications. Memory dumps Memory dumps can be very useful for diagnosing issues and debugging apps. Using a REST API, you can now get a memory dump of your sites, which you can then use for investigating issues in Visual Studio Debugger, WinDbg, and other tools. Scaling Sites Independently Prior to today’s release, all sites scaled up/down together whenever you scaled any site in a sub-region. So you may have had to keep your proof-of-concept or testing sites in a separate sub-region if you wanted to keep them in the Free tier. This will no longer be necessary. Windows Azure Web Sites can now mix different tier levels in the same geographic sub-region. This allows you, for example, to selectively move some of your sites in the West US sub-region up to Standard tier when they require the features, scalability, and SLA of the Standard tier. Full pricing details on Windows Azure Web Sites can be found here. Note that the “Shared Tier” of Windows Azure Web Sites remains in preview mode (and continues to have discounted preview pricing). Mobile Services: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Mobile Services I’m incredibly excited to announce the General Availability release of Windows Azure Mobile Services. Mobile Services is perfect for building scalable cloud back-ends for Windows 8.x, Windows Phone, Apple iOS, Android, and HTML/JavaScript applications. Customers We’ve seen tremendous adoption of Windows Azure Mobile Services since we first previewed it last September, and more than 20,000 customers are now running mobile back-ends in production using it. These customers range from startups like Yatterbox, to university students using Mobile Services to complete apps like Sly Fox in their spare time, to media giants like Verdens Gang finding new ways to deliver content, and telcos like TalkTalk Business delivering the up-to-the-minute information their customers require. In today’s Build keynote, we demonstrated how TalkTalk Business is using Windows Azure Mobile Services to deliver service, outage and billing information to its customers, wherever they might be. Partners When we unveiled the source control and Custom API features I blogged about two weeks ago, we enabled a range of new scenarios, one of which is a more flexible way to work with third party services. The following blogs, samples and tutorials from our partners cover great ways you can extend Mobile Services to help you build rich modern apps: New Relic allows developers to monitor and manage the end-to-end performance of iOS and Android applications connected to Mobile Services. SendGrid eliminates the complexity of sending email from Mobile Services, saving time and money, while providing reliable delivery to the inbox. Twilio provides a telephony infrastructure web service in the cloud that you can use with Mobile Services to integrate phone calls, text messages and IP voice communications into your mobile apps. Xamarin provides a Mobile Services add on to make it easy building cross-platform connected mobile aps. Pusher allows quickly and securely add scalable real-time messaging functionality to Mobile Services-based web and mobile apps. Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 This week during //build/ keynote, we demonstrated how Visual Studio 2013, Mobile Services and Windows 8.1 make building connected apps easier than ever. Developers building Windows 8 applications in Visual Studio can now connect them to Windows Azure Mobile Services by simply right clicking then choosing Add Connected Service. You can either create a new Mobile Service or choose existing Mobile Service in the Add Connected Service dialog. Once completed, Visual Studio adds a reference to Mobile Services SDK to your project and generates a Mobile Services client initialization snippet automatically. Add Push Notifications Push Notifications and Live Tiles are a key to building engaging experiences. Visual Studio 2013 and Mobile Services make it super easy to add push notifications to your Windows 8.1 app, by clicking Add a Push Notification item: The Add Push Notification wizard will then guide you through the registration with the Windows Store as well as connecting your app to a new or existing mobile service. Upon completion of the wizard, Visual Studio will configure your mobile service with the WNS credentials, as well as add sample logic to your client project and your mobile service that demonstrates how to send push notifications to your app. Server Explorer Integration In Visual Studio 2013 you can also now view your Mobile Services in the the Server Explorer. You can add tables, edit, and save server side scripts without ever leaving Visual Studio, as shown on the image below: Pricing With today’s general availability release we are announcing that we will be offering Mobile Services in three tiers – Free, Standard, and Premium. Each tier is metered using a simple pricing model based on the # of API calls (bandwidth is included at no extra charge), and the Standard and Premium tiers are backed by 99.9% monthly SLAs. You can elastically scale up or down the number of instances you have of each tier to increase the # of API requests your service can support – allowing you to efficiently scale as your business grows. The following table summarizes the new pricing model (full pricing details here): You can find the full details of the new pricing model here. Build Conference Talks The //BUILD/ conference will be packed with sessions covering every aspect of developing connected applications with Mobile Services. The best part is that, even if you can’t be with us in San Francisco, every session is being streamed live. Be sure not to miss these talks: Mobile Services – Soup to Nuts — Josh Twist Building Cross-Platform Apps with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner Connected Windows Phone Apps made Easy with Mobile Services — Yavor Georgiev Build Connected Windows 8.1 Apps with Mobile Services — Nick Harris Who’s that user? Identity in Mobile Apps — Dinesh Kulkarni Building REST Services with JavaScript — Nathan Totten Going Live and Beyond with Windows Azure Mobile Services — Kirill Gavrylyuk , Paul Batum Protips for Windows Azure Mobile Services — Chris Risner AutoScale: Dynamically scale up/down your