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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 15, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, May 15, 2010New ProjectsBizTalk EDI Guidance: BizTalk EDI Guidance is intended to simplify the delivery of EDI solutions by leveraging the ESB Toolkit. This project is currently Alpha and sh...Continues Integration Sample: I'm providing a series of blog post to show a complete CI process using CruiseControl.Net and msbuild. The source code for this series is hosted here.DioM2D: My Dragons in our Midst RPG. Runs on my custom Starlight Engine.Ethical Hacking ASP.NET: Security tools and guidelines for white-hat hacking and protecting ASP.NET web applications.Farseer Engine with XNATouch: Farseer is great engine for game physics. This implementation uses XNATouch framework.Feature Builder Guidance Extensions: Feature Builder Guidance Extensions are Feature Extensions which extend the guidance for the Feature Building experience. Each FBGX will be suppli...Microsoft Office Document Security: MODS is a plugin for office 2007 thats includes Hash Encryption, Hex Convertion and more. Plugins: MODS For Word still working on (MODS for Excel ...Minimize Engine (XNA): The Minimize Engine is a basic 3D Games Engine created using XNA, with its primary focus around Grid Based games.MSForge TownCrier: This project is meant to build a notification and calling system for MSForge.net User Groups.NatureProtector: Silverlight 4 project.OutSync: OutSync is a free Windows desktop application that syncs photos of your Facebook friends with matching contacts in Microsoft Outlook. It allows you...Quick Save Images, Clipboard save to file, Quick save, bmp, png, jpeg, Image: ClipSa is a very small tool for very quick picture saving. You put some picture into the clipboard (PrintScrn/Alt-PrintScrn/Ctrl-C), ClipSa saves ...ResHelper Manager: Resource strings management tool that creates localization files for any type of localization target (asp.net, wpf and so on...)SecureCookieHttpModule: Secure your session cookie (and other session-based) cookies for replay attacks using this easy to use ASP.NET HttpModule.simpleChMS: A Church Management System (ChMS) designed for churches or ministries like youth groups that want to facilitate better care or theie membership. Fo...sMAPtool: -SPDomainObject: mapping strong type objects to sp listsSQL Trim: This project aims at developing a universal trim function for Microsoft SQL Server. It trims: 1) pre spaces 2) post spaces 3) double spaces 3) subs...TurretGunner: mt-experienceNew ReleasesBeanProxy: BeanProxy 3.0: BeanProxy is a C# (.NET 3.5) library housing classes that facilitates unit testing. Any non-static, public interface/class or abstract class can be...Blueset Studio Opensource Projects: 蓝色之风记事本 0.2 Alpha: 一个超级Bug版本……CSharp Intellisense: V2.1: - Bug fix (Pascal Casing)DioM2D: DioM2D0.01: http://www.dragonsinourmidst.com/forums/showthread.php?p=690058#post690058Ethical Hacking ASP.NET: Version 1.0.0.1: This is the initial release of the project. Read more about the available tests and features on the Documentation tab. You need the full .NET Frame...Event Scavenger: Collector service update - version 3.2.4: Added check if the database connection string is set up in the config file.Feature Builder Guidance Extensions: FBGX-Binaries: This release consists of a zip file containing all the VSIXs resulting from building each of the FBGX packages found here as source. This will mak...Floe IRC Client: Floe IRC Client 2010-05 R2: - Detaching windows (right click on the tabs to detach them) - Highlight lines with your nick or other patterns - Fixed several bugs - Tabs can now...Free language translator and file converter: Free Language Translator 1.96: Fixed some minor bugs and improved the UI a bit. If you can not install the msi file you might be missing some prerequisites. You can try running t...Geocache Downloader: release 1.0: This is the first release.kp.net: Alpha release is avalable: The goal of this alpha release is to try the code in some production scenarios and find out what features should be tuned.Live-Exchange Calendar Sync: Live-Exchange Calendar Sync: Live-Exchange Calendar Sync Beta May 14, 2010 release of Live-Exchange Calendar Sync 1.0 BETA. (Version 45334) Getting StartedInfo about installat...MAPILab Explorer for SharePoint: MAPILab Explorer for SharePoint ver 2.1.1: 1) Small bug fixed that appears on first start (when earliers versions wasn't installed). How to install:Download ZIP file and extract it on Sha...Microsoft Office Document Security: MODS 4 WORD (SOURCE INCLUDED): Includes Source CodeMoonyDesk (windows desktop widgets): MoonyDesk Alpha: MoonyDesk Alpha (some memory improvements)OnTopReplica: Release 2.9.3: Some bugfixes and improvements. Czech translation added (thanks René Mihula).OutSync: OutSync v1.0.100.0: OutSync v1.0.100.0 is the final release by Mel before the move to CodePlex. I have tested it on Windows 7 32bit and 64bit with Office 2007 and it ...Quick Save Images, Clipboard save to file, Quick save, bmp, png, jpeg, Image: Clipsa v 0.1: Download and extract to any place 2 files - clipSa.exe and clipSa.exe.config Run clipSa.exe. That's all.ResHelper Manager: ResHelperManager: List of changes applied to this version of ResHelper is included in main download zip package. Example sourcesIn Source Code tab are sources of De...Rx Contrib: V1.3: - Bug Fix - BufferWithTimeOrCount with flexible time period setting when ever the time period elapsed...SharePoint DVK Integration: SharePoint 2007 DVK integration v1.0.3: Fixes Fixed default field bindings. I rebound too many fields on every page load. Fixed extension replacing on creating target url (threw it out)...ShoutcastStast for DotNetNuke: DNN_ShoutcastStats alpha 05.00.495: First Alpha release of ShoutcastStats Module for DotNetNuke This first alpha version of the ShoutcastStats Module for DotNetNuke is still in devel...SilverPart 2.1: SilverPart 2.1: SilverPart 2.1 This interim release fixes some major bugs related to Firefox and anonymous access. - Fix for Issue ID 4005 - SilverPart does not w...sMAPtool: sMAPedit v0.7c (Base Release with Maps): Fixed: force a gargabe collection update to prevent pictureBox's memory leak Added: essential map pack with all basic maps in jpg format Added:...SQL Trim: Trim: Initial releaseSSIS Multiple Hash: Multiple Hash V1.2.1: This is version 1.2.1 of the Multiple Hash SSIS Component. It supports SQL 2005 and SQL 2008, although you have to download the correct install pa...StreamInsight Yahoo Finance input adapter example: StockTicker_v1_0_RTM: Updated for StreamInsight RTM.Update Controls .NET: 2.1.0.0: Automatic dependency management for WPF and Silverlight data binding. This release combines both the WPF and Silverlight assemblies into one insta...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30514.0: Automatic drop of latest buildMost Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelASP.NETMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMirror Testing SystemRawrPHPExcelBlogEngine.NETMicrosoft Biology FoundationCustomer Portal Accelerator for Microsoft Dynamics CRMWindows Azure Command-line Tools for PHP DevelopersShake - C# MakeStyleCop

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• Handling HumanTask attachments in Oracle BPM 11g PS4FP+ (I)

  - by ccasares

  Adding attachments to a HumanTask is a feature that exists in Oracle HWF (Human Workflow) since 10g. However, in 11g there have been many improvements on this feature and this entry will try to summarize them. Oracle BPM 11g 11.1.1.5.1 (aka PS4 Feature Pack or PS4FP) introduced two great features: Ability to link attachments at a Task scope or at a Process scope: "Task" attachments are only visible within the scope (lifetime) of a task. This means that, initially, any member of the assignment pattern of the Human Task will be able to handle (add, review or remove) attachments. However, once the task is completed, subsequent human tasks will not have access to them. This does not mean those attachments got lost. Once the human task is completed, attachments can be retrieved in order to, i.e., check them in to a Content Server or to inject them to a new and different human task. Aside note: a "re-initiated" human task will inherit comments and attachments, along with history and -optionally- payload. See here for more info. "Process" attachments are visible within the scope of the process. This means that subsequent human tasks in the same process instance will have access to them. Ability to use Oracle WebCenter Content (previously known as "Oracle UCM") as the backend for the attachments instead of using HWF database backend. This feature adds all content server document lifecycle capabilities to HWF attachments (versioning, RBAC, metadata management, etc). As of today, only Oracle WCC is supported. However, Oracle BPM Suite does include a license of Oracle WCC for the solely usage of document management within BPM scope. Here are some code samples that leverage the above features. Retrieving uploaded attachments -Non UCM- Non UCM attachments (default ones or those that have existed from 10g, and are stored "as-is" in HWK database backend) can be retrieved after the completion of the Human Task. Firstly, we need to know whether any attachment has been effectively uploaded to the human task. There are two ways to find it out: Through an XPath function: Checking the execData/attachment[] structure. For example: Once we are sure one ore more attachments were uploaded to the Human Task, we want to get them. In this example, by "get" I mean to get the attachment name and the payload of the file. Aside note: Oracle HWF lets you to upload two kind of [non-UCM] attachments: a desktop document and a Web URL. This example focuses just on the desktop document one. In order to "retrieve" an uploaded Web URL, you can get it directly from the execData/attachment[] structure. Attachment content (payload) is retrieved through the getTaskAttachmentContents() XPath function: This example shows how to retrieve as many attachments as those had been uploaded to the Human Task and write them to the server using the File Adapter service. The sample process excerpt is as follows:  A dummy UserTask using "HumanTask1" Human Task followed by a Embedded Subprocess that will retrieve the attachments (we're assuming at least one attachment is uploaded): and once retrieved, we will write each of them back to a file in the server using a File Adapter service: In detail: We've defined an XSD structure that will hold the attachments (both name and payload): Then, we can create a BusinessObject based on such element (attachmentCollection) and create a variable (named attachmentBPM) of such BusinessObject type. We will also need to keep a copy of the HumanTask output's execData structure. Therefore we need to create a variable of type TaskExecutionData... ...and copy the HumanTask output execData to it: Now we get into the embedded subprocess that will retrieve the attachments' payload. First, and using an XSLT transformation, we feed the attachmentBPM variable with the name of each attachment and setting an empty value to the payload: Please note that we're using the XSLT for-each node to create as many target structures as necessary. Also note that we're setting an Empty text to the payload variable. The reason for this is to make sure the <payload></payload> tag gets created. This is needed when we map the payload to the XML variable later. Aside note: We are assuming that we're retrieving non-UCM attachments. However in real life you might want to check the type of attachment you're handling. The execData/attachment[]/storageType contains the values "UCM" for UCM type attachments, "TASK" for non-UCM ones or "URL" for Web URL ones. Those values are part of the "Ext.Com.Oracle.Xmlns.Bpel.Workflow.Task.StorageTypeEnum" enumeration. Once we have fed the attachmentsBPM structure and so it now contains the name of each of the attachments, it is time to iterate through it and get the payload. Therefore we will use a new embedded subprocess of type MultiInstance, that will iterate over the attachmentsBPM/attachment[] element: In every iteration we will use a Script activity to map the corresponding payload element with the result of the XPath function getTaskAttachmentContents(). Please, note how the target array element is indexed with the loopCounter predefined variable, so that we make sure we're feeding the right element during the array iteration:  The XPath function used looks as follows: hwf:getTaskAttachmentContents(bpmn:getDataObject('UserTask1LocalExecData')/ns1:systemAttributes/ns1:taskId, bpmn:getDataObject('attachmentsBPM')/ns:attachment[bpmn:getActivityInstanceAttribute('SUBPROCESS3067107484296', 'loopCounter')]/ns:fileName)  where the input parameters are: taskId of the just completed Human Task attachment name we're retrieving the payload from array index (loopCounter predefined variable)  Aside note: The reason whereby we're iterating the execData/attachment[] structure through embedded subprocess and not, i.e., using XSLT and for-each nodes, is mostly because the getTaskAttachmentContents() XPath function is currently not available in XSLT mappings. So all this example might be considered as a workaround until this gets fixed/enhanced in future releases. Once this embedded subprocess ends, we will have all attachments (name + payload) in the attachmentsBPM variable, which is the main goal of this sample. But in order to test everything runs fine, we finish the sample writing each attachment to a file. To that end we include a final embedded subprocess to concurrently iterate through each attachmentsBPM/attachment[] element: On each iteration we will use a Service activity that invokes a File Adapter write service. In here we have two important parameters to set. First, the payload itself. The file adapter awaits binary data in base64 format (string). We have to map it using XPath (Simple mapping doesn't recognize a String as a base64-binary valid target):  Second, we must set the target filename using the Service Properties dialog box:  Again, note how we're making use of the loopCounter index variable to get the right element within the embedded subprocess iteration. Handling UCM attachments will be part of a different and upcoming blog entry. Once I finish will all posts on this matter, I will upload the whole sample project to java.net.

