Search Results

Search found 67158 results on 2687 pages for 'work life'.

Page 438/2687 | < Previous Page | 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445  | Next Page >

  • Provide A Scrolling "Camera" View Over A 2D Game Map

    - by BitCrash
    I'm in the process of attempting to create a 2D MMO type game with Kryonet and some basic sprites, mostly for my own learning. I have the back end set up great (By my standards) and I'm moving on to actually getting some things drawn onto the map. I cannot for the life of me figure out a solid way to have a "Camera" follow a player around a large area. The view pane for the game is 640 x 480 pixels, and each tile is 32x32 pixels (Thats 20 tiles wide and 15 high for the viewpane) I have tried a couple things to do this, but they did not seem to work out so well. I had a JScrollPane with 9 "Viewpane"-sized canvases in it, and tried to have the JScrollPane move in accordance with the player. The issue came when I reached the end of the JScrollPane. I tried to "Flip" canvases, sending the canvas currrently drawing the player to the middle of the 9 and load the corresponding maps onto the other ones. It was slow and worked poorly. I'm looking for any advice or previous experience with this; any ideas? Thank you! Edit and Clarification: I did not mean to mention Kryonet, I was merely providing peripheral information in case there was something that would help which I could not foresee. Instead of having an array of 9 canvases, why not just have one large canvas loading a large map every once in a while? I'm willing to have "load times" where as with the canvas array I would have none (in theory) to give the user a smooth experience. I could just change the size and location of the map with a modified setBounds() call on the canvas in a layered pane (layered because I have hidden swing items, like inventories and stuff) I'll try it out and post here how it goes for people asking the same question.

    Read the article

  • Repurposing CSS Class Selectors

    - by limefartlek
    I don't know what this technique is called, I've only seen it used. It's a way to repurpose the same selectors with CSS. For example if I create h1 { font-size:18px; color:#FFFFFF; font-family:Arial, Helvetica;margin:0; padding:0; } h2 { font-size:18px; color:#000000; font-family:Arial, Helvetica; font-weight:normal;margin:0; padding:0; } I can repurpose the h selectors with something like .whatever h1 { color: #000; font: 2.0em arial, sans-serif; background-color: #fff3ea; margin: 50px 0px 0px 50px; } .whatever h2 { color: #000; font: 1.7em bold arial, sans-serif; background-color: #fff3ea; margin: 25px 0px 25px 75px; } If h1 and h2 appear inside of a div called whatever, then they will assume those properties. You can do this with ID tags and class tags but I can't for the life of me remember how this is done. Any thoughts?

    Read the article

  • Iterative and Incremental Principle Series 5: Conclusion

    - by llowitz
    Thank you for joining me in the final segment in the Iterative and Incremental series.  During yesterday’s segment, I discussed Iteration Planning, and specifically how I planned my daily exercise (iteration) each morning by assessing multiple factors, while following my overall Implementation plan. As I mentioned in yesterday’s blog, regardless of the type of exercise or how many increment sets I decide to complete each day, I apply the 6 minute interval sets and a timebox approach.  When the 6 minutes are up, I stop the interval, even if I have more to give, saving the extra energy to apply to my next interval set.   Timeboxes are used to manage iterations.  Once the pre-determined iteration duration is reached – whether it is 2 weeks or 6 weeks or somewhere in between-- the iteration is complete.  Iteration group items (requirements) not fully addressed, in relation to the iteration goal, are addressed in the next iteration.  This approach helps eliminate the “rolling deadline” and better allows the project manager to assess the project progress earlier and more frequently than in traditional approaches. Not only do smaller, more frequent milestones allow project managers to better assess potential schedule risks and slips, but process improvement is encouraged.  Even in my simple example, I learned, after a few interval sets, not to sprint uphill!  Now I plan my route more efficiently to ensure that I sprint on a level surface to reduce of the risk of not completing my increment.  Project managers have often told me that they used an iterative and incremental approach long before OUM.   An effective project manager naturally organizes project work consistent with this principle, but a key benefit of OUM is that it formalizes this approach so it happens by design rather than by chance.    I hope this series has encouraged you to think about additional ways you can incorporate the iterative and incremental principle into your daily and project life.  I further hope that you will share your thoughts and experiences with the rest of us.

    Read the article

  • Why does my system slow down or freeze when there is heavy disk activity?

    - by user72270
    Im a first-time user to Ubuntu-12.04 with WUBI installation. My NoteBook Information : Dell vostro 3450 : i5 2410m, 3 gb ram, intel hd3000, amd 6630m hybrid. Surfing and playing games works flawlessly, however, I'm having huge problems when installing applications and generally copying and moving files. When doing so, system is significantly slower and freezes quite often (Firefox gets bluish, sometimes even black n white). I would say that Ubuntu allocates too much resources on file transfers and installing, but even these tasks are very slow. Here is very specific example : today, i tried to move 6 GB file from win 7 installation. It was good at first, i jumped to firefox but after a while firefox started to randomly turn bluish and mouse was randomly stopping working. It was gradually worse and worse and it got to a point when firefox black n whited and mouse wasn't working at all. I raged and went for some meal, when i got back screen was black. It probably unlogged me due to inactivity, when i pushed random button to bring screen to life i had to wait few minutes to let it show me only my screen background. No log in screen, just background and working mouse. NoteBook fan was working at 100 % so I assumed that file transfer was going on and I left it to work. Nothing then changed for a full hour so I hard rebooted it. File transfer unsuccessful, It transfered hardly 2 gigs. Is this normal ? What to do in these situations ? It didn't let me load system manager and not even terminal. Thanks.

    Read the article

  • Poor performance after reinstalling to a USB drive

    - by anonymous
    I am currently running Ubuntu 11.10 off of a SanDisk 16GB USB. I installed it using a Live USB with the following partition configuration: 6GB Primary /dos FAT32 5GB Logical / ext4 5GB Logical /home ext4 I don't have a hard disk, and don't see myself getting one anytime soon. I rely solely on this 16GB, and two other 4GB USBs, one of which I used as the LiveUSB. I bring the USBs around, and even use the install at work. I previously used an install that used a swap file. It functioned fine for the most part, save for a few slow moments, but I came across this post, and it got me thinking about my USB's life, so I reinstalled with the current config. My problem now is that it is slower. Applications like Firefox would hang more often. In my previous setup (the automatically partitioned setup), Firefox would start hanging if I was running an unzip or install task on the same partition as /. Now however, it would hang if I had another window open i.e. the system settings window. My guess is that it may have something to do with the swap file or the install being on a Logical partition rather than a Primary partition, but I don't know. Any insight as to why it has slowed down?

    Read the article

  • BPM 11g Hands on Training

    - by mseika
    BPM 11g Hands on Training11-14 December 2012, Birmingham (UK) DescriptionThis free hands-on workshop covers the life cycle of a business process from analysis, modeling, simulation, process customization and monitoring using Oracle BPM Suite 11g. The process modeled in the workshop includes integrating with web services, creating complex human workflows with user interfaces for task forms and incorporating rule engine-based decision services. After taking this course on Oracle BPM Suite 11g, you can go onto build industry-focused solutions, customer-facing demos, proof-of-concepts (POCs), pilot implementations and reference architectures. REGISTER NOW Partner Registration Guide Price: FREE Address:Hockley Suite - Oracle OfficesBlythe Valley Business ParkShirley, SolihullWest Midlands B90 8ADUnited Kingdom 11 - 14 December 2012 You will also be able to extend your current SOA implementations with BPMN based business processes.You will have the opportunity to sit the BPM 11g Implementation Specialization exam at the end of the boot camp. The training will finish at 3pm on Friday 14th to allow time for the on-line exam to take place. AgendaThis workshop is 4 days long. 08:30 am: Arrival and sign-in09:00 am: Workshop begins 17:30 pm: Workshop ends (more detail to be provided) Workstation RequirementsAttendees must use their own laptops and it is essential they have the following:           · Minimum 8GB RAM. 40GB free disk space           · VirtualBox (latest version)           ·7zip (required for extracting the VirtualBox image) For more information please contact [email protected].