app based on real-world usage One of the key benefits of Windows Azure is that you can dynamically scale your application in response to changing demand. In the past, though, you have had to either manually change the scale of your application, or use additional tooling (such as WASABi or MetricsHub) to automatically scale your application. Today, we’re announcing that AutoScale will be built-into Windows Azure directly. With today’s release it is now enabled for Cloud Services, Virtual Machines and Web Sites (Mobile Services support will come soon). Auto-scale enables you to configure Windows Azure to automatically scale your application dynamically on your behalf (without any manual intervention) so you can achieve the ideal performance and cost balance. Once configured it will regularly adjust the number of instances running in response to the load in your application. Currently, we support two different load metrics: CPU percentage Storage queue depth (Cloud Services and Virtual Machines only) We’ll enable automatic scaling on even more scale metrics in future updates. When to use Auto-Scale The following are good criteria for services/apps that will benefit from the use of auto-scale: The service/app can scale horizontally (e.g. it can be duplicated to multiple instances) The service/app load changes over time If your app meets these criteria, then you should look to leverage auto-scale. How to Enable Auto-Scale To enable auto-scale, simply navigate to the Scale tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal for the app/service you wish to enable. Within the scale tab turn the Auto-Scale setting on to either CPU or Queue (for Cloud Services and VMs) to enable Auto-Scale. Then change the instance count and target CPU settings to configure the Auto-Scale ranges you want to maintain. The image below demonstrates how to enable Auto-Scale on a Windows Azure Web-Site. I’ve configured the web-site so that it will run using between 1 and 5 VM instances. The exact # used will depend on the aggregate CPU of the VMs using the 40-70% range I’ve configured below. If the aggregate CPU goes above 70%, then Windows Azure will automatically add new VMs to the pool (up to the maximum of 5 instances I’ve configured it to use). If the aggregate CPU drops below 40% then Windows Azure will automatically start shutting down VMs to save me money: Once you’ve turned auto-scale on, you can return to the Scale tab at any point and select Off to manually set the number of instances. Using the Auto-Scale Preview With today’s update you can now, in just a few minutes, have Windows Azure automatically adjust the number of instances you have running in your apps to keep your service performant at an even better cost. Auto-scale is being released today as a preview feature, and will be free until General Availability. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 separate auto-scale rules across all of the resources they have (Web sites, Cloud services or Virtual Machines). If you hit the 10 limit, you can disable auto-scale for any resource to enable it for another. Alerts and Notifications Starting today we are now providing the ability to configure threshold based alerts on monitoring metrics. This feature is available for compute services (cloud services, VM, websites and mobiles services). Alerts provide you the ability to get proactively notified of active or impending issues within your application. You can define alert rules for: Virtual machine monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (CPU percentage, network in/out, disk read bytes/sec and disk write bytes/sec) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Cloud service monitoring metrics that are collected from the host operating system (same as VM), monitoring metrics from the guest VM (from performance counters within the VM) and on monitoring metrics from monitoring web endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. For Web Sites and Mobile Services, alerting rules can be configured on monitoring metrics from monitoring endpoint urls (response time and uptime) that you have configured. Creating Alert Rules You can add an alert rule for a monitoring metric by navigating to the Setting -> Alerts tab in the Windows Azure Management Portal. Click on the Add Rule button to create an alert rule. Give the alert rule a name and optionally add a description. Then pick the service which you want to define the alert rule on: The next step in the alert creation wizard will then filter the monitoring metrics based on the service you selected: Once created the rule will show up in your alerts list within the settings tab: The rule above is defined as “not activated” since it hasn’t tripped over the CPU threshold we set. If the CPU on the above machine goes over the limit, though, I’ll get an email notifying me from an Windows Azure Alerts email address ([email protected]). And when I log into the portal and revisit the alerts tab I’ll see it highlighted in red. Clicking it will then enable me to see what is causing it to fail, as well as view the history of when it has happened in the past. Alert Notifications With today’s initial preview you can now easily create alerting rules based on monitoring metrics and get notified on active or impending issues within your application that require attention. During preview, each subscription is limited to 10 alert rules across all of the services that support alert rules. No More Credit Card Requirement for MSDN Subscribers Earlier this month (during TechEd 2013), Windows Azure announced that MSDN users will get Windows Azure Credits every month that they can use for any Windows Azure services they want. You can read details about this in my previous Dev/Test blog post. Today we are making further updates to enable an easier Windows Azure signup for MSDN users. MSDN users will now not be required to provide payment information (e.g. no credit card) during sign-up, so long as they use the service within the included monetary credit for the billing period. For usage beyond the monetary credit, they can enable overages by providing the payment information and remove the spending limit. This enables a super easy, one page sign-up experience for MSDN users. Simply sign-up for your Windows Azure trial using the same Microsoft ID that you use to manage your MSDN account, then complete the one page sign-up form below and you will be able to spend your free monthly MSDN credits (up to $150 each month) on any Windows Azure resource for dev/test: This makes it trivially easy for every MDSN customer to start using Windows Azure today. If you haven’t signed up yet, I definitely recommend checking it out. Summary Today’s release includes a ton of great features that enable you to build even better cloud solutions. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today. Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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10 Essential Tools for building ASP.NET Websites