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• Build an Organization Chart In Visio 2010

  - by Mysticgeek

  With trying to manage a business these days, it’s very important to have an Organization Chart to keep everything manageable. Here we’ll show you how to build one in Visio 2010. This Guest Article was written by our friends over at Office 2010 Club. Need for Organization Charts The need of creating Organization Charts are becoming indispensable these days, as companies start focusing on extensive hiring for far reach availability, increase in productivity and targeting diverse markets. Considering this rigorous change, creating an organization chart can help stakeholders in comprehending the ever growing organization structure & hierarchy with an ease. It shows the basic structure of organization along with defining the relationships between employees working in different departments. Opportunely, Microsoft Visio 2010 offers an easy way to create Organization chart. As before now, orthodox ways of listing organization hierarchy have been used for defining the structure of departments along with communication possible including; horizontal and vertical communications. To transform these lists which defines organizational structure, into a detailed chart, Visio 2010 includes an add-in for importing Excel spreadsheet, which comes in handy for pulling out data from spreadsheet to create an organization chart. Importantly, you don’t need to indulge yourself in maze of defining organizational hierarchies and chalking-out structure, as you just need to specify the column & row headers, along with data you need to import and it will automatically create out chart defining; organizational hierarchies with specified credentials of each employee, categorized in their corresponding departments. Creating Organization Charts in Visio 2010 To start off with, we have created an Excel spreadsheet having fields, Name, Supervisor, Designation, Department and Phone. The Name field contains name of all the employees working in different departments, whereas Supervisor field contains name of supervisors or team leads. This field is vital for creating Organization Chart, as it defines the basic structure & hierarchy in chart. Now launch Visio 2010, head over to View tab, under Add-Ons menu, from Business options, click Organization Chart Wizard. This will start Organization Chart Wizard, in the first step, enable Information that’s already stored in a file or database option, and click Next. As we are importing Excel sheet, select the second option for importing Excel spreadsheet. Specify the Excel file path and click Next to continue. In this step, you need to specify the fields which actually defines the structure of an organization. In our case, these are Name & Supervisor fields. After specifying fields, click Next to Proceed further. As organization chart is primarily for showing the hierarchy of departments/employees working in organization along with how they are linked together, and who supervises whom. Considering this, in this step we will leave out Supervisor field, because it’s inclusion wouldn’t be necessary as Visio automatically chalks-out the basic structure defined in Excel sheet. Add the rest of the fields under Displayed fields category, and click Next. Now choose the fields which you want to include in Organization Chart’s shapes and click Next. This step is about breaking the chart into multiple pages, if you are dealing with 100+ employees, you may want to specify numbers of pages on which Organization Chart will be displayed. But in our case, we are dealing with much less amount of data, so we will enable I want the wizard to automatically break my organization chart across pages option. Specify the name you need to show on the top of the page. If you are having less than 20 hierarchies, enter the name of the highest ranked employee in organization and click Finish to end the wizard. It will instantly create an Organization chart out of specified Excel spreadsheet. Highest ranked employee will be shown on top of the organization chart, supervising various employees from different departments. As shown below, his immediate subordinates further manages other employees and so on. For advance customizations, head over to Org Chart tab, here you will find different groups for setting up the Org Chart’s hierarchy and manage other employees’ positions. Under Arrange group, shapes’ arrangements can be changed and it provides easy navigation through the chart. You can also change the type of the position and hide subordinates of selected employee. From Picture group, you can insert a picture of the employees, departments, etc. From synchronization group, you have the option of creating a synced copy and expanding subordinates of selected employee. Under Organization Data group, you can change whole layout of Organization chart from Display Options including; shape display, show divider, enable/disable imported fields, change block position, and fill colors, etc. If at any point of time, you need to insert new position or announce vacancy, Organization Chart stencil is always available on the left sidebar. Drag the desired Organization Chart shape into main diagram page, to maintain the structure integrity, i.e, for inserting subordinates for a specific employee, drag the position shape over the existing employee shape box. For instance, We have added a consultant in organization, who is directly under CEO, for maintaining this, we have dragged the Consultant box and just dropped it over the CEO box to make the immediate subordinate position. Adding details to new position is a cinch, just right-click new position box and click Properties. This will open up Shape Data dialog, start filling in all the relevant information and click OK. Here you can see the newly created position is easily populated with all the specified information. Now expanding an Organization Chart doesn’t require maintenance of long lists any more. Under Design tab, you can also try out different designs & layouts over organization chart to make it look more flamboyant and professional.  Conclusion An Organization Chart is a great way of showing detailed organizational hierarchies; with defined credentials of employees, departments structure, new vacancies, newly hired employees, recently added departments, and importantly shows most convenient way of interaction between different departments & employees, etc. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Geek Reviews: Using Dia as a Free Replacement for Microsoft VisioMysticgeek Blog: Create Appealing Charts In Excel 2007Create Charts in Excel 2007 the Easy Way with Chart AdvisorCreate a Hyperlink in a Word 2007 Flow Chart and Hide Annoying ScreenTipsCreate A Flow Chart In Word 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Know if Someone Accessed Your Facebook Account Shop for Music with Windows Media Player 12 Access Free Documentaries at BBC Documentaries Rent Cameras In Bulk At CameraRenter Download Songs From MySpace Steve Jobs’ iPhone 4 Keynote Video

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• DTracing a PHPUnit Test: Looking at Functional Programming

  - by cj

  Here's a quick example of using DTrace Dynamic Tracing to work out what a PHP code base does. I was reading the article Functional Programming in PHP by Patkos Csaba and wondering how efficient this stype of programming is. I thought this would be a good time to fire up DTrace and see what is going on. Since DTrace is "always available" even in production machines (once PHP is compiled with --enable-dtrace), this was easy to do. I have Oracle Linux with the UEK3 kernel and PHP 5.5 with DTrace static probes enabled, as described in DTrace PHP Using Oracle Linux 'playground' Pre-Built Packages I installed the Functional Programming sample code and Sebastian Bergmann's PHPUnit. Although PHPUnit is included in the Functional Programming example, I found it easier to separately download and use its phar file: cd ~/Desktop wget -O master.zip https://github.com/tutsplus/functional-programming-in-php/archive/master.zip wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpunit.phar unzip master.zip I created a DTrace D script functree.d: #pragma D option quiet self int indent; BEGIN { topfunc = $1; } php$target:::function-entry /copyinstr(arg0) == topfunc/ { self->follow = 1; } php$target:::function-entry /self->follow/ { self->indent += 2; printf("%*s %s%s%s\n", self->indent, "->", arg3?copyinstr(arg3):"", arg4?copyinstr(arg4):"", copyinstr(arg0)); } php$target:::function-return /self->follow/ { printf("%*s %s%s%s\n", self->indent, "<-", arg3?copyinstr(arg3):"", arg4?copyinstr(arg4):"", copyinstr(arg0)); self->indent -= 2; } php$target:::function-return /copyinstr(arg0) == topfunc/ { self->follow = 0; } This prints a PHP script function call tree starting from a given PHP function name. This name is passed as a parameter to DTrace, and assigned to the variable topfunc when the DTrace script starts. With this D script, choose a PHP function that isn't recursive, or modify the script to set self->follow = 0 only when all calls to that function have unwound. From looking at the sample FunSets.php code and its PHPUnit test driver FunSetsTest.php, I settled on one test function to trace: function testUnionContainsAllElements() { ... } I invoked DTrace to trace function calls invoked by this test with # dtrace -s ./functree.d -c 'php phpunit.phar \ /home/cjones/Desktop/functional-programming-in-php-master/FunSets/Tests/FunSetsTest.php' \ '"testUnionContainsAllElements"' The core of this command is a call to PHP to run PHPUnit on the FunSetsTest.php script. Outside that, DTrace is called and the PID of PHP is passed to the D script $target variable so the probes fire just for this invocation of PHP. Note the quoting around the PHP function name passed to DTrace. The parameter must have double quotes included so DTrace knows it is a string. The output is: PHPUnit 3.7.28 by Sebastian Bergmann. ......-> FunSetsTest::testUnionContainsAllElements -> FunSets::singletonSet <- FunSets::singletonSet -> FunSets::singletonSet <- FunSets::singletonSet -> FunSets::union <- FunSets::union -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertTrue -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isTrue <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isTrue -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsTrue::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsTrue::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertTrue -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertTrue -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isTrue <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isTrue -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsTrue::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsTrue::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertTrue -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains -> FunSets::contains -> FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains <- FunSets::{closure} <- FunSets::contains -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertFalse -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isFalse -> {closure} -> main <- main <- {closure} <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::isFalse -> PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::count -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate -> PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsFalse::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint_IsFalse::matches <- PHPUnit_Framework_Constraint::evaluate <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertThat <- PHPUnit_Framework_Assert::assertFalse <- FunSetsTest::testUnionContainsAllElements ... Time: 1.85 seconds, Memory: 3.75Mb OK (9 tests, 23 assertions) The periods correspond to the successful tests before and after (and from) the test I was tracing. You can see the function entry ("->") and return ("<-") points. Cross checking with the testUnionContainsAllElements() source code confirms the two singletonSet() calls, one union() call, two assertTrue() calls and finally an assertFalse() call. These assertions have a contains() call as a parameter, so contains() is called before the PHPUnit assertion functions are run. You can see contains() being called recursively, and how the closures are invoked. If you want to focus on the application logic and suppress the PHPUnit function trace, you could turn off tracing when assertions are being checked by adding D clauses checking the entry and exit of assertFalse() and assertTrue(). But if you want to see all of PHPUnit's code flow, you can modify the functree.d code that sets and unsets self-follow, and instead change it to toggle the variable in request-startup and request-shutdown probes: php$target:::request-startup { self->follow = 1 } php$target:::request-shutdown { self->follow = 0 } Be prepared for a large amount of output!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 22, 2011