    Read the article

  • Are my negative internship experiences representative of the real world? [closed]

    - by attemptAtAnonymity
    I'm curious if my current experiences as an intern are representative of actual industry. As background, I'm through the better part of two computing majors and a math major at a major university; I've aced every class and adored all of them, so I'd like to think that I'm not terrible at programming. I got an internship with one of the major software companies, and half way through now I've been shocked at the extraordinarily low quality of code. Comments don't exist, it's all spaghetti code, and everything that could be wrong is even worse. I've done a ton of tutoring/TAing, so I'm very used to reading bad code, but the major industry products I've been seeing trump all of that. I work 10-12 hours a day and never feel like I'm getting anywhere, because it's endless hours of trying to figure out an undocumented API or determine the behavior of some other part of the (completely undocumented) product. I've left work hating the job every day so far, and I desperately want to know if this is what is in store for the rest of my life. Did I draw a short straw on internships (the absurdly large paychecks imply that it's not a low quality position), or is this what the real world is like?

    Read the article

  • Configuring network to set wlan0 as primary

    - by Sheed
    I recently had to rebuild my pc and decided to go for ubuntu 14.04. I think the mistake I made was I started from a 12.04 install disk instead of the 12.10 disk I'd used previously and when given the option set my primary connection as ethernet (because the wireless option didn't work). After upgrading to 14.04 etc, I managed to get the wireless working, or more using steps like ifconfig -a and the likes I managed to prove that the wireless card etc. is all installed and working. However every time I boot without a hard wired connection plugged in I get the message "waiting for network configuration". I can then once it's booted without a network get my wirless working using sudo ifconfig wlan0 up iwlist wlan0 scan This seems to kick the wireless module into life and it appears in the GUI and I can then select a network, however all the options like edit network and disconnect etc are all greyed out. What I would like of course is if the WLAN0 was just set as my primary default network so I've been looking for a solution to this and it would seem that I need to adjust the old /etc/network/interfaces file but when I try to do so using the sudo vi /etc/network/interfaces command I, well I simply have no idea what I'm doing. Other than that typing :q! gets me out of there before I do to much damage! As far as I can tell (by navigating to the file in the GUI) the output of my /etc/network/interfaces is as follows: (obviously not including the " in each line that's just to break the heading rule of the #) "# This file describes the network interfaces available on your system "# and how to activate them. For more information, see interfaces(5). "# The loopback network interface auto lo iface lo inet loopback "# The primary network interface auto eth0 iface eth0 inet dhcp If this is the case then this clearly doesn't contain what it should do but I don't how to fix it. Nor do I even know if I'm on the right track. Any help would be appreciated thanks :)

    Read the article

  • How and what should I be (unit) testing for in this method?

    - by user460667
    I am relatively new to unit testing and have a query about what/how I should be testing a certain method. For the following (psudo-c#) method I have created (not a real-life example) what would you test for? Initially, my thoughts would be to test the output with variations on the dictionary of form fields, e.g. valid, invalid, missing values. However I also wonder how you would test to make sure the object values have been changed to the correct value and that the correct email message was attempted to be sent (obviously both services could/would be mocked). I hope what I am asking makes sense, I appreciate this is a subjective question and the answers may be 'it depends' ;) public bool ProcessInput(Dictionary<string, string> formFields, ObjService objService, EmailService emailService) { try { // Get my object id int objId; if(!int.TryParse(formField["objId"], out objId) { return false; } // Update my object - would you validate the save against a DB or a mocked inmemory db? var myObj = objService.Find(objId); myObj.Name = formField["objName"]; objService.Save(myObj); // Send an email - how would you test to make sure content, recipient, etc was correct? emailService.SendEmail(formField("email"), "Hello World"); return true; } catch(Exception ex) { return false; } }

    Read the article

  • Insanity Day 3

    - by D'Arcy Lussier
    So on Tuesday (Sept 25th) I did my 2nd Insanity workout (for those keeping track, I’m not counting the fit test as #1) and it was MURDER on my legs. I wasn’t able to get to it yesterday, and I’m noticing a trend in this first week – I can easily push to do it every 2nd day, but life is just too crazy busy right now (yeah yeah, excuses right? I look at it more like priorities – I have a tech conference I’m running next week, crazy days right now). Today I moved to the 3rd workout – but honestly I couldn’t get into it. It was the cardio recovery day, which is a lot of stretching and stuff. I think if I had been doing the first two sessions back to back I’d need it, but I didn’t want to cool down today – I wanted to push! So I moved to the next DVD in the series but for some reason couldn’t get it to run on my computer, even with SlyDVD. So – back to Disc 1 and the Plyometric Cardio Circuit! Fantastic workout again this morning. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not all of a sudden in amazing shape, but I am noticing already that I seem to be somewhat better – I’m really looking forward to my next fit test at the end of the month!

    Read the article

  • I want to make "stuff" on the web, is a BsC. in Computers necessary/overkill? [on hold]

    - by notypist
    I'm 24 and have a lead role in a major news outlet in my country, with a good pay and public image in the horizon. I hold a job that was previously held by people with 15-20 years of experience and considered one of the top 5 news anchors in my country. My passion though, is computers. The web, to be precise. I was a problogger at a very young age. I hacked my way through CSS and some basic HTML and PHP. But I want to move forward - I want to CREATE not just STRUCTURE things. Giving up the present (and especially the seemingly promising future) in my current industry is hard, my friends raise their eyebrows... I'm considering a BsC. in computer Engineering - but my stats are short of getting into a good university for this discipline. Plus, I'm not the best with math - although I do exceptionally well in statistics and other numbers that are more applicable to real life. I tried learning PHP through online websites, but that just "doesn't cut it" for me. Nope. So what are my options here? if I don't want to build hardware or and deal with overly-complex algorithmic but would like, for example - to build a well functioning iPhone and iPad app, or a SaaS, a startup...do I have to go the BsC. route? I don't see any option to get an "official" education in strictly "web" concepts and languages.. Note: I'm well off financially, so I'm doing this more to be able to create stuff, rather than get a job in a corporations. Although if I land somewhere high, that might be an option. But my main concern is getting the tools.

    Read the article

  • Are my negative internship experiences respresentative of the real world?

    - by attemptAtAnonymity
    I'm curious if my current experiences as an intern are representative of actual industry. As background, I'm through the better part of two computing majors and a math major at a major university; I've aced every class and adored all of them, so I'd like to think that I'm not terrible at programming. I got an internship with one of the major software companies, and half way through now I've been shocked at the extraordinarily low quality of code. Comments don't exist, it's all spaghetti code, and everything that could be wrong is even worse. I've done a ton of tutoring/TAing, so I'm very used to reading bad code, but the major industry products I've been seeing trump all of that. I work 10-12 hours a day and never feel like I'm getting anywhere, because it's endless hours of trying to figure out an undocumented API or determine the behavior of some other part of the (completely undocumented) product. I've left work hating the job every day so far, and I desperately want to know if this is what is in store for the rest of my life. Did I draw a short straw on internships (the absurdly large paychecks imply that it's not a low quality position), or is this what the real world is like?