- by Stephen Walther

I recently put together a simple public website created with ASP.NET for my company at Superexpert.com. I was surprised by the number of free tools that I ended up using to put together the website. Therefore, I thought it would be interesting to create a list of essential tools for building ASP.NET websites. These tools work equally well with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Performance Tools After reading Steve Souders two (very excellent) books on front-end website performance High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites, I have been super sensitive to front-end website performance. According to Souders’ Performance Golden Rule: “Optimize front-end performance first, that's where 80% or more of the end-user response time is spent” You can use the tools below to reduce the size of the images, JavaScript files, and CSS files used by an ASP.NET application. 1. Sprite and Image Optimization Framework CSS sprites were first described in an article written for A List Apart entitled CSS sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death. When you use sprites, you combine multiple images used by a website into a single image. Next, you use CSS trickery to display particular sub-images from the combined image in a webpage. The primary advantage of sprites is that they reduce the number of requests required to display a webpage. Requesting a single large image is faster than requesting multiple small images. In general, the more resources – images, JavaScript files, CSS files – that must be moved across the wire, the slower your website. However, most people avoid using sprites because they require a lot of work. You need to combine all of the images and write just the right CSS rules to display the sub-images. The Microsoft Sprite and Image Optimization Framework enables you to avoid all of this work. The framework combines the images for you automatically. Furthermore, the framework includes an ASP.NET Web Forms control and an ASP.NET MVC helper that makes it easy to display the sub-images. You can download the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework from CodePlex at http://aspnet.codeplex.com/releases/view/50869. The Sprite and Image Optimization Framework was written by Morgan McClean who worked in the office next to mine at Microsoft. Morgan was a scary smart Intern from Canada and we discussed the Framework while he was building it (I was really excited to learn that he was working on it). Morgan added some great advanced features to this framework. For example, the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework supports something called image inlining. When you use image inlining, the actual image is stored in the CSS file. Here’s an example of what image inlining looks like: .Home_StephenWalther_small-jpg { width:75px; height:100px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAEsAAABkCAIAAABB1lpeAAAAB GdBTUEAALGOfPtRkwAAACBjSFJNAACHDwAAjA8AAP1SAACBQAAAfXkAAOmLAAA85QAAGcxzPIV3AAAKL s+zNfREAAAAASUVORK5CYII=) no-repeat 0% 0%; } The actual image (in this case a picture of me that is displayed on the home page of the Superexpert.com website) is stored in the CSS file. If you visit the Superexpert.com website then very few separate images are downloaded. For example, all of the images with a red border in the screenshot below take advantage of CSS sprites: Unfortunately, there are some significant Gotchas that you need to be aware of when using the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework. There are workarounds for these Gotchas. I plan to write about these Gotchas and workarounds in a future blog entry. 2. Microsoft Ajax Minifier Whenever possible you should combine, minify, compress, and cache with a far future header all of your JavaScript and CSS files. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier makes it easy to minify JavaScript and CSS files. Don’t confuse minification and compression. You need to do both. According to Souders, you can reduce the size of a JavaScript file by an additional 20% (on average) by minifying a JavaScript file after you compress the file. When you minify a JavaScript or CSS file, you use various tricks to reduce the size of the file before you compress the file. For example, you can minify a JavaScript file by replacing long JavaScript variables names with short variables names and removing unnecessary white space and comments. You can minify a CSS file by doing such things as replacing long color names such as #ffffff with shorter equivalents such as #fff. The Microsoft Ajax Minifier was created by Microsoft employee Ron Logan. Internally, this tool was being used by several large Microsoft websites. We also used the tool heavily on the ASP.NET team. I convinced Ron to publish the tool on CodePlex so that everyone in the world could take advantage of it. You can download the tool from the ASP.NET Ajax website and read documentation for the tool here. I created the installer for the Microsoft Ajax Minifier. When creating the installer, I also created a Visual Studio build task to make it easy to minify all of your JavaScript and CSS files whenever you do a build within Visual Studio automatically. Read the Ajax Minifier Quick Start to learn how to configure the build task. 3. ySlow The ySlow tool is a free add-on for Firefox created by Yahoo that enables you to test the front-end of your website. For example, here are the current test results for the Superexpert.com website: The Superexpert.com