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, October 22, 2011Popular ReleasesWatchersNET CKEditor™ Provider for DotNetNuke®: CKEditor Provider 1.12.17: Changes Added FilePath Length Check when Uploading Files. Fixed Issue #6550 Fixed Issue #6536 Fixed Issue #6525 Fixed Issue #6500 Fixed Issue #6401 Fixed Issue #6490DotNet.Framework.Common: DotNet.Framework.Common 4.0: ??????????，????????????XML Explorer: XML Explorer 4.0.5: Changes in 4.0.5: Added 'Copy Attribute XPath to Address Bar' feature. Added methods for decoding node text and value from Base64 encoded strings, and copying them to the clipboard. Added 'ChildNodeDefinitions' to the options, which allows for easier navigation of parent-child and ID-IDREF relationships. Discovery happens on-demand, as nodes are expanded and child nodes are added. Nodes can now have 'virtual' child nodes, defined by an xpath to select an identifier (usually relative to ...Media Companion: MC 3.419b Weekly: A couple of minor bug fixes, but the important fix in this release is to tackle the extremely long load times for users with large TV collections (issue #130). A note has been provided by developer Playos: "One final note, you will have to suffer one final long load and then it should be fixed... alternatively you can delete the TvCache.xml and rebuild your library... The fix was to include the file extension so it doesn't have to look for the video file (checking to see if a file exists is a...CODE Framework: 4.0.11021.0: This build adds a lot of our WPF components, including our MVVC and MVC components as well as a "Metro" and "Battleship" style.Manejo de tags - PHP sobre apache: tagqrphp: Primera version: Para que funcione el programa se debe primero obtener un id para desarrollo del tag eso lo entrega Microsoft registrandose en el sitio. http://tag.microsoft.com - En tagm.php que llama a la libreria Microsoft Tag PHP Library (Codigo que sirve para trabajar con PHP y Tag) - Llenamos los datos del formulario y ejecutamos para obtener el codigo tag de microsoft el cual apunte a la url que le indicamos en el formulario - Libreria MStag.php (tiene mucha explicación del funciona...GridLibre para Visual FoxPro: GridLibre para Visual FoxPro v3.5: GridLibre Para Visual FoxPro: esta herramienta ayudara a los usuarios y programadores en los manejos de los datos, como Filtrar, multiseleccion y el autoformato a las columnas como la asignacion del controlsource.Self-Tracking Entity Generator for WPF and Silverlight: Self-Tracking Entity Generator v 0.9.9: Self-Tracking Entity Generator v 0.9.9 for Entity Framework 4.0Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 5.0 CMS Alpha 3: Umbraco 5 Alpha 3Umbraco 5 (aka Jupiter) will be the next version of everyone's favourite, friendly ASP.NET CMS that already powers over 100,000 websites worldwide. Try out the Alpha of v5 today! If you're new to Umbraco and would like to get a low-down on our popular and easy-to-learn approach to content management, check out our intro video. What's Alpha 3?This is our third Alpha release. It's intended for developers looking to become familiar with the codebase & architecture, or for thos...Vkontakte WP: Vkontakte: source codeWay2Sms Applications for Android, Desktop/Laptop & Java enabled phones: Way2SMS Desktop App v2.0: 1. Fixed issue with sending messages due to changes to Way2Sms site 2. Updated the character limit to 160 from 140GART - Geo Augmented Reality Toolkit: 1.0.1: About Release 1.0.1 Release 1.0.1 is a service release that addresses several issues and improves performance. As always, check the Documentation tab for instructions on how to get started. If you don't have the Windows Phone SDK yet, grab it here. Breaking Change Please note: There is a breaking change in this release. As noted below, the WorldCalculationMode property of ARItem has been replaced by a user-definable function. ARItem is now automatically wired up with a function that perform...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.32: Fix for issue #16710 - string literals in "constant literal operations" which contain ASP.NET substitutions should not be considered "constant." Move the JS1284 error (Misplaced Function Declaration) so it only fires when in strict mode. I got a couple complaints that people didn't like that error popping up in their existing code when they could verify that the location of that function, although not strict JS, still functions as expected cross-browser.Naked Objects: Naked Objects Release 4.0.110.0: Corresponds to the packaged version 4.0.110.0 available via NuGet. Please note that the easiest way to install and run the Naked Objects Framework is via the NuGet package manager: just search the Official NuGet Package Source for 'nakedobjects'. It is only necessary to download the source code (from here) if you wish to modify or re-build the framework yourself. If you do wish to re-build the framework, consul the file HowToBuild.txt in the release. 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• Running TeamCity from Amazon EC2 - Cloud based scalable build and continuous Integration

  - by RoyOsherove

  I’ve been having fun playing with the amazon EC2 cloud service. I set up a server running TeamCity, and an image of a server that just runs a TeamCity agent. I also setup TeamCity  to automatically instantiate agents on EC2 and shut them down based upon availability of free agents. Here’s how I did it: The first step was setting up the teamcity server. Create an account on amazon EC2 (BTW, amazon’s sites works better in IE than it does in chrome.. who knew!?) Open the EC2 dashboard, and click “Launch Instance” . From the “Quick Start” tab I selected from the list: “Getting Started on Microsoft Windows Server 2008 (AMI Id: ami-c5e40dac)” .  it’s good enough to just run teamcity. In the instance details, I used the default (Small instance, 1.7 GB mem). You might want to choose a close availability zone based on where you are. We want to “Launch instances” so click continue. Select the default kernel, RAM disk and all. No need to enable monitoring for now (you can do that later). click continue. If you don’t have a key pair, you will be prompted to create one. Once you do, select it in the list. Now you’ll be prompted to create a security group. I named mine “TC” as in “TeamCity”. each group is a bunch of settings on which ports can be let through into and out of a hosted machine.  keep it as the default settings. We will change them later. Click continue,  review and then click “Launch”. Now you’ll be able to see the new instance in the running instances list on your site. Now, you need to install stuff on that instance (TeamCity!) . To do that, you’ll need to Remote desktop into that instance. To do that, we’ll get the admin password for that instance: Check it on the list, and click “Instance Actions” - “Get Windows Admin Password”. You might have to wait about 10 minutes or so for the password to be generated for you. Once you have the password, you will remote desktop (start-run-‘mstsc’) into the instance. It’s address is a dns address shown below the list under “Public DNS”. it looks something like: ec2-256-226-194-91.compute-1.amazonaws.com Once you’re inside the instance – you’ll need to open IE (it is in hardened mode so you’ll have to relax its security settings to download stuff). I first downloaded chrome and using chrome I downloaded TeamCity. Note that the download speed is FAST. several MBs per second. To be able to see TeamCity from the outside, you will need to open the advanced firewall settings inside the remote machine, and add incoming and outgoing rules for port 80 (HTTP). Once you do that, you should be able to see the machine from the outside. If you still can’t, see the next step. I also enabled ports 9090 since I will use this machine to create an agent image later as well. Now configure the security group (TC) to enable talking to agents: IN the EC2 dashboard click on “Security Groups” and select your group. To add a rule, click on the empty list under the ‘protocol’ header. select TCP. from and ‘to’ ports are 9090. source ip is 0.0.0.0/0 (every ip is allowed). click “Save.  Also make sure you can see “HTTP” tcp 80 in that list. if you can’t see it, add it or you won’t be able to browse to the machine’s teamcity server home page. I also set an elastic IP for the machine: so I always have the same IP for the machine instance. Allocate and set one through the”Elastic IP” link on the EC2 dashboard.   you should now have a working instance of teamcity.   Now let’s create an agent image. Repeat steps 1-9, but this time, make sure you select a machine that fits what an agent might do. I selected Instance type – Hihg-CPU medium machine,  that is much faster. On that machine, I installed what I needed (VS 2010, PostSharp etc..). downloading VS 2010 from MSDN (2 GB took less than 10 min!) Now, instead of installing teamcity, browse using the browser to the teamcity homepage (from within the remote machine). go to the Administration page, and click the upper right link “Install agents”. Install the agent on he local machine – set it to the IP or DNS of the running TeamCity server. That way you’ll be able to check their connectivity live before making this machine your official agent image to reuse. Once the agent is installed, see that the TC server can see it and use it. see steps 13-14 above if they can’t. Once it works, you can take steps to make this image your agent image to be reused. next, here is a copy-paste of several steps to take from http://confluence.jetbrains.net/display/TCD5/Setting+Up+TeamCity+for+Amazon+EC2 Configure system so that agent it is started on machine boot (and make sure TeamCity server is accessible on machine boot). Test the setup by rebooting machine and checking that the agent connects normally to the server. Prepare the Image for bundling: Remove any temporary/history information in the system. Stop the agent (under Windows stop the service but leave it in Automatic startup type) Delete content agent logs and temp directories (not necessary) Delete "<Agent Home>/conf/amazon-*" file (not necessary) Change config/buildAgent.properties to remove properties: name, serverAddress, authToken (not necessary)   Now, we need to: Make AMI from the running instance. Configure TeamCity EC2 support on TeamCity server. Making an AMI: Check the instance of the agent in the EC2 dashboard instance list, and select instance actions->Create Image (EBS AMI) you’ll see the image pending in the APIs list in the EC2 dashboard. this could take 30 minutes or more. meanwhile we can configure the could support in the teamcity server. COPY THE AMI ID to the clipboard (looks like ami-a88aa4ce) Configuring TeamCity for Cloud: In TeamCity, click on “Agents” and then on “Cloud” tab. this is where you will control your cloud agents. to configure new cloud agents based on APIs, click on the right link to the “configuration page” Create a new profile and select AMazon EC2 as cloud type. Use your AMI ID that you copied to the clipboard into the “Images” field. Select an availability zone that is the same as the one your instance is running on for best communication perf between them make sure you select the ‘TC’ security group hopefully, that should be it, and teamcity will try to instantiate new instances on demand. Note that it may take around 10 minutes for an agent to become available to teamcity from the time it’s started.