    Read the article

  • iTunes for Ubuntu Studio

    - by soundblastdj
    I have finally gotten my old Mac HDD sorted out, and now I would like to know if anybody has either: a) a way to run iTunes without wine, as it did not work out well for me the last time I tried it, or b) any other media player that will sync with an iPod and, more importantly, use the same file system. When my Mac died, I started to get into open source. I bought a MacBook Air, only out of necessity. For almost two years now, I have not once backed up or synced my iPod. I am getting nervous that it may give up on it's life soon and would like to find a solution. I don't have enough room on my Air, and it would just erase my iPod anyway... Another thing that I am having trouble with is the way iTunes arranged the music. Now, it is arranged all by artist, then album, the song and I would like to have a media library, but somewhere around 400GB of music is a lot to sift through (I have attempted in the past). Thus I am looking for something that will use the same library format. A side note: As I was writing this I started to wonder; Is a Hackintosh in order here? If somebody will give me instructions on how to install MacOSX for free (maybe Mavericks?) in a dual boot with Ubuntu, I will be ever grateful. :) Thanks, soundblastdj

    Read the article

  • Massive Affiliate Shopping Platform. Is WordPress really suitable? [closed]

    - by SPI
    I am working on an online shopping platform that acquires it's data from various affiliate programs through XML files. I am talking hundreds and thousands of items per program here that change often if they go out of stock. My clients choice of CMS was WordPress. I am guessing he assumed the user friendly interface would make life easy for him. However, the fact that he hired me to parse the XML files, store data in the back-end and basically make everything work tells me he had very little clue about what he was getting himself into. My impression is that WordPress has a very specific way of handling data as it divides everything into categories/sub-categories in the back-end which is very counter intuitive to a business model where data exists in numbers of over hundreds and thousands of items and is further cross referenced by programs so that any change in the programs XML file can easily be reflected products page. Conclusion I have a very specific database model implemented for handling my clients needs. However, this model conflicts with how wordpress chooses to save data in the back-end natively. I am absolutely convinced WordPress is geared towards anything that might resemble a blog and definitely not THIS. I am thinking about asking my client to shift to a custom CMS. Before making my pitch though, I wanted to run this by the stack community. Thanks for the input in advance.

    Read the article

  • Apache 2.2 and FastCGI stops responding, warnings, crashes

    - by Brett
    I've seen this question posted a few times using a Google search, with no real answers. I have a multi-threaded FastCGI application running with Apache 2.2 on FreeBSD 7.2. There are a few issues with it, and I am unable to really figure out the source of the problem even after poking through a bunch of the mod_fastcgi source code. My FastCGI application gets anywhere from 2 to 15 or so hits per second, and mostly services a back-end API (the majority of web server usage is for this, and not actually serving content). Everything seems to work ok under normal conditions, but recently this problem has been becoming worse. It starts out with the FastCGI process manager apparently trying to close unneeded processes, sending them a SIGTERM signal. I catch the signal, clean up some stuff, and exit (by calling exit()) with status code 0. This process seems to result in three log messages in my httpd error log: [Tue Jun 01 14:03:31 2010] [warn] FastCGI: (dynamic) server "/home/program/wwwroot/domains/www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/program.cgi" (pid 98182) termination signaled [Tue Jun 01 14:03:31 2010] [warn] FastCGI: (dynamic) server "/home/program/wwwroot/domains/www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/program.cgi" (pid 98182) terminated by calling exit with status '0' [Tue Jun 01 14:03:31 2010] [warn] FastCGI: (dynamic) server "/home/program/wwwroot/domains/www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/program.cgi" restarted (pid 98294) I am not sure why it says it is restarting the process, but in any case no core dump is ever generated so I do believe it is the FastCGI process manager doing it's thing. This makes sense because it begins to happen after the initial load increase from restarting Apache. Since it's down for a few seconds, it gets hit with a couple of hundred requests over the first few seconds it's running again (sometimes even hitting the upper limit of MAXCLIENTS in Apache), and this seems to be the process manager doing the work of spawning more processes to handle the increased load. So this all seems fine, but here is where things get weird. There are really two problems that I see. First, my multithreaded FastCGI process spawns 25 worker threads, and all seem to be used according to my internal log files (multiple processes are clearly using multiple threads to do work). However it seems that 3 or 4 FastCGI processes is not enough to handle the 5 to 15 hit per second load, even though the requests take about .02s or so to process internally. In order to be at all responsive, it seems I need 50 or more FastCGI processes, leading me to believe that FastCGI does not realize that my program is multithreaded. I've read the documentation at http://www.fastcgi.com/mod_fastcgi/docs/mod_fastcgi.html and do not see any option pertaining to multithreaded-ness, and my internal code is more or less set up just like the examples provided by the FastCGI library. The second problem I am having is that once process termination has happened a bunch of times as above (and seemingly at random), I begin getting a lot of these messages in my error log: [Tue Jun 01 14:06:22 2010] [warn] (32)Broken pipe: FastCGI: write() to PM failed (ignore if a restart or shutdown is pending) The messages occur for about half the hits I get to the server, and it completely kills the responsiveness of my application - it seems FastCGI will look for a working "pipe" until it finds one, and fail to realize that whatever application it is trying to contact is dead. It does still work though, it's just incredibly unresponsive - sometimes taking up to 40 or so seconds to process a request. I recompiled mod_fastcgi with some extra debugging around the point of the error message, and it appears that the error happens when it tries to write() to the application. The call to write() fails with a -1 return code, and sets errno to EPIPE. I am noticing that the issue happens mostly when either a crash occurs in one of the FastCGI processes, or a bunch of them are seemingly terminated by the process manager. I haven't had any core dumps though, except for one, where the backtrace outputted by gdb is just a single call to free() at address 0x0000000000000000 with nothing else in the stack trace, so I don't really know what to make of that. I'm thinking it happens sometime after the SIGTERM signal is caught, maybe some global variable not being cleaned up properly or something.

    Read the article

  • Weird networking problem ( Linksys, Windows 7 )

    - by Rohit Nair
    Okay it's a bit tough to figure out where to start from, but here is the basic summary of the issue: During general internet usage, there are times when any attempt to visit a website stalls at "Waiting for somedomain.com". This problem occurs in Firefox, IE and Chrome. No website will load, INCLUDING the router configuration page at 192.168.1.1. Curiously, ping works fine, and other network apps such as MSN Messenger continue to work and I can send and receive messages. Disconnecting and reconnecting to the wireless network seems to fix the problem for a bit, but there are times when it relapses into not loading after every 2-3 http requests. Restarting the router seems to fix the issue, but it can crop up hours or days later. I have a CCNA cert and I know my way around the Windows family of operating systems, so I'm going to list all the things I've tried here. Other computers on the network seem to suffer the same problem, which makes me think it might be a specific problem with something in Win7. The random nature of this issue makes it a bit difficult to confirm, but I can definitely say that I have experienced this on the following systems: Windows 7 64-bit on my desktop Windows Vista 32-bit on my desktop ( the desktop has 2 wireless NICs and the problem existed on both ) Windows Vista 32-bit on my laptop ( both with wireless and wired ) Windows XP SP3 on another laptop ( both wireless and wired ) Using Wireshark to sniff packets seemed to indicate that although HTTP requests were being SENT out, no packets were coming in to respond to the HTTP request. However, other network apps continued to work i.e I would still receive IMs on Windows Live Messenger. Disabling IPV6 had no effect. Updating router firmware to the latest stock firmware by Linksys had no effect. Switching to dd-wrt firmware had no effect. By "no effect" I mean that although the restart required by firmware updates fixed the problem at the time, it still came back. A couple of weeks back, after a LOT of googling and flipping of various options, I figured it might be a case of router slowdown ( http://www.dd-wrt.com/wiki/index.php/Router%5FSlowdown ) caused by the fact that I occasionally run a torrent client. I tried changing the configuration as suggested in that router slowdown link, and restarted the router. However I have not run the torrent client for 12 days now, and yet I still randomly experience this problem. Currently the computer I am using is running Windows 7 64-bit. I would just like to reiterate some of the reasons that I was confused by the issue. Even the router config page at 192.168.1.1 would not load, indicating that it's not a problem with the WAN link, but probably a router issue or a local computer issue. For some reason, disconnecting and reconnecting to the wireless network immediately seems to fix the problem. Updating the router firmware, even switching to open source firmware did nothing. So it seemed to be a computer issue. On the other hand, I have not seen any mass outrage of people having networking problems with Windows 7 and Linksys routers, especially a problem of this sort, and I have tweaked every network setting I could think of. Although HTTP seems to have trouble, ping works fine, DNS lookups work fine, other networking apps work fine. However if I disconnect from Windows Live Messenger and try to reconnect, it fails to reconnect. So although it could receive data over the existing TCP/IP connection, trying to start a new one failed? Does anyone have any further ideas on debugging or fixing this issue? I am reasonably certain there are no viruses or other malicious apps on my network, and I am also reasonably certain that nobody is accessing my router without my consent. Router: Linksys WRT54G2 1.0 running dd-wrt firmware Wireless Card: Alfa AWUS036H OS: Windows 7 64-bit EDIT: I tried switching to a clean wireless channel free from interference, but the problem still persisted. I tried connecting directly with a cable, but the problem still persisted. Signed A very confused and bewildered geek whose knowledge seems to be useless in the face of this frustrating network issue.