website has an overall score of B (not perfect but not bad). The ySlow tool is not perfect. For example, the Superexpert.com website received a failing grade of F for not using a Content Delivery Network even though the website using the Microsoft Ajax Content Delivery Network for JavaScript files such as jQuery. Uptime After publishing a website live to the world, you want to ensure that the website does not encounter any issues and that it stays live. I use the following tools to monitor the Superexpert.com website now that it is live. 4. ELMAH ELMAH stands for Error Logging Modules and Handlers for ASP.NET. ELMAH enables you to record any errors that happen at your website so you can review them in the future. You can download ELMAH for free from the ELMAH project website. ELMAH works great with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. You can configure ELMAH to store errors in a number of different stores including XML files, the Event Log, an Access database, a SQL database, an Oracle database, or in computer RAM. You also can configure ELMAH to email error messages to you when they happen. By default, you can access ELMAH by requesting the elmah.axd page from a website with ELMAH installed. Here’s what the elmah page looks like from the Superexpert.com website (this page is password-protected because secret information can be revealed in an error message): If you click on a particular error message, you can view the original Yellow Screen ASP.NET error message (even when the error message was never displayed to the actual user). I installed ELMAH by taking advantage of the new package manager for ASP.NET named NuGet (originally named NuPack). You can read the details about NuGet in the following blog entry by Scott Guthrie. You can download NuGet from CodePlex. 5. Pingdom I use Pingdom to verify that the Superexpert.com website is always up. You can sign up for Pingdom by visiting Pingdom.com. You can use Pingdom to monitor a single website for free. At the Pingdom website, you configure the frequency that your website gets pinged. I verify that the Superexpert.com website is up every 5 minutes. I have the Pingdom service verify that it can retrieve the string “Contact Us” from the website homepage. If your website goes down, you can configure Pingdom so that it sends an email, Twitter, SMS, or iPhone alert. I use the Pingdom iPhone app which looks like this: 6. Host Tracker If your website does go down then you need some way of determining whether it is a problem with your local network or if your website is down for everyone. I use a website named Host-Tracker.com to check how badly a website is down. Here’s what the Host-Tracker website displays for the Superexpert.com website when the website can be successfully pinged from everywhere in the world: Notice that Host-Tracker pinged the Superexpert.com website from 68 locations including Roubaix, France and Scranton, PA. Debugging I mean debugging in the broadest possible sense. I use the following tools when building a website to verify that I have not made a mistake. 7. HTML Spell Checker Why doesn’t Visual Studio have a built-in spell checker? Don’t know – I’ve always found this mysterious. Fortunately, however, a former member of the ASP.NET team wrote a free spell checker that you can use with your ASP.NET pages. I find a spell checker indispensible. It is easy to delude yourself that you are capable of perfect spelling. I’m always super embarrassed when I actually run the spell checking tool and discover all of my spelling mistakes. The fastest way to add the HTML Spell Checker extension to Visual Studio is to select the menu option Tools, Extension Manager within Visual Studio. Click on Online Gallery and search for HTML Spell Checker: 8. IIS SEO Toolkit If people cannot find your website through Google then you should not even bother to create it. Microsoft has a great extension for IIS named the IIS Search Engine Optimization Toolkit that you can use to identify issue with your website that would hurt its page rank. You also can use this tool to quickly create a sitemap for your website that you can submit to Google or Bing. You can even generate the sitemap for an ASP.NET MVC website. Here’s what the report overview for the Superexpert.com website looks like: Notice that the Sueprexpert.com website had plenty of violations. For example, there are 65 cases in which a page has a broken hyperlink. You can drill into these violations to identity the exact page and location where these violations occur. 9. LinqPad If your ASP.NET website accesses a database then you should be using LINQ to Entities with the Entity Framework. Using LINQ involves some magic. LINQ queries written in C# get converted into SQL queries for you. If you are not careful about how you write your LINQ queries, you could unintentionally build a really badly performing website. LinqPad is a free tool that enables you to experiment with your LINQ queries. It even works with Microsoft SQL CE 4 and Azure. You can use LinqPad to execute a LINQ to Entities query and see the results. You also can use it to see the resulting SQL that gets executed against the database: 10. .NET Reflector I use .NET Reflector daily. The .NET Reflector tool enables you to take any assembly and disassemble the assembly into C# or VB.NET code. You can use .NET Reflector to see the “Source Code” of an assembly even when you do not have the actual source code. You can download a free version of .NET Reflector from the Redgate website. I use .NET Reflector primarily to help me understand what code is doing internally. For example, I used .NET Reflector with the Sprite and Image Optimization Framework to better understand how the MVC Image helper works. Here’s part of the disassembled code from the Image helper class: Summary In this blog entry, I’ve discussed several of the tools that I used to create the Superexpert.com website. These are tools that I use to improve the performance, improve the SEO, verify the uptime, or debug the Superexpert.com website. All of the tools discussed in this blog entry are free. Furthermore, all of these tools work with both ASP.NET Web Forms and ASP.NET MVC. Let me know if there are any tools that you use daily when building ASP.NET websites.