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• Example: Communication between Activity and Service using Messaging

  - by Lance Lefebure

  I couldn't find any examples of how to send messages between an activity and a service, and spent far too many hours figuring this out. Here is an example project for others to reference. This example allows you to start or stop a service directly, and separately bind/unbind from the service. When the service is running, it increments a number at 10Hz. If the activity is bound to the service, it will display the current value. Data is transferred as an Integer and as a String so you can see how to do that two different ways. There are also buttons in the activity to send messages to the service (changes the increment-by value). Screenshot: AndroidManifest.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package="com.exampleservice" android:versionCode="1" android:versionName="1.0"> <application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name"> <activity android:name=".MainActivity" android:label="@string/app_name"> <intent-filter> <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" /> <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" /> </intent-filter> </activity> <service android:name=".MyService"></service> </application> <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="8" /> </manifest> res\values\strings.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <string name="app_name">ExampleService</string> <string name="service_started">Example Service started</string> <string name="service_label">Example Service Label</string> </resources> res\layout\main.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" > <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout01" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnStart" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Start Service"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnStop" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Stop Service" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout02" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnBind" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Bind to Service"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUnbind" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Unbind from Service" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> <TextView android:id="@+id/textStatus" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Status Goes Here" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/textIntValue" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Integer Value Goes Here" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/textStrValue" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="String Value Goes Here" /> <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout03" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUpby1" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Increment by 1"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUpby10" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Increment by 10" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> </LinearLayout> src\com.exampleservice\MainActivity.java: package com.exampleservice; import android.app.Activity; import android.content.ComponentName; import android.content.Context; import android.content.Intent; import android.content.ServiceConnection; import android.os.Bundle; import android.os.Handler; import android.os.IBinder; import android.os.Message; import android.os.Messenger; import android.os.RemoteException; import android.util.Log; import android.view.View; import android.view.View.OnClickListener; import android.widget.Button; import android.widget.TextView; public class MainActivity extends Activity { Button btnStart, btnStop, btnBind, btnUnbind, btnUpby1, btnUpby10; TextView textStatus, textIntValue, textStrValue; Messenger mService = null; boolean mIsBound; final Messenger mMessenger = new Messenger(new IncomingHandler()); class IncomingHandler extends Handler { @Override public void handleMessage(Message msg) { switch (msg.what) { case MyService.MSG_SET_INT_VALUE: textIntValue.setText("Int Message: " + msg.arg1); break; case MyService.MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE: String str1 = msg.getData().getString("str1"); textStrValue.setText("Str Message: " + str1); break; default: super.handleMessage(msg); } } } private ServiceConnection mConnection = new ServiceConnection() { public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName className, IBinder service) { mService = new Messenger(service); textStatus.setText("Attached."); try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // In this case the service has crashed before we could even do anything with it } } public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName className) { // This is called when the connection with the service has been unexpectedly disconnected - process crashed. mService = null; textStatus.setText("Disconnected."); } }; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); btnStart = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnStart); btnStop = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnStop); btnBind = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnBind); btnUnbind = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUnbind); textStatus = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textStatus); textIntValue = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textIntValue); textStrValue = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textStrValue); btnUpby1 = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUpby1); btnUpby10 = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUpby10); btnStart.setOnClickListener(btnStartListener); btnStop.setOnClickListener(btnStopListener); btnBind.setOnClickListener(btnBindListener); btnUnbind.setOnClickListener(btnUnbindListener); btnUpby1.setOnClickListener(btnUpby1Listener); btnUpby10.setOnClickListener(btnUpby10Listener); restoreMe(savedInstanceState); CheckIfServiceIsRunning(); } @Override protected void onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState) { super.onSaveInstanceState(outState); outState.putString("textStatus", textStatus.getText().toString()); outState.putString("textIntValue", textIntValue.getText().toString()); outState.putString("textStrValue", textStrValue.getText().toString()); } private void restoreMe(Bundle state) { if (state!=null) { textStatus.setText(state.getString("textStatus")); textIntValue.setText(state.getString("textIntValue")); textStrValue.setText(state.getString("textStrValue")); } } private void CheckIfServiceIsRunning() { //If the service is running when the activity starts, we want to automatically bind to it. if (MyService.isRunning()) { doBindService(); } } private OnClickListener btnStartListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ startService(new Intent(MainActivity.this, MyService.class)); } }; private OnClickListener btnStopListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doUnbindService(); stopService(new Intent(MainActivity.this, MyService.class)); } }; private OnClickListener btnBindListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doBindService(); } }; private OnClickListener btnUnbindListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doUnbindService(); } }; private OnClickListener btnUpby1Listener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ sendMessageToService(1); } }; private OnClickListener btnUpby10Listener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ sendMessageToService(10); } }; private void sendMessageToService(int intvaluetosend) { if (mIsBound) { if (mService != null) { try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_SET_INT_VALUE, intvaluetosend, 0); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { } } } } void doBindService() { bindService(new Intent(this, MyService.class), mConnection, Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE); mIsBound = true; textStatus.setText("Binding."); } void doUnbindService() { if (mIsBound) { // If we have received the service, and hence registered with it, then now is the time to unregister. if (mService != null) { try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // There is nothing special we need to do if the service has crashed. } } // Detach our existing connection. unbindService(mConnection); mIsBound = false; textStatus.setText("Unbinding."); } } @Override protected void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); try { doUnbindService(); } catch (Throwable t) { Log.e("MainActivity", "Failed to unbind from the service", t); } } } src\com.exampleservice\MyService.java: package com.exampleservice; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Timer; import java.util.TimerTask; import android.app.Notification; import android.app.NotificationManager; import android.app.PendingIntent; import android.app.Service; import android.content.Intent; import android.os.Bundle; import android.os.Handler; import android.os.IBinder; import android.os.Message; import android.os.Messenger; import android.os.RemoteException; import android.util.Log; public class MyService extends Service { private NotificationManager nm; private Timer timer = new Timer(); private int counter = 0, incrementby = 1; private static boolean isRunning = false; ArrayList<Messenger> mClients = new ArrayList<Messenger>(); // Keeps track of all current registered clients. int mValue = 0; // Holds last value set by a client. static final int MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT = 1; static final int MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT = 2; static final int MSG_SET_INT_VALUE = 3; static final int MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE = 4; final Messenger mMessenger = new Messenger(new IncomingHandler()); // Target we publish for clients to send messages to IncomingHandler. @Override public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) { return mMessenger.getBinder(); } class IncomingHandler extends Handler { // Handler of incoming messages from clients. @Override public void handleMessage(Message msg) { switch (msg.what) { case MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT: mClients.add(msg.replyTo); break; case MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT: mClients.remove(msg.replyTo); break; case MSG_SET_INT_VALUE: incrementby = msg.arg1; break; default: super.handleMessage(msg); } } } private void sendMessageToUI(int intvaluetosend) { for (int i=mClients.size()-1; i>=0; i--) { try { // Send data as an Integer mClients.get(i).send(Message.obtain(null, MSG_SET_INT_VALUE, intvaluetosend, 0)); //Send data as a String Bundle b = new Bundle(); b.putString("str1", "ab" + intvaluetosend + "cd"); Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE); msg.setData(b); mClients.get(i).send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // The client is dead. Remove it from the list; we are going through the list from back to front so this is safe to do inside the loop. mClients.remove(i); } } } @Override public void onCreate() { super.onCreate(); Log.i("MyService", "Service Started."); showNotification(); timer.scheduleAtFixedRate(new TimerTask(){ public void run() {onTimerTick();}}, 0, 100L); isRunning = true; } private void showNotification() { nm = (NotificationManager)getSystemService(NOTIFICATION_SERVICE); // In this sample, we'll use the same text for the ticker and the expanded notification CharSequence text = getText(R.string.service_started); // Set the icon, scrolling text and timestamp Notification notification = new Notification(R.drawable.icon, text, System.currentTimeMillis()); // The PendingIntent to launch our activity if the user selects this notification PendingIntent contentIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(this, 0, new Intent(this, MainActivity.class), 0); // Set the info for the views that show in the notification panel. notification.setLatestEventInfo(this, getText(R.string.service_label), text, contentIntent); // Send the notification. // We use a layout id because it is a unique number. We use it later to cancel. nm.notify(R.string.service_started, notification); } @Override public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) { Log.i("MyService", "Received start id " + startId + ": " + intent); return START_STICKY; // run until explicitly stopped. } public static boolean isRunning() { return isRunning; } private void onTimerTick() { Log.i("TimerTick", "Timer doing work." + counter); try { counter += incrementby; sendMessageToUI(counter); } catch (Throwable t) { //you should always ultimately catch all exceptions in timer tasks. Log.e("TimerTick", "Timer Tick Failed.", t); } } @Override public void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); if (timer != null) {timer.cancel();} counter=0; nm.cancel(R.string.service_started); // Cancel the persistent notification. Log.i("MyService", "Service Stopped."); isRunning = false; } }