    Read the article

  • Dual head setup for Ubuntu 10.04.1 and Windows XP Pro with same hardware configuration

    - by mejpark
    Hello. I have a Dell OptiPlex 360 workstation at work, with 2 x ATI RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO] graphics cards installed, which are attached to two identical 19" HII flat panel monitors. I'm using the open source Radeon driver with Ubuntu, and the proprietary drivers with Windows. The good news is that dual head configuration works for both OSes. The bad news is, I have to use a different hardware configuration for each OS to achieve this. Hardware config #1: Dual monitors work for Windows XP Pro like this: First display -> external VGA port Second display -> DVI input on gfx card Hardware config #2: Dual monitors work for Ubuntu 10.04.1 like this: First display -> VGA port on gfx card Second display -> DVI input on gfx card I connected up the displays according to Config #2 and booted up Windows, which resulted in a mirror image on both screens. I was unable to login, as the login box was not visible. I unplugged the VGA lead from gfx card and plugged it into the external VGA port (Config #1) - Windows dual head works again, but the VGA-connected screen is not recognised by Ubuntu and remains in standby mode. Is it possible to configure a dual head setup for Ubuntu using Config #1, or am I missing something? I tried setting up dual monitors using Config #1, this morning which didn't work. By default, there is no xorg.conf file in Ubuntu 10.04.1, so I generated one using: $ sudo X :2 -configure X.Org X Server 1.7.6 Release Date: 2010-03-17 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.24-27-server i686 Ubuntu Current Operating System: Linux harrier 2.6.32-24-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Aug 20 14:24:04 UTC 2010 i686 Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-24-generic root=UUID=a34c1931-98d4-4a34-880c-c227a2936c4a ro quiet splash Build Date: 21 July 2010 12:47:34PM xorg-server 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7.3 (For technical support please see http://www.ubuntu.com/support) Current version of pixman: 0.16.4 Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.2.log", Time: Mon Sep 13 10:02:02 2010 List of video drivers: apm ark intel mach64 s3virge trident mga tseng ati nouveau neomagic i740 openchrome voodoo s3 i128 radeon siliconmotion nv ztv vmware v4l chips rendition savage sisusb tdfx geode sis r128 cirrus fbdev vesa (++) Using config file: "/home/michael/xorg.conf.new" (==) Using config directory: "/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d" (II) [KMS] No DRICreatePCIBusID symbol, no kernel modesetting. Xorg detected your mouse at device /dev/input/mice. Please check your config if the mouse is still not operational, as by default Xorg tries to autodetect the protocol. Xorg has configured a multihead system, please check your config. Your xorg.conf file is /home/michael/xorg.conf.new To test the server, run 'X -config /home/michael/xorg.conf.new' ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log $ sudo X -config /home/michael/xorg.conf.new Fatal server error: Server is already active for display 0 If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock and start again. Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help. ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log I then booted Ubuntu in failsafe mode, dropped into root shell, and executed $ X -config /home/michael/xorg.conf.new again. The screen went blank and turned off, so I reset the machine. There must be a way round this. Any help to set up a dual head config for Ubuntu using Config #1 would be hugely appreciated. TIA, Mike

    Read the article

  • Does likewise-open > version 5.4 contain CIFS support?

    - by Ben Andken
    I'm trying to get the CIFS server working in likewise-open. I've found this set of instructions and everything seems to work until I try to connect ([url]http://www.likewise.com/resources/documentation_library/manuals/cifs/likewise-cifs-smb-file-server-guide.html#id2765992):[/url] 1.6. Build and Configure a Standalone Likewise-CIFS Server This section demonstrates how to build and configure a standalone instance of Likewise-CIFS from the command line. The following procedure assumes that you want to set up Likewise-CIFS on a Linux server to share files with Windows computers in a network without Active Directory. This procedure also assumes you know how to build Linux applications from their source code and then install them. Download Likewise-CIFS from its open source git location: $ git clone git://git.likewiseopen.org/ Download, build, and install the following tools. The tools listed are known to work, but earlier or later versions might work as well. Also, instead of downloading the tools, you might be able to install them on your platform with apt-get or some other means. http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/autoconf/autoconf-2.65.tar.gz http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/automake/automake-1.9.6.tar.gz http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/libtool/libtool-2.2.6a.tar.gz http://pkgconfig.freedesktop.org/releases/pkg-config-0.23.tar.gz gcc --version 3.x or greater Build Likewise-CIFS: $ cd likewise-open $ build/mkcomp --debug all Install Likewise-CIFS: $ sudo su $ cd staging/install-root $ tar cf - . | (cd / && tar xvf -) Make sure Samba is not running: $ /etc/init.d/smb stop Make sure SELinux is either disabled or set to permissive. Make sure the ports required by Likewise are open. For a list of ports that Likewise uses, see the Likewise Open Installation and Administration Guide. Configure Likewise Open: $ /etc/init.d/lwsmd start $ for i in /etc/likewise/*.reg; do /opt/likewise/bin/lwregshell upgrade $i; done $ /etc/init.d/lwsmd stop $ /etc/init.d/lwsmd start $ /opt/likewise/bin/lwsm start srvsvc $ /opt/likewise/bin/domainjoin-cli configure --enable nsswitch Add a user account to the local Likewise provider database. In the following example, substitute the account name that you want for newuser. $ /opt/likewise/bin/lw-add-user --home /home/newuser --shell /bin/bash newuser Successfully added user newuser Enable the user and set the password: $ /opt/likewise/bin/lw-mod-user --enable-user --set-password newuser New Password: ********** Successfully modified user newuser Look up new user's identity as follows. Substitute the value from the command hostname -s for the hostname. Keep in mind that Likewise truncates a hostname longer than 15 characters to the first 15 characters of the string. % id hostname\\newuser uid=2000(HOSTNAME\newuser) gid=1800(HOSTNAME\Likewise Users) groups=1800(HOSTNAME\Likewise Users) context=system_u:system_r:unconfined_t:s0 Make a CIFS directory for the user: mkdir /lwcifs/newuser chown 2000:1800 /lwcifs/newuser From a Windows computer, map the Likewise-CIFS drive share: Computer->Map Network Drive... Folder: \\IP_hostname\c$ Click "Finish" Username: hostname\newuser Password: user_password The last step fails when I try to connect. I've tried with Windows XP Pro and Windows 7 Pro. The rest of the directions only appear to work for version 5.4 (the one that shipped with 10.04). For 12.04, version 6.1 is the only one available and it doesn't appear to have the srvsvc module mentioned in these instructions. Is CIFS support dropped in the 6.1 version of likewise-open?