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CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 10, 2010

CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, December 10, 2010Popular ReleasesFree Silverlight & WPF Chart Control - Visifire: Visifire Silverlight, WPF Charts v3.6.5 Released: Hi, Today we are releasing final version of Visifire, v3.6.5 with the following new feature: * New property AutoFitToPlotArea has been introduced in DataSeries. AutoFitToPlotArea will bring bubbles inside the PlotArea in order to avoid clipping of bubbles in bubble chart. You can visit Visifire documentation to know more. http://www.visifire.com/visifirechartsdocumentation.php Also this release includes few bug fixes: * Chart threw exception while adding new Axis in Chart using Vi...PHPExcel: PHPExcel 1.7.5 Production: DonationsDonate via PayPal via PayPal. If you want to, we can also add your name / company on our Donation Acknowledgements page. PEAR channelWe now also have a full PEAR channel! Here's how to use it: New installation: pear channel-discover pear.pearplex.net pear install pearplex/PHPExcel Or if you've already installed PHPExcel before: pear upgrade pearplex/PHPExcel The official page can be found at http://pearplex.net. Want to contribute?Please refer the Contribute page.UserVoice Helper for WebMatrix: UserVoice Helper v0.9: This version will work with ASP.NET WebPages and ASP.NET MVC ApplicationsDNN Simple Article: DNNSimpleArticle Module V00.00.03: The initial release of the DNNSimpleArticle module (labelled V00.00.03) There are C# and VB versions of this module for this initial release. No promises that going forward there will be packages for both languages provided for future releases. This module provides the following functionality Create and display articles Display a paged list of articles Articles get created as DNN ContentItems Categorization provided through DNN Taxonomy SEO functionality for article display providi...UOB & ME: UOB_ME 2.5: latest versionCouchDB.NET: CouchDB.NET 0.1: CouchDB.NET ------- Libraries and providers to use CouchDB features from .NET This distribution includes the following projects: - MachineKeyGenerator: Command line tool to generate a machine key string for use in App.Config and Web.Config files. - CouchDB.NET: Library to facilitate the use of CouchDB features. It uses Hadi Hariri's EasyHttp library to communicate with the CouchDB server. More info at: https://github.com/hhariri/EasyHttp - CouchDb.ASP.NET: ASP.NET Membership Provider and ASP...AutoLoL: AutoLoL v1.4.3: AutoLoL now supports importing the build pages from Mobafire.com as well! Just insert the url to the build and voila. (For example: http://www.mobafire.com/league-of-legends/build/unforgivens-guide-how-to-build-a-successful-mordekaiser-24061) Stable release of AutoChat (It is still recommended to use with caution and to read the documentation) It is now possible to associate *.lolm files with AutoLoL to quickly open them The selected spells are now displayed in the masteries tab for qu...SubtitleTools: SubtitleTools 1.2: - Added auto insertion of RLE (RIGHT-TO-LEFT EMBEDDING) Unicode character for the RTL languages. - Fixed delete rows issue.PHP Manager for IIS: PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7: This is a final stable release of PHP Manager 1.1 for IIS 7. This is a minor incremental release that contains all the functionality available in 53121 plus additional features listed below: Improved detection logic for existing PHP installations. Now PHP Manager detects the location to php.ini file in accordance to the PHP specifications Configuring date.timezone. PHP Manager can automatically set the date.timezone directive which is required to be set starting from PHP 5.3 Ability to ...Algorithmia: Algorithmia 1.1: Algorithmia v1.1, released on December 8th, 2010.SuperSocket, an extensible socket application framework: SuperSocket 1.0 SP1: Fixed bugs: fixed a potential bug that the running state hadn't been updated after socket server stopped fixed a synchronization issue when clearing timeout session fixed a bug in ArraySegmentList fixed a bug on getting configuration valueCslaGenFork: CslaGenFork 4.0 CTP 2: The version is 4.0.1 CTP2 and was released 2010 December 7 and includes the following files: CslaGenFork 4.0.1-2010-12-07 Setup.msi Templates-2010-10-07.zip For getting started instructions, refer to How to section. Overview of the changes Since CTP1 there were 53 work items closed (28 features, 24 issues and 1 task). During this 60 days a lot of work has been done on several areas. First the stereotypes: EditableRoot is OK EditableChild is OK EditableRootCollection is OK Editable...My Web Pages Starter Kit: 1.3.1 Production Release (Security HOTFIX): Due to a critical security issue, it's strongly advised to update the My Web Pages Starter Kit to this version. Possible attackers could misuse the image upload to transmit any type of file to the website. If you already have a running version of My Web Pages Starter Kit 1.3.0, you can just replace the ftb.imagegallery.aspx file in the root directory with the one attached to this release.EnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.0 ALPHA: 2.2.0 ALPHAThis release adds in the changes for 4.03a. at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Updated En...ASP.NET MVC Project Awesome (jQuery Ajax helpers): 1.4: A rich set of helpers (controls) that you can use to build highly responsive and interactive Ajax-enabled Web applications. These helpers include Autocomplete, AjaxDropdown, Lookup, Confirm Dialog, Popup Form, Popup and Pager new stuff: popup WhiteSpaceFilterAttribute tested on mozilla, safari, chrome, opera, ie 9b/8/7/6nopCommerce. ASP.NET open source shopping cart: nopCommerce 1.90: To see the full list of fixes and changes please visit the release notes page (http://www.nopCommerce.com/releasenotes.aspx).myCollections: Version 1.2: New in version 1.2: Big performance improvement. New Design (Added Outlook style View, New detail view, New Groub By...) Added Sort by Media Added Manage Movie Studio Zoom preference is now saved. Media name are now editable. Added Portuguese version You can now Hide details panel Add support for FLAC tags You can now imports books from BibTex Xml file BugFixingmytrip.mvc (CMS & e-Commerce): mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta: mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta web Web for install hosting System Requirements: NET 4.0, MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src System Requirements: Visual Studio 2010 or Web Deweloper 2010 MSSQL 2008 or MySql (auto creation table to database) if .