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• Beginner’s Guide to Flock, the Social Media Browser

  - by Asian Angel

  Are you wanting a browser that can work as a social hub from the first moment that you start it up? If you love the idea of a browser that is ready to go out of the box then join us as we look at Flock. During the Install Process When you are installing Flock there are two install windows that you should watch for. The first one lets you choose between the “Express Setup & Custom Setup”. We recommend the “Custom Setup”. Once you have selected the “Custom Setup” you can choose which of the following options will enabled. Notice the “anonymous usage statistics” option at the bottom…you can choose to leave this enabled or disable it based on your comfort level. The First Look When you start Flock up for the first time it will open with three tabs. All three are of interest…especially if this is your first time using Flock. With the first tab you can jump right into “logging in/activating” favorite social services within Flock. This page is set to display each time that you open Flock unless you deselect the option in the lower left corner. The second tab provides a very nice overview of Flock and its’ built-in social management power. The third and final page can be considered a “Personal Page”. You can make some changes to the content displayed for quick and easy access and/or monitoring “Twitter Search, Favorite Feeds, Favorite Media, Friend Activity, & Favorite Sites”. Use the “Widget Menu” in the upper left corner to select the “Personal Page Components” that you would like to use. In the upper right corner there is a built-in “Search Bar” and buttons for “Posting to Your Blog & Uploading Media”. To help personalize the “My World Page” just a bit more you can even change the text to your name or whatever best suits your needs. The Flock Toolbar The “Flock Toolbar” is full of social account management goodness. In order from left to right the buttons are: My World (Homepage), Open People Sidebar, Open Media Bar, Open Feeds Sidebar, Webmail, Open Favorites Sidebar, Open Accounts and Services Sidebar, Open Web Clipboard Sidebar, Open Blog Editor, & Open Photo Uploader. The buttons will be “highlighted” with a blue background to help indicate which area you are in. The first area will display a listing of people that you are watching/following at the services shown here. Clicking on the “Media Bar Button” will display the following “Media Slider Bar” above your “Tab Bar”. Notice that there is a built-in “Search Bar” on the right side. Any photos, etc. clicked on will be opened in the currently focused tab below the “Media Bar”. Here is a listing of the “Media Streams” available for viewing. By default Flock will come with a small selection of pre-subscribed RSS Feeds. You can easily unsubscribe, rearrange, add custom folders, or non-categorized feeds as desired. RSS Feeds subscribed to here can be viewed combined together as a single feed (clickable links) in the “My World Page”. or can be viewed individually in a new tab. Very nice! Next on the “Flock Toolbar is the “Webmail Button”. You can set up access to your favorite “Yahoo!, Gmail, & AOL Mail” accounts from here. The “Favorites Sidebar” combines your “Browser History & Bookmarks” into one convenient location. The “Accounts and Services Sidebar” gives you quick and easy access to get logged into your favorite social accounts. Clicking on any of the links will open that particular service’s login page in a new tab. Want to store items such as photos, links, and text to add into a blog post or tweet later on? Just drag and drop them into the “Web Clipboard Sidebar” for later access. Clicking on the “Blog Editor Button” will open up a separate blogging window to compose your posts in. If you have not logged into or set up an account yet in Flock you will see the following message window. The “Blogging Window”…nice, simple, and straightforward. If you are not already logged into your photo account(s) then you will see the following message window when you click on the “Photo Uploader Button”. Clicking “OK” will open the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” with compatible photo services highlighted in a light yellow color. Log in to your favorite service to start uploading all those great images. After Setting Up Here is what our browser looked like after setting up some of our favorite services. The Twitter feed is certainly looking nice and easy to read through… Some tweaking in the “RSS Feeds Sidebar” makes for a perfect reading experience. Keeping up with our e-mail is certainly easy to do too. A look back at the “Accounts and Services Sidebar” shows that all of our accounts are actively logged in (green dot on the right side). Going back to our “My World Page” you can see how nice everything looks for monitoring our “Friend Activity & Favorite Feeds”. Moving on to regular browsing everything is looking very good… Flock is a perfect choice for anyone wanting a browser and social hub all built into a single app. Conclusion Anyone who loves keeping up with their favorite social services while browsing will find using Flock to be a wonderful experience. You literally get the best of both worlds with this browser. Links Download Flock The Official Flock Extensions Homepage The Official Flock Toolbar Homepage Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Add Color Coding to Windows 7 Media Center Program GuideAdd Social Bookmarking (Digg This!) Links to your Wordpress BlogHow to use an ISO image on Ubuntu LinuxAdvertise on How-To GeekFixing When Windows Media Player Library Won’t Let You Add Files TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Have Fun Editing Photo Editing with Citrify Outlook Connector Upgrade Error Gadfly is a cool Twitter/Silverlight app Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause

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• Use Autoruns to Manually Clean an Infected PC

  - by Mark Virtue

  There are many anti-malware programs out there that will clean your system of nasties, but what happens if you’re not able to use such a program?  Autoruns, from SysInternals (recently acquired by Microsoft), is indispensable when removing malware manually. There are a few reasons why you may need to remove viruses and spyware manually: Perhaps you can’t abide running resource-hungry and invasive anti-malware programs on your PC You might need to clean your mom’s computer (or someone else who doesn’t understand that a big flashing sign on a website that says “Your computer is infected with a virus – click HERE to remove it” is not a message that can necessarily be trusted) The malware is so aggressive that it resists all attempts to automatically remove it, or won’t even allow you to install anti-malware software Part of your geek credo is the belief that anti-spyware utilities are for wimps Autoruns is an invaluable addition to any geek’s software toolkit.  It allows you to track and control all programs (and program components) that start automatically with Windows (or with Internet Explorer).  Virtually all malware is designed to start automatically, so there’s a very strong chance that it can be detected and removed with the help of Autoruns. We have covered how to use Autoruns in an earlier article, which you should read if you need to first familiarize yourself with the program. Autoruns is a standalone utility that does not need to be installed on your computer.  It can be simply downloaded, unzipped and run (link below).  This makes is ideally suited for adding to your portable utility collection on your flash drive. When you start Autoruns for the first time on a computer, you are presented with the license agreement: After agreeing to the terms, the main Autoruns window opens, showing you the complete list of all software that will run when your computer starts, when you log in, or when you open Internet Explorer: To temporarily disable a program from launching, uncheck the box next to it’s entry.  Note:  This does not terminate the program if it is running at the time – it merely prevents it from starting next time.  To permanently prevent a program from launching, delete the entry altogether (use the Delete key, or right-click and choose Delete from the context-menu)).  Note:  This does not remove the program from your computer – to remove it completely you need to uninstall the program (or otherwise delete it from your hard disk). Suspicious Software It can take a fair bit of experience (read “trial and error”) to become adept at identifying what is malware and what is not.  Most of the entries presented in Autoruns are legitimate programs, even if their names are unfamiliar to you.  Here are some tips to help you differentiate the malware from the legitimate software: If an entry is digitally signed by a software publisher (i.e. there’s an entry in the Publisher column) or has a “Description”, then there’s a good chance that it’s legitimate If you recognize the software’s name, then it’s usually okay.  Note that occasionally malware will “impersonate” legitimate software, but adopting a name that’s identical or similar to software you’re familiar with (e.g. “AcrobatLauncher” or “PhotoshopBrowser”).  Also, be aware that many malware programs adopt generic or innocuous-sounding names, such as “Diskfix” or “SearchHelper” (both mentioned below). Malware entries usually appear on the Logon tab of Autoruns (but not always!) If you open up the folder that contains the EXE or DLL file (more on this below), an examine the “last modified” date, the dates are often from the last few days (assuming that your infection is fairly recent) Malware is often located in the C:\Windows folder or the C:\Windows\System32 folder Malware often only has a generic icon (to the left of the name of the entry) If in doubt, right-click the entry and select Search Online… The list below shows two suspicious looking entries:  Diskfix and SearchHelper These entries, highlighted above, are fairly typical of malware infections: They have neither descriptions nor publishers They have generic names The files are located in C:\Windows\System32 They have generic icons The filenames are random strings of characters If you look in the C:\Windows\System32 folder and locate the files, you’ll see that they are some of the most recently modified files in the folder (see below) Double-clicking on the items will take you to their corresponding registry keys: Removing the Malware Once you’ve identified the entries you believe to be suspicious, you now need to decide what you want to do with them.  Your choices include: Temporarily disable the Autorun entry Permanently delete the Autorun entry Locate the running process (using Task Manager or similar) and terminating it Delete the EXE or DLL file from your disk (or at least move it to a folder where it won’t be automatically started) or all of the above, depending upon how certain you are that the program is malware. To see if your changes succeeded, you will need to reboot your machine, and check any or all of the following: Autoruns – to see if the entry has returned Task Manager (or similar) – to see if the program was started again after the reboot Check the behavior that led you to believe that your PC was infected in the first place.  If it’s no longer happening, chances are that your PC is now clean Conclusion This solution isn’t for everyone and is most likely geared to advanced users. Usually using a quality Antivirus application does the trick, but if not Autoruns is a valuable tool in your Anti-Malware kit. Keep in mind that some malware is harder to remove than others.  Sometimes you need several iterations of the steps above, with each iteration requiring you to look more carefully at each Autorun entry.  Sometimes the instant that you remove the Autorun entry, the malware that is running replaces the entry.  When this happens, we need to become more aggressive in our assassination of the malware, including terminating programs (even legitimate programs like Explorer.exe) that are infected with malware DLLs. Shortly we will be publishing an article on how to identify, locate and terminate processes that represent legitimate programs but are running infected DLLs, in order that those DLLs can be deleted from the system. Download Autoruns from SysInternals Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Using Autoruns Tool to Track Startup Applications and Add-onsHow To Get Detailed Information About Your PCSUPERAntiSpyware Portable is the Must-Have Spyware Removal Tool You NeedQuick Tip: Windows Vista Temp Files DirectoryClear Recent Commands From the Run Dialog in Windows XP TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional 15 Great Illustrations by Chow Hon Lam Easily Sync Files & Folders with Friends & Family Amazon Free Kindle for PC Download Stretch popurls.com with a Stylish Script (Firefox) OldTvShows.org – Find episodes of Hitchcock, Soaps, Game Shows and more Download Microsoft Office Help tab

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• Why did Ubuntu suddenly get so slow?