    Read the article

  • Multiple Homed Windows 2008 Server / Windows 7 Client

    - by Daniel Scott
    I have a small Windows 2008 network, with some Windows 7 clients. The clients are both laptops with docking stations and I would like them to communicate with the Windows 2008 server (for filesharing) through the wired network whilst they're docked. Internet connectivity for all machines (clients and server) is via a Wireless LAN, so the wireless adapter in the Windows 7 clients stays active while they're docked. When the laptops are un-docked, it would be nice to still be able to contact the windows 2008 server for print sharing (and slower file sharing) - hence the server also being on the wireless LAN. The windows 2008 server is running Active Directory, DHCP and DNS. It controls DHCP leases on the wired network and holds the DNS records for "myserver.mycompany.local", which is what the filesharing clients connect to. Ideally I'd like the DNS records to return the wired IP first so that this is the address that the laptops will attempt initially - but there doesn't seem to be a way to do that? At present the server's IP on the wireless LAN comes out of an nslookup above the wired Lan IP. The multi-homing works perfectly - but in the wrong order! Switch on the wireless lan and ping myserver and it goes to the wireless IP. Disable the wireless on the client and do the same ping again and after a couple of seconds it starts pinging the wired address. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to make this work in a predictable order? - or even if it can work. Alternative 1? If it can't work, then would this work: Remove the wireless adapter from the server, put a wireless router/bridge on the wired network (set up to route to/from the wireless LAN's subnet), then configure the clients with two routes to the (now) single IP of the server with metrics favouring direct communication over the wired LAN first? Alternative 2? Should I instead single-home the laptops so all of their connectivity is via the wired-LAN while they're docked? (and route via the windows 2008 server - or a dedicated wireless bridge/router)? My concern here is that I'd like undocking to be seamless - and if the clients are in the middle of downloading something from the internet I wouldn't want whatever they're doing interupted as they switch IP addresses onto the Wireless network. Perhaps this isn't the case and I'm concerned over nothing? Any thoughts? :) UPDATE I seem to have cracked it (at least DNS entries come out in the order I hope for - and pinging the server with various combinations of wired, wireless and both interfaces enabled uses the IP I want) ... I set the binding order of the NICs on the Server (which is acting as Domain Controller, DHCP and DNS server) so that the Wired NIC is before the Wireless adapter. (Start -- type "Network Interfaces" -- Select "View Network Connections" -- Press Alt to show classic dropdown menus -- Advanced -- Advanced Settings) Now, an nslookup (from the client) of the server's hostname returns the Wired IP first, followed by the Wireless IP. The wired IP now seems to be used whenever it's contactable. Incidentally, the metrics on the wired and wireless routes (on the client) also favour the wired LAN (based on Windows' automatically assigned metrics) - but this was always the case, even when I was having trouble getting the wired IP to be "favoured". I'm not entirely sure if this is coincidence - or if a DNS server running on Windows, handing back IP addresses for itself does actually take the binding order of it's own network interfaces into account? It would be interesting to hear from someone who can confirm or deny that (or confirm that the binding order on the server plays a role for some other reason?)

    Read the article

  • Dual head setup for Ubuntu 10.04.1 and Windows XP Pro with same hardware configuration

    - by mejpark
    I have a Dell OptiPlex 360 workstation at work, with 2 x ATI RV280 [Radeon 9200 PRO] graphics cards installed, which are attached to two identical 19" HII flat panel monitors. I'm using the open source Radeon driver with Ubuntu, and the proprietary drivers with Windows. The good news is that dual head configuration works for both OSes. The bad news is, I have to use a different hardware configuration for each OS to achieve this. Hardware config #1: Dual monitors work for Windows XP Pro like this: First display -> external VGA port Second display -> DVI input on gfx card Hardware config #2: Dual monitors work for Ubuntu 10.04.1 like this: First display -> VGA port on gfx card Second display -> DVI input on gfx card I connected up the displays according to Config #2 and booted up Windows, which resulted in a mirror image on both screens. I was unable to login, as the login box was not visible. I unplugged the VGA lead from gfx card and plugged it into the external VGA port (Config #1) - Windows dual head works again, but the VGA-connected screen is not recognised by Ubuntu and remains in standby mode. Is it possible to configure a dual head setup for Ubuntu using Config #1, or am I missing something? I tried setting up dual monitors using Config #1, this morning which didn't work. By default, there is no xorg.conf file in Ubuntu 10.04.1, so I generated one using: $ sudo X :2 -configure X.Org X Server 1.7.6 Release Date: 2010-03-17 X Protocol Version 11, Revision 0 Build Operating System: Linux 2.6.24-27-server i686 Ubuntu Current Operating System: Linux harrier 2.6.32-24-generic #42-Ubuntu SMP Fri Aug 20 14:24:04 UTC 2010 i686 Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-24-generic root=UUID=a34c1931-98d4-4a34-880c-c227a2936c4a ro quiet splash Build Date: 21 July 2010 12:47:34PM xorg-server 2:1.7.6-2ubuntu7.3 (For technical support please see http://www.ubuntu.com/support) Current version of pixman: 0.16.4 Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version. Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) default setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational, (WW) warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.2.log", Time: Mon Sep 13 10:02:02 2010 List of video drivers: apm ark intel mach64 s3virge trident mga tseng ati nouveau neomagic i740 openchrome voodoo s3 i128 radeon siliconmotion nv ztv vmware v4l chips rendition savage sisusb tdfx geode sis r128 cirrus fbdev vesa (++) Using config file: "/home/michael/xorg.conf.new" (==) Using config directory: "/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d" (II) [KMS] No DRICreatePCIBusID symbol, no kernel modesetting. Xorg detected your mouse at device /dev/input/mice. Please check your config if the mouse is still not operational, as by default Xorg tries to autodetect the protocol. Xorg has configured a multihead system, please check your config. Your xorg.conf file is /home/michael/xorg.conf.new To test the server, run 'X -config /home/michael/xorg.conf.new' ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log $ sudo X -config /home/michael/xorg.conf.new Fatal server error: Server is already active for display 0 If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock and start again. Please consult the The X.Org Foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help. ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log I then booted Ubuntu in failsafe mode, dropped into root shell, and executed $ X -config /home/michael/xorg.conf.new again. The screen went blank and turned off, so