\SQLEXPRESS auto creation database (App_Data folder) Connector/Net 6.3.4, MVC3 RC WARNING For run and debug mytrip.mvc 1.0.49.0 beta src download and ...Menu and Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: Silverlight Menu and Context Menu v2.3 Beta: - Added keyboard navigation support with access keys - Shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-A are now supported(where the browser permits it) - The PopupMenuSeparator is now completely based on the PopupMenuItem class - Moved item manipulation code to a partial class in PopupMenuItemsControl.cs - Moved menu management and keyboard navigation code to the new PopupMenuManager class - Simplified the layout by removing the RootGrid element(all content is now placed in OverlayCanvas and is accessed by the new ...MiniTwitter: 1.62: MiniTwitter 1.62 ???? ?? ??????????????????????????????????????? 140 ?????????????????????????? ???????????????????????????????? ?? ??????????????????????????????????New ProjectsAccountingGuid: for testing onlyChinese Nag Screen: This is a simple but effective program for learning to recognize Mandarin characters. The application sits in the system tray and displays a character random through your day. You can only get rid of it by typing in the pinyin.CouchDB.NET: .NET libraries to use CouchDB from .NET. Included are Membership and Roles provider so that you may use CouchDB as your integrated DB backend on your ASP.NET projects. Please see the readme.txt file for instructions.DataSetMapper: The idea behind DataSetMapper is to provide support for the automatic mapping of legacy DataSet based structures to proper domain objects. In essence the aim is to create the Mapping aspect of an ORM without the persistence concerns.EasyXnaAudio: EasyXnaAudio is a simple component for use in XNA Game Studio 3.1/4.0 projects that provides an easy interface to load, play, and manage songs and sounds in your game.FixMailboxSD - Exchange Mailbox Security Descriptor Canonicalizer: This is a small utility to fix mailbox security descriptors in Microsoft Exchange that have become non-canonical. It must be run on a machine with Exchange System Manager for Exchange 2003 installed, but it will work against mailboxes on 2003 or 2007 (not 2010).GearSynth Plugin: a plugin for graphsynth that makes gear trainsGroceryList: TBD with first versionIBMS Suite Build on the Associate Platform: A new way of approaching Information Systems. From the UI, users of the IS will be able to build and manipulate the IS to whatever way fits their needs. We have simplified development, removed the chasm between management and IT and give the power of simplification to the user!Ivy Nasha Framework: A PHP FrameworkjQuery helpers for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC: jQuery helpers makes it easier for ASP.NET developers to build jQuery scripts. It's developed in C#. JSTest.NET: JSTest.NET enabled JavaScript unit tests to be run directly in the test framework of your choice (MSTest, NUnit, xUnit, etc) and all without the need for a web browser. JSTest.NET utilizes the Windows Script Host (CScript) to run fast, fully debuggable JavaScript unit tests!Multicore Task Framework: MTF is a visual tool to simplify building robust component based .NET applications. MTF is designed to make full use of the power of multi-core processors.Nazha Script On DLR: NazhaPascalESE - a Delphi/Pascal class library for Microsoft ESENT database API: This pascal class library, primarily written for Delphi's Object Pascal, provides a lightweight and easy-to-use wrapper around the ESENT API. Perpetuum Hangar: A Character planner for the online game "Perpetuum"Projeto Exemplo: Projeto exemplo para a atividade 3 da disciplina.PSiteCode: PSiteCode Manager rScript Engine: rScript scripting engine is a managed script engine wrote in C# that supports Visual Basic and C# syntax based scripts. It provides Type's for dynamically getting and setting properties, invoking methods and run-time compilation of scripts.SharePoint 2010 User Profile WebPart: This webpart shows all user profile properties and values of the properties for a particular user profile. The results are shown in a table containing the display and technical name together with the user value.SHC: shriSHMTools: SHMTools is set of compatible software tools (mostly Matlab based) for structural health monitoring (SHM) research. This includes algorithms for system design, modeling, data acquisition, feature extraction, classification, and prognosis.SwapWin: SwapWin is a tiny and handy tool which swaps windows on different screens. Developed in C# and .NET 3.5.Teachers Diary: Teachers diary is application realizing electronic teacher's notepad with student marks. Current localization of the application is in czech language only.VkApp: Vk app for downloadingWebSpirit: A lightweighted web server implemented by C# which supports sufficient extendible feature. By zjuWPF & MEF Studio: WPF & MEF Studio

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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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Windows Phone 7: Building a simple dictionary web client

- by TechTwaddle

Like I mentioned in this post a while back, I came across a dictionary web service called Aonaware that serves up word definitions from various dictionaries and is really easy to use. The services page on their website, http://services.aonaware.com/DictService/DictService.asmx, lists all the operations that are supported by the dictionary service. Here they are, Word Dictionary Web Service The following operations are supported. For a formal definition, please review the Service Description. Define Define given word, returning definitions from all dictionaries DefineInDict Define given word, returning definitions from specified dictionary DictionaryInfo Show information about the specified dictionary DictionaryList Returns a list of available dictionaries DictionaryListExtended Returns a list of advanced dictionaries (e.g. translating dictionaries) Match Look for matching words in all dictionaries using the given strategy MatchInDict Look for matching words in the specified dictionary using the given strategy ServerInfo Show remote server information StrategyList Return list of all available strategies on the server Follow the links above to get more information on each API. In this post we will be building a simple windows phone 7 client which uses this service