  - by user101383

  12.10 has been slowing down mysteriously. Normally, in past versions, I can log in, open Firefox, and it will pop up within seconds. 12.10 is like that upon install too, though once I install my old apps, it gets very slow by Ubuntu standards. After login the hard drive will just make noise for a while before the OS will do anything. Hardware: enter description: Desktop Computer product: XPS 8300 () vendor: Dell Inc. serial: B6G2WR1 width: 64 bits capabilities: smbios-2.6 dmi-2.6 vsyscall32 configuration: boot=normal chassis=desktop uuid=44454C4C-3600-1047-8032-C2C04F575231 core description: Motherboard product: 0Y2MRG vendor: Dell Inc. physical id: 0 version: A00 serial: ..CN7360419G04VQ. slot: To Be Filled By O.E.M. *cpu description: CPU product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz vendor: Intel Corp. physical id: 4 bus info: cpu@0 version: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz serial: To Be Filled By O.E.M. slot: CPU 1 size: 1600MHz capacity: 1600MHz width: 64 bits clock: 100MHz capabilities: x86-64 fpu fpu_exception wp vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx smx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer aes xsave avx lahf_lm ida arat epb xsaveopt pln pts dtherm tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid cpufreq configuration: cores=4 enabledcores=1 threads=2 *-cache:0 description: L1 cache physical id: 5 slot: L1-Cache size: 256KiB capacity: 256KiB capabilities: internal write-through unified *-cache:1 description: L2 cache physical id: 6 slot: L2-Cache size: 1MiB capacity: 1MiB capabilities: internal write-through unified *-cache:2 DISABLED description: L3 cache physical id: 7 slot: L3-Cache size: 8MiB capacity: 8MiB capabilities: internal write-back unified *-memory description: System Memory physical id: 20 slot: System board or motherboard size: 8GiB *-bank:0 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 0 serial: 7228183 slot: DIMM3 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:1 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 1 serial: 1E28183 slot: DIMM1 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:2 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 2 serial: 9E28183 slot: DIMM4 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-bank:3 description: SODIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns) product: NT2GC64B88B0NF-CG vendor: Nanya physical id: 3 serial: 5527183 slot: DIMM2 size: 2GiB width: 64 bits clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns) *-firmware description: BIOS vendor: Dell Inc. physical id: 0 version: A05 date: 09/21/2011 size: 64KiB capacity: 4032KiB capabilities: mca pci upgrade shadowing escd cdboot bootselect socketedrom edd int13floppy1200 int13floppy720 int13floppy2880 int5printscreen int9keyboard int14serial int17printer int10video acpi usb zipboot biosbootspecification *-pci description: Host bridge product: 2nd Generation Core Processor Family DRAM Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 100 bus info: pci@0000:00:00.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz *-pci:0 description: PCI bridge product: Xeon E3-1200/2nd Generation Core Processor Family PCI Express Root Port vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1 bus info: pci@0000:00:01.0 version: 09 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pm msi pciexpress normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:40 ioport:e000(size=4096) memory:fe600000-fe6fffff ioport:d0000000(size=268435456) *-display description: VGA compatible controller product: Juniper [Radeon HD 5700 Series] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom configuration: driver=radeon latency=0 resources: irq:44 memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:fe620000-fe63ffff ioport:e000(size=256) memory:fe600000-fe61ffff *-multimedia description: Audio device product: Juniper HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5700 Series] vendor: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI physical id: 0.1 bus info: pci@0000:01:00.1 version: 00 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm pciexpress msi bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:48 memory:fe640000-fe643fff *-communication description: Communication controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 16 bus info: pci@0000:00:16.0 version: 04 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=mei latency=0 resources: irq:45 memory:fe708000-fe70800f *-usb:0 description: USB controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1a bus info: pci@0000:00:1a.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:fe707000-fe7073ff *-multimedia description: Audio device product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1b bus info: pci@0000:00:1b.0 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=snd_hda_intel latency=0 resources: irq:46 memory:fe700000-fe703fff *-pci:1 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.0 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:41 memory:fe500000-fe5fffff *-network description: Network controller product: BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0 version: 01 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=bcma-pci-bridge latency=0 resources: irq:16 memory:fe500000-fe503fff *-pci:2 description: PCI bridge product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 4 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1c.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1c.3 version: b5 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pci pciexpress msi pm normal_decode bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=pcieport resources: irq:42 memory:fe400000-fe4fffff *-network description: Ethernet interface product: NetLink BCM57788 Gigabit Ethernet PCIe vendor: Broadcom Corporation physical id: 0 bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0 logical name: eth0 version: 01 serial: 18:03:73:e1:a7:71 size: 100Mbit/s capacity: 1Gbit/s width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list ethernet physical tp mii 10bt 10bt-fd 100bt 100bt-fd 1000bt 1000bt-fd autonegotiation configuration: autonegotiation=on broadcast=yes driver=tg3 driverversion=3.123 duplex=full firmware=sb ip=192.168.1.3 latency=0 link=yes multicast=yes port=MII speed=100Mbit/s resources: irq:47 memory:fe400000-fe40ffff *-usb:1 description: USB controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1d bus info: pci@0000:00:1d.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: pm debug ehci bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ehci_hcd latency=0 resources: irq:23 memory:fe706000-fe7063ff *-isa description: ISA bridge product: H67 Express Chipset Family LPC Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.0 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 33MHz capabilities: isa bus_master cap_list configuration: latency=0 *-storage description: SATA controller product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SATA AHCI Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.2 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.2 version: 05 width: 32 bits clock: 66MHz capabilities: storage msi pm ahci_1.0 bus_master cap_list configuration: driver=ahci latency=0 resources: irq:43 ioport:f070(size=8) ioport:f060(size=4) ioport:f050(size=8) ioport:f040(size=4) ioport:f020(size=32) memory:fe705000-fe7057ff *-serial UNCLAIMED description: SMBus product: 6 Series/C200 Series Chipset Family SMBus Controller vendor: Intel Corporation physical id: 1f.3 bus info: pci@0000:00:1f.3 version: 05 width: 64 bits clock: 33MHz configuration: latency=0 resources: memory:fe704000-fe7040ff ioport:f000(size=32) *-scsi:0 physical id: 1 logical name: scsi0 capabilities: emulated *-disk description: ATA Disk product: Hitachi HUA72201 vendor: Hitachi physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sda version: JP4O serial: JPW9J0HD21BTZC size: 931GiB (1TB) capabilities: partitioned partitioned:dos configuration: ansiversion=5 sectorsize=512 signature=000641dc *-volume:0 description: EXT4 volume vendor: Linux physical id: 1 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,1 logical name: /dev/sda1 logical name: / version: 1.0 serial: 4e3d91b7-fd38-4f44-a9e9-ba3c39b926ec size: 585GiB capacity: 585GiB capabilities: primary journaled extended_attributes large_files huge_files dir_nlink recover extents ext4 ext2 initialized configuration: created=2012-10-21 16:26:50 filesystem=ext4 lastmountpoint=/ modified=2012-10-29 18:12:08 mount.fstype=ext4 mount.options=rw,relatime,errors=remount-ro,data=ordered mounted=2012-10-29 18:12:08 state=mounted *-volume:1 description: Extended partition physical id: 2 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,2 logical name: /dev/sda2 size: 7823MiB capacity: 7823MiB capabilities: primary extended partitioned partitioned:extended *-logicalvolume description: Linux swap / Solaris partition physical id: 5 logical name: /dev/sda5 capacity: 7823MiB capabilities: nofs *-volume:2 description: Windows NTFS volume physical id: 3 bus info: scsi@0:0.0.0,3 logical name: /dev/sda3 version: 3.1 serial: 84a92aae-347b-7940-a2d1-f4745b885ef2 size: 337GiB capacity: 337GiB capabilities: primary bootable ntfs initialized configuration: clustersize=4096 created=2012-10-21 18:43:39 filesystem=ntfs modified_by_chkdsk=true mounted_on_nt4=true resize_log_file=true state=dirty upgrade_on_mount=true *-scsi:1 physical id: 2 logical name: scsi1 capabilities: emulated *-cdrom description: DVD-RAM writer product: DVDRWBD DH-12E3S vendor: PLDS physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@1:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/cdrom logical name: /dev/cdrw logical name: /dev/dvd logical name: /dev/dvdrw logical name: /dev/sr0 version: MD11 capabilities: removable audio cd-r cd-rw dvd dvd-r dvd-ram configuration: ansiversion=5 status=nodisc *-scsi:2 physical id: 3 bus info: usb@2:1.8 logical name: scsi6 capabilities: emulated scsi-host configuration: driver=usb-storage *-disk:0 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.0 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.0 logical name: /dev/sdb configuration: sectorsize=512 *-disk:1 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.1 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.1 logical name: /dev/sdc configuration: sectorsize=512 *-disk:2 description: SCSI Disk physical id: 0.0.2 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.2 logical name: /dev/sdd configuration: sectorsize=512 *-disk:3 description: SCSI Disk product: MS/MS-Pro vendor: Generic- physical id: 0.0.3 bus info: scsi@6:0.0.3 logical name: /dev/sde version: 1.03 serial: 3 capabilities: removable configuration: sectorsize=512 *-medium physical id: 0 logical name: /dev/sde