    Read the article

  • MVC HTML.RenderAction – Error: Duration must be a positive number

    - by BarDev
    On my website I want the user to have the ability to login/logout from any page. When the user select login button a modal dialog will be present to the user for him to enter in his credentials. Since login will be on every page, I thought I would create a partial view for the login and add it to the layout page. But when I did this I got the following error: Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationException: Duration must be a positive number. There are other ways to work around this that would not using partial views, but I believe this should work. So to test this, I decided to make everything simple with the following code: Created a layout page with the following code @{Html.RenderAction("_Login", "Account");} In the AccountController: public ActionResult _Login() { return PartialView("_Login"); } Partial View _Login <a id="signin">Login</a> But when I run this simple version this I still get this error: Exception Details: System.InvalidOperationException: Duration must be a positive number. Source of error points to "@{Html.RenderAction("_Login", "Account");}" There are some conversations on the web that are similar to my problem, which identifies this as bug with MVC (see links below). But the links pertain to Caching, and I'm not doing any caching. OuputCache Cache Profile does not work for child actions http://aspnet.codeplex.com/workitem/7923 Asp.Net MVC 3 Partial Page Output Caching Not Honoring Config Settings Asp.Net MVC 3 Partial Page Output Caching Not Honoring Config Settings Caching ChildActions using cache profiles won't work? Caching ChildActions using cache profiles won't work? I'm not sure if this makes a difference, but I'll go ahead and add it here. I'm using MVC 3 with Razor. Update Stack Trace [InvalidOperationException: Duration must be a positive number.] System.Web.Mvc.OutputCacheAttribute.ValidateChildActionConfiguration() +624394 System.Web.Mvc.OutputCacheAttribute.OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) +127 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionMethodFilter(IActionFilter filter, ActionExecutingContext preContext, Func1 continuation) +72 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionMethodFilter(IActionFilter filter, ActionExecutingContext preContext, Func1 continuation) +784922 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionMethodWithFilters(ControllerContext controllerContext, IList1 filters, ActionDescriptor actionDescriptor, IDictionary2 parameters) +314 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeAction(ControllerContext controllerContext, String actionName) +784976 System.Web.Mvc.Controller.ExecuteCore() +159 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerBase.Execute(RequestContext requestContext) +335 System.Web.Mvc.<c_DisplayClassb.b_5() +62 System.Web.Mvc.Async.<c_DisplayClass1.b_0() +20 System.Web.Mvc.<c_DisplayClasse.b_d() +54 System.Web.Mvc.<c_DisplayClass4.b_3() +15 System.Web.Mvc.ServerExecuteHttpHandlerWrapper.Wrap(Func`1 func) +41 System.Web.HttpServerUtility.ExecuteInternal(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm, Boolean setPreviousPage, VirtualPath path, VirtualPath filePath, String physPath, Exception error, String queryStringOverride) +1363 [HttpException (0x80004005): Error executing child request for handler 'System.Web.Mvc.HttpHandlerUtil+ServerExecuteHttpHandlerAsyncWrapper'.] System.Web.HttpServerUtility.ExecuteInternal(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm, Boolean setPreviousPage, VirtualPath path, VirtualPath filePath, String physPath, Exception error, String queryStringOverride) +2419 System.Web.HttpServerUtility.Execute(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm, Boolean setPreviousPage) +275 System.Web.HttpServerUtilityWrapper.Execute(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm) +94 System.Web.Mvc.Html.ChildActionExtensions.ActionHelper(HtmlHelper htmlHelper, String actionName, String controllerName, RouteValueDictionary routeValues, TextWriter textWriter) +838 System.Web.Mvc.Html.ChildActionExtensions.RenderAction(HtmlHelper htmlHelper, String actionName, String controllerName, RouteValueDictionary routeValues) +56 ASP._Page_Views_Shared_SiteLayout_cshtml.Execute() in c:\Projects\Odat Projects\Odat\Source\Presentation\Odat.PublicWebSite\Views\Shared\SiteLayout.cshtml:80 System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.ExecutePageHierarchy() +280 System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage.ExecutePageHierarchy() +104 System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.ExecutePageHierarchy(WebPageContext pageContext, TextWriter writer, WebPageRenderingBase startPage) +173 System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.Write(HelperResult result) +89 System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.RenderSurrounding(String partialViewName, Action1 body) +234 System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.PopContext() +234 System.Web.Mvc.ViewResultBase.ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) +384 System.Web.Mvc.<>c__DisplayClass1c.<InvokeActionResultWithFilters>b__19() +33 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultFilter(IResultFilter filter, ResultExecutingContext preContext, Func1 continuation) +784900 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultFilter(IResultFilter filter, ResultExecutingContext preContext, Func1 continuation) +784900 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultWithFilters(ControllerContext controllerContext, IList1 filters, ActionResult actionResult) +265 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeAction(ControllerContext controllerContext, String actionName) +784976 System.Web.Mvc.Controller.ExecuteCore() +159 System.Web.Mvc.ControllerBase.Execute(RequestContext requestContext) +335 System.Web.Mvc.<c_DisplayClassb.b_5() +62 System.Web.Mvc.Async.<c_DisplayClass1.b_0() +20 System.Web.Mvc.<c_DisplayClasse.b_d() +54 System.Web.CallHandlerExecutionStep.System.Web.HttpApplication.IExecutionStep.Execute() +453 System.Web.HttpApplication.ExecuteStep(IExecutionStep step, Boolean& completedSynchronously) +371 Update When I Break in Code, it errors at @{Html.RenderAction("_Login", "Account");} with the following exception. The inner exception Error executing child request for handler 'System.Web.Mvc.HttpHandlerUtil+ServerExecuteHttpHandlerAsyncWrapper'. at System.Web.HttpServerUtility.ExecuteInternal(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm, Boolean setPreviousPage, VirtualPath path, VirtualPath filePath, String physPath, Exception error, String queryStringOverride) at System.Web.HttpServerUtility.Execute(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm, Boolean setPreviousPage) at System.Web.HttpServerUtilityWrapper.Execute(IHttpHandler handler, TextWriter writer, Boolean preserveForm) at System.Web.Mvc.Html.ChildActionExtensions.ActionHelper(HtmlHelper htmlHelper, String actionName, String controllerName, RouteValueDictionary routeValues, TextWriter textWriter) at System.Web.Mvc.Html.ChildActionExtensions.RenderAction(HtmlHelper htmlHelper, String actionName, String controllerName, RouteValueDictionary routeValues) at ASP._Page_Views_Shared_SiteLayout_cshtml.Execute() in c:\Projects\Odat Projects\Odat\Source\Presentation\Odat.PublicWebSite\Views\Shared\SiteLayout.cshtml:line 80 at System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.ExecutePageHierarchy() at System.Web.Mvc.WebViewPage.ExecutePageHierarchy() at System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.ExecutePageHierarchy(WebPageContext pageContext, TextWriter writer, WebPageRenderingBase startPage) at System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.Write(HelperResult result) at System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.RenderSurrounding(String partialViewName, Action1 body) at System.Web.WebPages.WebPageBase.PopContext() at System.Web.Mvc.ViewResultBase.ExecuteResult(ControllerContext context) at System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.<>c__DisplayClass1c.<InvokeActionResultWithFilters>b__19() at System.Web.Mvc.ControllerActionInvoker.InvokeActionResultFilter(IResultFilter filter, ResultExecutingContext preContext, Func1 continuation) Answer Thanks Darin Dimitrov Come to find out, my AccountController had the following attribute [System.Web.Mvc.OutputCache(NoStore =true, Duration = 0, VaryByParam = "*")]. I don't believe this should caused a problem, but when I removed the attribute everything worked. BarDev