to get word definitions for words entered by the user. The application will also allow the user to select a dictionary from all the available ones and look up the word definition in that dictionary. So of all the apis above we will be using only two, DictionaryList() to get a list of all supported dictionaries and DefineInDict() to get the word definition from a particular dictionary. Before we get started, a note to you all; I would have liked to implement this application using concepts from data binding, item templates, data templates etc. I have a basic understanding of what they are but, being a beginner, I am not very comfortable with those topics yet so I didn’t use them. I thought I’ll get this version out of the way and maybe in the next version I could give those a try. A somewhat scary mock-up of the what the final application will look like, Select Dictionary is a list picker control from the silverlight toolkit (you need to download and install the toolkit if you haven’t already). Below it is a textbox where the user can enter words to look up and a button beside it to fetch the word definition when clicked. Finally we have a textblock which occupies the remaining area and displays the word definition from the selected dictionary. Create a silverlight application for windows phone 7, AonawareDictionaryClient, and add references to the silverlight toolkit and the web service. From the solution explorer right on References and select Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit from under the .NET tab, Next, add a reference to the web service. Again right click on References and this time select Add Service Reference In the resulting dialog paste the service url in the Address field and press go, (url –> http://services.aonaware.com/DictService/DictService.asmx) once the service is discovered, provide a name for the NameSpace, in this case I’ve called it AonawareDictionaryService. Press OK. You can now use the classes and functions that are generated in the AonawareDictionaryClient.AonawareDictionaryService namespace. Let’s get the UI done now. In MainPage.xaml add a namespace declaration to use the toolkit controls, xmlns:toolkit="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Phone.Controls;assembly=Microsoft.Phone.Controls.Toolkit" the content of LayoutRoot is changed as follows, (sorry, no syntax highlighting in this post) <StackPanel x:Name="TitlePanel" Grid.Row="0" Margin="12,5,0,5"> <TextBlock x:Name="ApplicationTitle" Text="AONAWARE DICTIONARY CLIENT" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextNormalStyle}"/>  </StackPanel>  <Grid x:Name="ContentPanel" Grid.Row="1" Margin="12,0,12,0"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="Auto"/> <RowDefinition Height="*"/> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <toolkit:ListPicker Grid.Column="1" x:Name="listPickerDictionaryList" Header="Select Dictionary :"> </toolkit:ListPicker> <Grid Grid.Row="1" Margin="0,5,0,0"> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="*"/> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <TextBox x:Name="txtboxInputWord" Grid.Column="0" GotFocus="OnTextboxInputWordGotFocus" /> <Button x:Name="btnGo" Grid.Column="1" Click="OnButtonGoClick" > <Button.Content> <Image Source="/images/button-go.png"/> </Button.Content> </Button> </Grid> <ScrollViewer Grid.Row="2" x:Name="scrollViewer"> <TextBlock Margin="12,5,12,5" x:Name="txtBlockWordMeaning" HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" TextWrapping="Wrap" FontSize="26" /> </ScrollViewer> </Grid> I have commented out the PageTitle as it occupies too much valuable space, and the ContentPanel is changed to contain three rows. First row contains the list picker control, second row contains the textbox and the button, and the third row contains a textblock within a scroll viewer. The designer will now be showing the final ui, Now go to MainPage.xaml.cs, and add the following namespace declarations, using Microsoft.Phone.Controls; using AonawareDictionaryClient.AonawareDictionaryService; using System.IO.IsolatedStorage; A class called DictServiceSoapClient would have been created for you in the background when you added a reference to the web service. This class functions as a wrapper to the services exported by the web service. All the web service functions that we saw at the start can be access through this class, or more precisely through an object of this class. Create a data member of type DictServiceSoapClient in the Mainpage class, and a function which initializes it, DictServiceSoapClient DictSvcClient = null; private DictServiceSoapClient GetDictServiceSoapClient() { if (null == DictSvcClient) { DictSvcClient = new DictServiceSoapClient(); } return DictSvcClient; } We have two major tasks remaining. First, when the application loads we need to populate the list picker with all the supported dictionaries and second, when the user enters a word and clicks on the arrow button we need to fetch the word’s meaning. Populating the List Picker In the OnNavigatingTo event of the MainPage, we call the DictionaryList() api. This can also be done in the OnLoading event handler of the MainPage; not sure if one has an advantage over the other. Here’s the code for OnNavigatedTo, protected override void OnNavigatedTo(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e) { DictServiceSoapClient client = GetDictServiceSoapClient(); client.DictionaryListCompleted += new EventHandler<DictionaryListCompletedEventArgs>(OnGetDictionaryListCompleted); client.DictionaryListAsync(); base.OnNavigatedTo(e); } Windows Phone 7 supports only async calls to web services. When we added a reference to the dictionary service, asynchronous versions of all the functions were generated automatically. So in the above function we register a handler to the DictionaryListCompleted event which will occur when the call to DictionaryList() gets a response from the server. Then we call the DictionaryListAsynch() function which is the async version of the DictionaryList() api. The result of this api will be sent to the handler OnGetDictionaryListCompleted(), void OnGetDictionaryListCompleted(object sender, DictionaryListCompletedEventArgs e) { IsolatedStorageSettings settings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings; Dictionary[] listOfDictionaries; if (e.Error == null) { listOfDictionaries = e.Result; PopulateListPicker(listOfDictionaries, settings); } else if (settings.Contains("SavedDictionaryList")) { listOfDictionaries = settings["SavedDictionaryList"] as Dictionary[]; PopulateListPicker(listOfDictionaries, settings); } else { MessageBoxResult res = MessageBox.Show("An error occured while retrieving dictionary list, do you want to try again?", "Error", MessageBoxButton.OKCancel); if (MessageBoxResult.OK == res) { GetDictServiceSoapClient().DictionaryListAsync(); } } settings.Save(); } I have used IsolatedStorageSettings to store a few things; the entire dictionary list and the dictionary that is selected when the user exits the application, so that the next time when the user starts the application the current dictionary is set to the last selected value. First we check if the api returned any error, if the error object is null e.Result will contain the list (actually array) of Dictionary type objects. If there was an error, we check the isolated storage settings to see if there is a dictionary list stored from a previous instance of the application and if so, we populate the list picker based on this saved list. Note that in this case there are chances that the dictionary list might be out of date if there have been changes on the server. Finally, if none of these cases are true, we display an error message to the user and try to fetch the list again. PopulateListPicker() is passed the array of Dictionary objects and the settings object as well, void PopulateListPicker(Dictionary[] listOfDictionaries, IsolatedStorageSettings settings) { listPickerDictionaryList.Items.Clear(); foreach (Dictionary dictionary in listOfDictionaries) { listPickerDictionaryList.Items.Add(dictionary.Name); } settings["SavedDictionaryList"] = listOfDictionaries; string savedDictionaryName; if (settings.Contains("SavedDictionary")) { savedDictionaryName = settings["SavedDictionary"] as string; } else { savedDictionaryName = "WordNet (r) 2.0"; //default dictionary, wordnet } foreach (string dictName in listPickerDictionaryList.Items) { if (dictName == savedDictionaryName) { listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem = dictName; break; } } settings["SavedDictionary"] = listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem as string; } We first clear all the items from the list picker, add the dictionary names from the array and then create a key in the settings called SavedDictionaryList and store the dictionary list in it. We then check if there is saved dictionary available from a previous instance, if there is, we set it as the selected item in the list picker. And if not, we set “WordNet ® 2.0” as the default dictionary. Before returning, we save the selected dictionary in the “SavedDictionary” key of the isolated storage settings. Fetching word definitions Getting this part done is very similar to the above code. We get the input word from the textbox, call into DefineInDictAsync() to fetch the definition and when DefineInDictAsync completes, we get the result and display it in the textblock. Here is the handler for the button click, private void OnButtonGoClick(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { txtBlockWordMeaning.Text = "Please wait.."; IsolatedStorageSettings settings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings; if (txtboxInputWord.Text.Trim().Length <= 0) { MessageBox.Show("Please enter a word in the textbox and press 'Go'"); } else { Dictionary[] listOfDictionaries = settings["SavedDictionaryList"] as Dictionary[]; string selectedDictionary = listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem.ToString(); string dictId = "wn"; //default dictionary is wordnet (wn is the dict id) foreach (Dictionary dict in listOfDictionaries) { if (dict.Name == selectedDictionary) { dictId = dict.Id; break; } } DictServiceSoapClient client = GetDictServiceSoapClient(); client.DefineInDictCompleted += new EventHandler<DefineInDictCompletedEventArgs>(OnDefineInDictCompleted); client.DefineInDictAsync(dictId, txtboxInputWord.Text.Trim()); } } We validate the input and then select the dictionary id based on the currently selected dictionary. We need the dictionary id because the api DefineInDict() expects the dictionary identifier and not the dictionary name. We could very well have stored the dictionary id in isolated storage settings too. Again, same as before, we register a event handler for the DefineInDictCompleted event and call the DefineInDictAsync() method passing in the dictionary id and the input word. void OnDefineInDictCompleted(object sender, DefineInDictCompletedEventArgs e) { WordDefinition wd = e.Result; scrollViewer.ScrollToVerticalOffset(0.0f); if (wd.Definitions.Length == 0) { txtBlockWordMeaning.Text = String.Format("No definitions were found for '{0}' in '{1}'", txtboxInputWord.Text.Trim(), listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem.ToString().Trim()); } else { foreach (Definition def in wd.Definitions) { string str = def.WordDefinition; str = str.Replace(" ", " "); //some formatting txtBlockWordMeaning.Text = str; } } } When the api completes, e.Result will contain a WordDefnition object. This class is also generated in the background while adding the service reference. We check the word definitions within this class to see if any results were returned, if not, we display a message to the user in the textblock. If a definition was found the text on the textblock is set to display the definition of the word. Adding final touches, we now need to save the current dictionary when the application exits. A small but useful thing is selecting the entire word in the input textbox when the user selects it. This makes sure that if the user has looked up a definition for a really long word, he doesn’t have to press ‘clear’ too many times to enter the next word, protected override void OnNavigatingFrom(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigatingCancelEventArgs e) { IsolatedStorageSettings settings = IsolatedStorageSettings.ApplicationSettings; settings["SavedDictionary"] = listPickerDictionaryList.SelectedItem as string; settings.Save(); base.OnNavigatingFrom(e); } private void OnTextboxInputWordGotFocus(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { TextBox txtbox = sender as TextBox; if (txtbox.Text.Trim().Length > 0) { txtbox.SelectionStart = 0; txtbox.SelectionLength = txtbox.Text.Length; } } OnNavigatingFrom() is called whenever you navigate away from the MainPage, since our application contains only one page that would mean that it is exiting. I leave you with a short video of the application in action, but before that if you have any suggestions on how to make the code better and improve it please do leave a comment. Until next time…

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