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 23, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Sunday, May 23, 2010New ProjectsA2Command: Apple 2 port of CBM-Command (http://cbmcommand.codeplex.com)AgUnit: AgUnit is a plugin for Jetbrains ReSharper (R#) that allows you to run and debug Silverlight unit tests from within Visual Studio.BSonPosh Powershell Module: A collection of useful Powershell functions I have written and collected over the years. It is a Powershell v2 Module composed of mostly scripts.DB Restriker: Simple tool for lookup, parsing, searching some standard databases using wildcards and pattern recognition.Entity Framework Repository & Unit of Work Template: T4 Template for Entity Framework 4 for creating a data access layer using the repository and unit of work patterns. Designed to work well with dep...Fiction Catalog: A catalog project designed to store information about fictional literature.Giving a Presentation: Useful for people doing presentations, this application hides desktop icons, disables screensaver, closes chosen programs when presentation starts,...glueless: Glueless is a local message bus which allows architect to design highly decoupled systems and applications. Glueless is a step beyond dependency i...HtmlCodeIt: Take any code and format it so that it can be viewed properly on a web browser, blog post or website.just testproject :): just have a test!KanbanTaskboard: The aim of the project is to design and implement a functional prototype for visualizing and operating a multi-platform virtual "Kanban Taskboard”Life System: Life SystemOaSys Project: Project Oasys is a project that aims to help solve desertification. Scoring of pingPong Game: Scoring of pingPong GameSilverlight Web Comic: The Silverlight Web Comic makes easier for the people create your own comic with your own pictures o drawings, and add the globes of text like the ...TickSharp: C# Wrapper for http://TickSpot.com RESTful API.Traductor: El Traductor es una aplicación de escritorio para traducción de frases entre distintos idiomas basada en la plataforma Silverlight Out Of Browser y...WatchersNET.SkinObjects.ModulActionsMenu: Displays the Module Actions Menu as a Unsorted CSS Menu.xxfd1r4w96: testingNew ReleasesAgUnit: AgUnit 0.1: Initial release of AgUnit. Copy the extracted files from AgUnit-0.1.zip into the "Bin\Plugins\" folder of your ReSharper installation (default C:...ASP.NET MVC | SCAFFOLD: ASP.NET MVC SCAFFOLD - Beta 1.0: Release versão betaBizTalk Server 2006 Documenter: Documenter_v3.4.0.0: This is the new release of the documenter which has the following highlights Support for 64 bit systems Support for SxS scenarios (so now the sys...CassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers Edition: CassiniDev 3.5.1 Beta 2- VS 2008 Replacement: The CassiniDev Visual Studio build is a fully compatibly Visual Studio 2008/2010 Development server drop-in replacement with all CassiniDev enhance...CBM-Command: 2010-05-22 Beta: Release Notes - 2010-05-22 BetaNew Features Simple text file viewer. Now when you use SHIFT-RETURN to open a file, it will ask if you want to view...Easy Validation: Documentation: Documentation for easyVal was created and presented at University of Texas at Austin in May of 2010.Entity Framework Repository & Unit of Work Template: 1.0: Initial ReleaseFrotz.NET: FrotzNet 1.0 beta: Many, many changes, including: - Got Adaptive Palette working for graphics - Got undo working - Implemented all zcodes - Added scripting as well as...Giving a Presentation: CTP: This release includes basic extensibility infrastructure and three extensions: hides desktop icons, disables screensaver, closes chosen programs wh...Gov 2.0 Kit: SharePoint 2010 MyPeeps Mysite Accelerators: SharePoint 2010 MyPeeps Mysite Accelerators. Attached are the installation and documentations files.HKGolden Express: HKGoldenExpress (Build 201005221900): New features: (None) Bug fix: Hong Kong special characters now can be posted without encoding problem. Improvements: (None) Other changes: (None) K...Intellibox - A WPF auto complete textbox search control: Beta 2: Updated the namespace of the Intellibox control from "System.Windows.Controls" to "FeserWard.Controls". Empty binding Path properties now work on...MDownloader: MDownloader-0.15.14.59111: Fixed DepositFile provider. Fixed FileFactory provider. Added simple fakeness detector (can check if .rar, .zip, .7z files have valid signature...Mute4: V1: Initial version of Mute4NLog - Advanced .NET Logging: Nightly Build 2010.05.22.003: Changes since the last build:No changes. Unit test results:Passed 191/191 (100%) Passed 191/191 (100%) Passed 214/214 (100%) Passed 216/216 (100%)...NSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.9: This release includes source code, executable binaries and example materials.Silverlight Gantt Chart: Silverlight Gantt Chart 1.3 (SL4): The latest release mainly makes the Gantt Chart useful in Silverlight 4 applications.SqlServerExtensions: V 0.2 beta: V 0.2 Beta release: New features available TrimStart - trim leading characters TrimEnd - trim trailing characters Remove - remove characters f...Traductor: Version 3.1: Nuevo en esta versión: El Traductor ahora permite escoger entre los motores de Microsoft y Google. El Text to Speech is es ahora habilitado por...VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30522.0: Automatic drop of latest buildVDialer Add-In for Outlook 2007 & 2010 - Dial your Vonage phone from Outlook: VDialer Add-In 1.0.3: This release adds new features related to Journal and use of Vonage API Changes in version 1.0.3 Added configurable option to automatically open J...WatchersNET.SkinObjects.ModulActionsMenu: ModulActionsMenu 01.00.00: First Release For Informations How To Install, the Skin Object Read the DocumentationMost Popular ProjectsCodeComment.NETRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryPHPExcelMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryCaliburn: An Application Framework for WPF and Silverlightpatterns & practices: Windows Azure Security GuidanceCassiniDev - Cassini 3.5/4.0 Developers EditionGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleSQL Server PowerShell ExtensionsBlogEngine.NETCodeReview

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• Get Information to Your Blog with Microsoft Broadcaster

  - by Matthew Guay

  Do you often have people ask you for advice about technology, or do you write tech-focused blog or newsletter?  Here’s how you can get information to share with your readers about Microsoft technology with Microsoft Broadcaster. Microsoft Broadcaster is a new service from Microsoft to help publishers, bloggers, developers, and other IT professionals find relevant information and resources from Microsoft.  You can use it to help discover things to write about, or simply discover new information about the technology you use.  Broadcaster will also notify you when new resources are available about the topics that interest you.  Let’s look at how you could use this to expand your blog and help your users. Getting Started Head over to the Microsoft Broadcaster site (link below), and click Join to get started. Sign in with your Windows Live ID, or create a new account if you don’t already have one. Near the bottom of the page, add information about your blog, newsletter, or group that you want to share Broadcaster information with.  Click Add when you’re done entering information.  You can enter as many sites or groups as you wish. When you’ve entered all of your information, click the Apply button at the bottom of the page.  Broadcaster will then let you know your information has been submitted, but you’ll need to wait several days to see if you are approved or not. Our application was approved about 2 days after applying, though this may vary.  When you’re approved, you’ll receive an email letting you know.  Return to the Broadcaster website (link below), but this time, click Sign in. Accept the terms of use by clicking I Accept at the bottom of the page. Confirm that your information entered previously is correct, and then click Configure my keywords at the bottom of the page. Now you can pick the topics you want to stay informed about.  Type keywords in the textbox, and it will bring up relevant topics with IntelliSense. Here we’ve added several topics to keep up with. Next select the Microsoft Products you want to keep track of.  If the product you want to keep track of is not listed, make sure to list it in the keywords section as above. Finally, select the types of content you wish to see, including articles, eBooks, webcasts, and more. Finally, when everything’s entered, click Configure My Alerts at the bottom of the page. Broadcaster can automatically email you when new content is found.  If you would like this, click Subscribe.  Otherwise, simply click Access Dashboard to go ahead and find your personalized content. If you choose to receive emails of new content, you’ll have to configure it with Windows Live Alerts.  Click Continue to set this up. Select if you want to receive Messenger alerts, emails, and/or text messages when new content is available.  Click Save when you’re finished. Finally, select how often you want to be notified, and then click Access Dashboard to view the content currently available. Finding Content For Your Blog, Site, or Group Now you can find content specified for your interests from the dashboard.  To access the dashboard in the future, simply go to the Broadcaster site and click Sign In. Here you can see available content, and can search for different topics or customize the topics shown. You’ll see snippets of information from various Microsoft videos, articles, whitepapers, eBooks, and more, depending on your settings.  Click the link at the top of the snippet to view the content, or right-click and copy the link to use in emails or on social networks like Twitter. If you’d like to add this snippet to your website or blog, click the Download content link at the bottom.   Now you can preview what the snippet will look like on your site, and change the width or height to fit your site.  You can view and edit the source code of the snippet from the box at the bottom, and then copy it to use on your site. Copy the code, and paste it in the HTML of a blog post, email, webpage, or anywhere else you wish to share it.  Here we’re pasting it into the HTML editor in Windows Live Writer so we can post it to a blog. After adding a title and opening paragraph, we have a nice blog post that only took a few minutes to put together but should still be useful for our readers.  You can check out the blog post we created at the link below. Readers can click on the links, which will direct them to the content on Microsoft’s websites. Conclusion If you frequently need to find educational and informative content about Microsoft products and services, Broadcaster can be a great service to keep you up to date.  The service worked quite good in our tests, and generally found relevant content to our keywords.  We had difficulty embedding links to eBooks that were listed by Broadcaster, but everything else worked for us.  Now you can always have high quality content to help your customers, coworkers, friends, and more, and you just might find something that will help you, too! Link Microsoft Broadcaster (registration required) Example Post at Techinch.com with Content from Microsoft Broadcaster Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Create An Electronic Business Card In Outlook 2007Mysticgeek Blog: A Look at Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 on Windows XPAnnouncing the How-To Geek BlogsNew Vista Syntax for Opening Control Panel Items from the Command-lineHow To Create and Publish Blog Posts in Word 2010 & 2007 TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips HippoRemote Pro 2.2 Xobni Plus for Outlook All My Movies 5.9 CloudBerry Online Backup 1.5 for Windows Home Server Fix Common Inkjet Printer Errors Dual Boot Ubuntu and Windows 7 What is HTML5? Default Programs Editor – One great tool for Setting Defaults Convert BMP, TIFF, PCX to Vector files with RasterVect Free Identify Fonts using WhatFontis.com

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• Can you help me fix my broken packages?