    Read the article

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

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

    Read the article

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

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

    Read the article

  • WinInet Apps failing when Internet Explorer is set to Offline Mode

    - by Rick Strahl
    Ran into a nasty issue last week when all of a sudden many of my old applications that are using WinInet for HTTP access started failing. Specifically, the WinInet HttpSendRequest() call started failing with an error of 2, which when retrieving the error boils down to: WinInet Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified Now this error can pop up in many legitimate scenarios with WinInet such as when no Internet connection is available or the HTTP configuration (usually configured in Internet Explorer’s options) is misconfigured. The error typically means that the server in question cannot be found or more specifically an Internet connection can’t be established. In this case the problem started suddenly and was causing some of my own applications (old Visual FoxPro apps using my own wwHttp library) and all Adobe Air applications (which apparently uses WinInet for its basic HTTP stack) along with a few more oddball applications to fail instantly when trying to connect via HTTP. Most other applications – all of my installed browsers, email clients, various social network updaters all worked just fine. It seems it was only WinInet apps that were failing. Yet oddly Internet Explorer appeared to be working. So the problem seemed to be isolated to those ‘classic’ applications using WinInet. WinInet’s base configuration uses the Internet Explorer options dialog. To check this out I typically go to the Internet Explorer options and find the Connection tab, and check out the LAN Setup. Make sure there are no rogue proxy settings or configuration scripts that are invalid. Trying with Auto-configuration on and off also can often fix ‘real’ configuration errors. This time however this wasn’t a problem – nothing in the LAN configuration was set (all default). I also played with the Automatic detection of settings which also had no effect. I also tried to use Fiddler to see if that would tell me something. Fiddler has a few additional WinInet configuration options in its configuration. Running Fiddler and hitting an HTTP request using WinInet would never actually hit Fiddler – the failure would occur before WinInet ever fired up the HTTP connection to go through the Fiddler HTTP proxy. And the Culprit is: Internet Explorer’s Work Offline Option The culprit in this situation was Internet Explorer which at some point, unknown to me switched into Offline Mode and was then shut down: When this Offline mode is checked when IE is running *or* if IE gets shut down with this flag set, all applications using WinInet by default assume that it’s running in offline mode. Depending on your caching HTTP headers and whether the page was cached previously you may or may not get a response or an error. For an independent non-browser application this will be highly unpredictable and likely result in failures getting online – especially if the application forces requests to always reload by disabling HTTP caching (as I do on most of my dynamic HTTP clients). What makes this especially tricky is that even when IE is in offline mode in the browser, you can still browse around the Web *if* you have a connection. IE will try to load anything it has cached from the local cache, but as soon as you hit a URL that isn’t cached it will automatically try to access that URL and uncheck the Work Offline option. Conversely if you get knocked off the Internet and browse in IE 9, IE will automatically go into offline mode. I never explicitly set offline mode – it just automatically sets itself on and off depending on the connection. Problem is if you’re not using IE all the time (as I do – rarely and just for testing so usually a few commonly used URLs) and you left it in offline mode when you exit, offline mode stays set which results in the above head scratcher. Ack. This isn’t new behavior in IE 9 BTW – this behavior has always been there, but I think what’s different is that IE now automatically switches between online and offline modes without notifying you at all, so it’s hard to tell when you are offline. Fixing the Issue in your Code If you have an application that is using WinInet, there’s a WinInet option called INTERNET_OPTION_IGNORE_OFFLINE. I just checked this out in my own applications and Internet Explorer 9 and it works, but apparently it’s been broken for some older releases (I can’t confirm how far back though) – lots of posts seem to suggest the flag doesn’t work. However, in IE 9 at least it does seem to work if you call InternetSetOption before you call HttpOpenRequest with the Http Session handle. In FoxPro code I use: DECLARE INTEGER InternetSetOption ;    IN WININET.DLL ;    INTEGER HINTERNET,;    INTEGER dwFlags,;    INTEGER @dwValue,;    INTEGER cbSize lnOptionValue = 1   && BOOL TRUE pass by reference   *** Set needed SSL flags lnResult=InternetSetOption(this.hHttpSession,;    INTERNET_OPTION_IGNORE_OFFLINE ,;  && 77    @lnOptionValue ,4)   DECLARE INTEGER HttpOpenRequest ;    IN WININET.DLL ;    INTEGER hHTTPHandle,;    STRING lpzReqMethod,;    STRING lpzPage,;    STRING lpzVersion,;    STRING lpzReferer,;    STRING lpzAcceptTypes,;    INTEGER dwFlags,;    INTEGER dwContextw     hHTTPResult=HttpOpenRequest(THIS.hHttpsession,;    lcVerb,;    tcPage,;    NULL,NULL,NULL,;    INTERNET_FLAG_RELOAD + ;    IIF(THIS.lsecurelink,INTERNET_FLAG_SECURE,0) + ;    this.nHTTPServiceFlags,0) …  And this fixes the issue at least for IE 9… In my FoxPro wwHttp class I now call this by default to never get bitten by this again… This solves the problem permanently for my HTTP client. I never want to see offline operation in an HTTP client API – it’s just too unpredictable in handling errors and the last thing you want is getting unpredictably stale data. Problem solved but this behavior is – well ugly. But then that’s to be expected from an API that’s based on Internet Explorer, eh?© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in HTTP  Windows  

    Read the article

  • Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released

    - by ScottGu
    The final release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 is now available. Download and Install Today MSDN subscribers, as well as WebsiteSpark/BizSpark/DreamSpark members, can now download the final releases of Visual Studio 2010 and TFS 2010 through the MSDN subscribers download center.  If you are not an MSDN Subscriber, you can download free 90-day trial editions of Visual Studio 2010.  Or you can can download the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++.  These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out).  If you are looking for an easy way to setup a new machine for web-development you can automate installing ASP.NET 4, ASP.NET MVC 2, IIS, SQL Server Express and Visual Web Developer 2010 Express really quickly with the Microsoft Web Platform Installer (just click the install button on the page). What is new with VS 2010 and .NET 4 Today’s release is a big one – and brings with it a ton of new feature and capabilities. One of the things we tried hard to focus on with this release was to invest heavily in making existing applications, projects and developer experiences better.  What this means is that you don’t need to read 1000+ page books or spend time learning major new concepts in order to take advantage of the release.  There are literally thousands of improvements (both big and small) that make you more productive and successful without having to learn big new concepts in order to start using them.  Below is just a small sampling of some of the improvements with this release: Visual Studio 2010 IDE  Visual Studio 2010 now supports multiple-monitors (enabling much better use of screen real-estate).  It has new code Intellisense support that makes it easier to find and use classes and methods. It has improved code navigation support for searching code-bases and seeing how code is called and used.  It has new code visualization support that allows you to see the relationships across projects and classes within projects, as well as to automatically generate sequence diagrams to chart execution flow.  The editor now supports HTML and JavaScript snippet support as well as improved JavaScript intellisense. The VS 2010 Debugger and Profiling support is now much, much richer and enables new features like Intellitrace (aka Historical Debugging), debugging of Crash/Dump files, and better parallel debugging.  VS 2010’s multi-targeting support is now much richer, and enables you to use VS 2010 to target .NET 2, .NET 3, .NET 3.5 and .NET 4 applications.  And the infamous Add Reference dialog now loads much faster. TFS 2010 is now easy to setup (you can now install the server in under 10 minutes) and enables great source-control, bug/work-item tracking, and continuous integration support.  Testing (both automated and manual) is now much, much richer.  And VS 2010 Premium and Ultimate provide much richer architecture and design tooling support. VB and C# Language Features VB and C# in VS 2010 both contain a bunch of new features and capabilities.  VB adds new support for automatic properties, collection initializers, and implicit line continuation support among many other features.  C# adds support for optional parameters and named arguments, a new dynamic keyword, co-variance and contra-variance, and among many other features. ASP.NET 4 and ASP.NET MVC 2 With ASP.NET 4, Web Forms controls now render clean, semantically correct, and CSS friendly HTML markup. Built-in URL routing functionality allows you to expose clean, search engine friendly, URLs and increase the traffic to your Website.  ViewState within applications can now be more easily controlled and made smaller.  ASP.NET Dynamic Data support has been expanded.  More controls, including rich charting and data controls, are now built-into ASP.NET 4 and enable you to build applications even faster.  New starter project templates now make it easier to get going with new projects.  SEO enhancements make it easier to drive traffic to your public facing sites.  And web.config files are now clean and simple. ASP.NET MVC 2 is now built-into VS 2010 and ASP.NET 4, and provides a great way to build web sites and applications using a model-view-controller based pattern. ASP.NET MVC 2 adds features to easily enable client and server validation logic, provides new strongly-typed HTML and UI-scaffolding helper methods.  It also enables more modular/reusable applications.  The new <%: %> syntax in ASP.NET makes it easier to HTML encode output.  Visual Studio 2010 also now includes better tooling support for unit testing and TDD.  In particular, “Consume first intellisense” and “generate from usage" support within VS 2010 make it easier to write your unit tests first, and then drive your implementation from them. Deploying ASP.NET applications gets a lot easier with this release. You can now publish your Websites and applications to a staging or production server from within Visual Studio itself. Visual Studio 2010 makes it easy to transfer all your files, code, configuration, database schema and data in one complete package. VS 2010 also makes it easy to manage separate web.config configuration files settings depending upon whether you are in debug, release, staging or production modes. WPF 4 and Silverlight 4 WPF 4 includes a ton of new improvements and capabilities including more built-in controls, richer graphics features (cached composition, pixel shader 3 support, layoutrounding, and animation easing functions), a much improved text stack (with crisper text rendering, custom dictionary support, and selection and caret brush options).  WPF 4 also includes a bunch of support to enable you to take advantage of new Windows 7 features – including multi-touch and Windows 7 shell integration. Silverlight 4 will launch this week as well.  You can watch my Silverlight 4 launch keynote streamed live Tuesday (April 13th) at 8am Pacific Time.  Silverlight 4 includes a ton of new capabilities – including a bunch for making it possible to build great business applications and out of the browser applications.  I’ll be doing a separate blog post later this week (once it is live on the web) that talks more about its capabilities. Visual Studio 2010 now includes great tooling support for both WPF and Silverlight.  The new VS 2010 WPF and Silverlight designer makes it much easier to build client applications as well as build great line of business solutions, as well as integrate and bind with data.  Tooling support for Silverlight 4 with the final release of Visual Studio 2010 will be available when Silverlight 4 releases to the web this week. SharePoint and Azure Visual Studio 2010 now includes built-in support for building SharePoint applications.  You can now create, edit, build, and debug SharePoint applications directly within Visual Studio 2010.  You can also now use SharePoint with TFS 2010. Support for creating Azure-hosted applications is also now included with VS 2010 – allowing you to build ASP.NET and WCF based applications and host them within the cloud. Data Access Data access has a lot of improvements coming to it with .NET 4.  Entity Framework 4 includes a ton of new features and capabilities – including support for model first and POCO development, default support for lazy loading, built-in support for pluralization/singularization of table/property names within the VS 2010 designer, full support for all the LINQ operators, the ability to optionally expose foreign keys on model objects (useful for some stateless web scenarios), disconnected API support to better handle N-Tier and stateless web scenarios, and T4 template customization support within VS 2010 to allow you to customize and automate how code is generated for you by the data designer.  In addition to improvements with the Entity Framework, LINQ to SQL with .NET 4 also includes a bunch of nice improvements.  WCF and Workflow WCF includes a bunch of great new capabilities – including better REST, activation and configuration support.  WCF Data Services (formerly known as Astoria) and WCF RIA Services also now enable you to easily expose and work with data from remote clients. Windows Workflow is now much faster, includes flowchart services, and now makes it easier to make custom services than before.  More details can be found here. CLR and Core .NET Library Improvements .NET 4 includes the new CLR 4 engine – which includes a lot of nice performance and feature improvements.  CLR 4 engine now runs side-by-side in-process with older versions of the CLR – allowing you to use two different versions of .NET within the same process.  It also includes improved COM interop support.  The .NET 4 base class libraries (BCL) include a bunch of nice additions and refinements.  In particular, the .NET 4 BCL now includes new parallel programming support that makes it much easier to build applications that take advantage of multiple CPUs and cores on a computer.  This work dove-tails nicely with the new VS 2010 parallel debugger (making it much easier to debug parallel applications), as well as the new F# functional language support now included in the VS 2010 IDE.  .NET 4 also now also has the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) library built-in – which makes it easier to use dynamic language functionality with .NET.  MEF – a really cool library that enables rich extensibility – is also now built-into .NET 4 and included as part of the base class libraries.  .NET 4 Client Profile The download size of the .NET 4 redist is now much smaller than it was before (the x86 full .NET 4 package is about 36MB).  We also now have a .NET 4 Client Profile package which is a pure sub-set of the full .NET that can be used to streamline client application installs. C++ VS 2010 includes a bunch of great improvements for C++ development.  This includes better C++ Intellisense support, MSBuild support for projects, improved parallel debugging and profiler support, MFC improvements, and a number of language features and compiler optimizations. My VS 2010 and .NET 4 Blog Series I’ve been cranking away on a blog series the last few months that highlights many of the new VS 2010 and .NET 4 improvements.  The good news is that I have about 20 in-depth posts already written.  The bad news (for me) is that I have about 200 more to go until I’m done!  I’m going to try and keep adding a few more each week over the next few months to discuss the new improvements and how best to take advantage of them. Below is a list of the already written ones that you can check out today: Clean Web.Config Files Starter Project Templates Multi-targeting Multiple Monitor Support New Code Focused Web Profile Option HTML / ASP.NET / JavaScript Code Snippets Auto-Start ASP.NET Applications URL Routing with ASP.NET 4 Web Forms Searching and Navigating Code in VS 2010 VS 2010 Code Intellisense Improvements WPF 4 Add Reference Dialog Improvements SEO Improvements with ASP.NET 4 Output Cache Extensibility with ASP.NET 4 Built-in Charting Controls for ASP.NET and Windows Forms Cleaner HTML Markup with ASP.NET 4 - Client IDs Optional Parameters and Named Arguments in C# 4 - and a cool scenarios with ASP.NET MVC 2 Automatic Properties, Collection Initializers and Implicit Line Continuation Support with VB 2010 New <%: %> Syntax for HTML Encoding Output using ASP.NET 4 JavaScript Intellisense Improvements with VS 2010 Stay tuned to my blog as I post more.  Also check out this page which links to a bunch of great articles and videos done by others. VS 2010 Installation Notes If you have installed a previous version of VS 2010 on your machine (either the beta or the RC) you must first uninstall it before installing the final VS 2010 release.  I also recommend uninstalling .NET 4 betas (including both the client and full .NET 4 installs) as well as the other installs that come with VS 2010 (e.g. ASP.NET MVC 2 preview builds, etc).  The uninstalls of the betas/RCs will clean up all the old state on your machine – after which you can install the final VS 2010 version and should have everything just work (this is what I’ve done on all of my machines and I haven’t had any problems). The VS 2010 and .NET 4 installs add a bunch of new managed assemblies to your machine.  Some of these will be “NGEN’d” to native code during the actual install process (making them run fast).  To avoid adding too much time to VS setup, though, we don’t NGEN all assemblies immediately – and instead will NGEN the rest in the background when your machine is idle.  Until it finishes NGENing the assemblies they will be JIT’d to native code the first time they are used in a process – which for large assemblies can sometimes cause a slight performance hit. If you run into this you can manually force all assemblies to be NGEN’d to native code immediately (and not just wait till the machine is idle) by launching the Visual Studio command line prompt from the Windows Start Menu (Microsoft Visual Studio 2010->Visual Studio Tools->Visual Studio Command Prompt).  Within the command prompt type “Ngen executequeueditems” – this will cause everything to be NGEN’d immediately. How to Buy Visual Studio 2010 You can can download and use the free Visual Studio express editions of Visual Web Developer 2010, Visual Basic 2010, Visual C# 2010 and Visual C++.  These express editions are available completely for free (and never time out). You can buy a new copy of VS 2010 Professional that includes a 1 year subscription to MSDN Essentials for $799.  MSDN Essentials includes a developer license of Windows 7 Ultimate, Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise, SQL Server 2008 DataCenter R2, and 20 hours of Azure hosting time.  Subscribers also have access to MSDN’s Online Concierge, and Priority Support in MSDN Forums. Upgrade prices from previous releases of Visual Studio are also available.  Existing Visual Studio 2005/2008 Standard customers can upgrade to Visual Studio 2010 Professional for a special $299 retail price until October.  You can take advantage of this VS Standard->Professional upgrade promotion here. Web developers who build applications for others, and who are either independent developers or who work for companies with less than 10 employees, can also optionally take advantage of the Microsoft WebSiteSpark program.  This program gives you three copies of Visual Studio 2010 Professional, 1 copy of Expression Studio, and 4 CPU licenses of both Windows 2008 R2 Web Server and SQL 2008 Web Edition that you can use to both develop and deploy applications with at no cost for 3 years.  At the end of the 3 years there is no obligation to buy anything.  You can sign-up for WebSiteSpark today in under 5 minutes – and immediately have access to the products to download. Summary Today’s release is a big one – and has a bunch of improvements for pretty much every developer.  Thank you everyone who provided feedback, suggestions and reported bugs throughout the development process – we couldn’t have delivered it without you.  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

    Read the article

< Previous Page | 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445  | Next Page >