  - by Andreas Hartmann

  I would like to upgrade from 13.04 to 13.10, but some broken packages are preventing upgrade success: grep Broken /var/log/dist-upgrade/apt.log output: Broken libwayland-client0:amd64 Conflicts on libwayland0 [ amd64 ] < 1.0.5-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) (< 1.1.0) Broken libunity9:amd64 Breaks on unity-common [ amd64 ] < 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 > ( gnome ) (< 7.1.2) Broken cups-filters:amd64 Conflicts on ghostscript-cups [ amd64 ] < 9.07~dfsg2-0ubuntu3.1 > ( text ) Broken libpam-systemd:amd64 Conflicts on libpam-xdg-support [ amd64 ] < 0.2-0ubuntu2 > ( admin ) Broken libharfbuzz0a:amd64 Breaks on libharfbuzz0 [ amd64 ] < 0.9.13-1 > ( libs ) Broken libharfbuzz0a:amd64 Breaks on libharfbuzz0 [ i386 ] < 0.9.13-1 > ( libs ) Broken libunity-scopes-json-def-desktop:amd64 Conflicts on libunity-common [ amd64 ] < 6.90.2daily13.04.05-0ubuntu1 > ( gnome ) (< 7.0.7) Broken libunity-scopes-json-def-desktop:amd64 Conflicts on libunity-common [ i386 ] < none > ( none ) (< 7.0.7) Broken libaccount-plugin-generic-oauth:amd64 Conflicts on account-plugin-generic-oauth [ amd64 ] < 0.10bzr13.03.26-0ubuntu1.1 > ( gnome ) (< 0.10bzr13.04.30) Broken libaccount-plugin-generic-oauth:amd64 Breaks on account-plugin-generic-oauth [ amd64 ] < 0.10bzr13.03.26-0ubuntu1.1 > ( gnome ) (< 0.10bzr13.04.30) Broken libmutter0b:amd64 Breaks on libmutter0a [ amd64 ] < 3.6.3-0ubuntu2 > ( libs ) Broken python3-aptdaemon.pkcompat:amd64 Breaks on libpackagekit-glib2-14 [ amd64 ] < 0.7.6-3ubuntu1 > ( libs ) (<= 0.7.6-4) Broken apache2:amd64 Conflicts on apache2.2-common [ amd64 ] < 2.2.22-6ubuntu5.1 > ( httpd ) Broken chromium-codecs-ffmpeg-extra:amd64 Conflicts on chromium-codecs-ffmpeg [ amd64 ] < 28.0.1500.71-0ubuntu1.13.04.1 -> 29.0.1547.65-0ubuntu2 > ( universe/web ) Broken unity-scope-home:amd64 Conflicts on unity-lens-shopping [ amd64 ] < 6.8.0daily13.03.04-0ubuntu1 > ( gnome ) Broken libsnmp30:amd64 Breaks on libsnmp15 [ amd64 ] < 5.4.3~dfsg-2.7ubuntu1 > ( libs ) Broken apache2.2-bin:amd64 Breaks on gnome-user-share [ amd64 ] < 3.0.4-0ubuntu1 > ( gnome ) (< 3.8.0-2~) Broken libgjs0d:amd64 Conflicts on libgjs0c [ amd64 ] < 1.34.0-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) Broken unity-gtk2-module:amd64 Conflicts on appmenu-gtk [ amd64 ] < 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) Broken lib32asound2:amd64 Depends on libasound2 [ amd64 ] < 1.0.25-4ubuntu3.1 -> 1.0.27.2-1ubuntu6 > ( libs ) (= 1.0.25-4ubuntu3.1) Broken unity-gtk3-module:amd64 Conflicts on appmenu-gtk3 [ amd64 ] < 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) Broken activity-log-manager:amd64 Conflicts on activity-log-manager-common [ amd64 ] < 0.9.4-0ubuntu6.2 > ( utils ) Broken libgtksourceview-3.0-0:amd64 Depends on libgtksourceview-3.0-common [ amd64 ] < 3.6.3-0ubuntu1 -> 3.8.2-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) (< 3.7) Broken icaclient:amd64 Depends on lib32asound2 [ amd64 ] < 1.0.25-4ubuntu3.1 > ( libs ) Broken libunity-core-6.0-5:amd64 Depends on unity-services [ amd64 ] < 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 -> 7.1.2+13.10.20131014.1-0ubuntu1 > ( gnome ) (= 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1) Broken libbamf3-1:amd64 Depends on bamfdaemon [ amd64 ] < 0.4.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 -> 0.5.1+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 > ( libs ) (= 0.4.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1) Broken apache2-bin:amd64 Conflicts on apache2.2-bin [ amd64 ] < 2.2.22-6ubuntu5.1 -> 2.4.6-2ubuntu2 > ( httpd ) (< 2.3~) Output for cat /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*.list # deb cdrom:[Ubuntu 13.04 _Raring Ringtail_ - Release amd64 (20130424)]/ raring main restricted # See http://help.ubuntu.com/community/UpgradeNotes for how to upgrade to # newer versions of the distribution. deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring main restricted ## Major bug fix updates produced after the final release of the ## distribution. deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring-updates main restricted ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team. Also, please note that software in universe WILL NOT receive any ## review or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring universe deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring-updates universe ## N.B. software from this repository is ENTIRELY UNSUPPORTED by the Ubuntu ## team, and may not be under a free licence. Please satisfy yourself as to ## your rights to use the software. Also, please note that software in ## multiverse WILL NOT receive any review or updates from the Ubuntu ## security team. deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring multiverse deb http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ raring-updates multiverse ## N.B. software from this repository may not have been tested as ## extensively as that contained in the main release, although it includes ## newer versions of some applications which may provide useful features. ## Also, please note that software in backports WILL NOT receive any review ## or updates from the Ubuntu security team. deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu raring-security main restricted deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu raring-security universe deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu raring-security multiverse ## Uncomment the following two lines to add software from Canonical's ## 'partner' repository. ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by Canonical and the ## respective vendors as a service to Ubuntu users. deb http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu raring partner # deb-src http://archive.canonical.com/ubuntu raring partner ## This software is not part of Ubuntu, but is offered by third-party ## developers who want to ship their latest software. deb http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu raring main # deb-src http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu raring main # deb http://linux.dropbox.com/ubuntu precise main output for sudo dpkg -l | grep -e "^iU" -e "^rc": rc ibm-lotus-cae 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Composite Application Editor rc ibm-lotus-cae-nl1 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus CAE NL1 rc ibm-lotus-feedreader 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 Feeds for IBM Lotus Notes 8.5.2 rc ibm-lotus-feedreader-nl1 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Feed Reader NL1 rc ibm-lotus-notes 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Notes rc ibm-lotus-notes-core-de 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Notes Native German (de) rc ibm-lotus-notes-nl1 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Notes Java NL1 rc ibm-lotus-sametime 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Sametime rc ibm-lotus-symphony 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Symphony rc ibm-lotus-symphony-nl1 8.5.2-20100805.0821 i386 IBM Lotus Symphony NL1 rc libapache2-mod-php5filter 5.4.9-4ubuntu2.2 amd64 server-side, HTML-embedded scripting language (apache 2 filter module) rc libavcodec53:amd64 6:0.8.6-1ubuntu2 amd64 Libav codec library rc libavutil51:amd64 6:0.8.6-1ubuntu2 amd64 Libav utility library rc libmotif4:amd64 2.3.3-7ubuntu1 amd64 Open Motif - shared libraries rc linux-image-3.8.0-25-generic 3.8.0-25.37 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-25-generic 3.8.0-25.37 amd64 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 64 bit x86 SMP

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• Pet Peeves with the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace

  - by Bil Simser

  Have you ever noticed how something things just gnaw at your very being. This is the case with the WP7 marketplace, the Zune software, and the things that drive me batshit crazy with a side of fries. To go. I wanted to share. XBox Live is Not the Centre of the Universe Okay, it’s fine that the Zune software has an XBox live tag for games so can see them clearly but do we really need to have it shoved down our throats. On every click? Click on Games in the marketplace: The first thing that it defaults to on the filters on the right is XBox Live: Okay. Fine. However if you change it (say to Paid) then click onto a title when you come back from that title is the filter still set to Paid? No. It’s back to XBox Live again. Really? Give us a break. If you change to any filter on any other genre then click on the selected title, it doesn’t revert back to anything. It stays on the selection you picked. Let’s be fair here. The Games genre should behave just like every other one. If I pick Paid then when I come back to the list please remember that. Double Dipping On the subject of XBox Live titles, Microsoft (and developers who have an agreement with Microsoft to produce Live titles, which generally rules out indie game developers) is double dipping with regards to exposure of their titles. Here’s the Puzzle and Trivia Game section on the Marketplace for XBox Live titles: And here’s the same category filtered on Paid titles: See the problem? Two indie titles while the rest are XBox Live ones. So while XBL has it’s filter, they also get to showcase their wares in the Paid and Free filters as well. If you’re going to have an XBox Live filter then use it and stop pushing down indie titles until they’re off the screen (on some genres this is already the case). Free and Paid titles should be just that and not include XBox Live ones. If you’re really stoked that people can’t find the Free XBox Live titles vs. the paid ones, then create a Free XBox Live filter and a Paid XBox Live filter. I don’t think we would mind much. Whose Trial is it Anyways? You might notice apps in the marketplace with titles like “My Fart App Professional Lite” or “Silicon Lamb Spleen Builder Free”. When you submit and app to the marketplace it can either be free or paid. If it’s a paid app you also have the option to submit it with Trial capabilities. It’s up to you to decide what you offer in the trial version but trial versions can be purchased from within the app so after someone trys out your app (for free) and wants to unlock the Super Secret Obama Spy Ring Level, they can just go to the marketplace from your app (if you built that functionality in) and upgrade to the paid version. However it creates a rift of sorts when it comes to visibility. Some developers go the route of the paid app with a trial version, others decide to submit *two* apps instead of one. One app is the “Free” or “Lite” verions and the other is the paid version. Why go to the hassle of submitting two apps when you can just create a trial version in the same app? Again, visibility. There’s no way to tell Paid apps with Trial versions and ones without (it’s an option, you don’t have to provide trial versions, although I think it’s a good idea). However there is a way to see the Free apps from the Paid ones so some submit the two apps and have the Free version have links to buy the paid one (again through the Marketplace tasks in the API). What we as developers need for visibility is a new filter. Trial. That’s it. It would simply filter on Paid apps that have trial capabilities and surface up those apps just like the free ones. If Microsoft added this filter to the marketplace, it would eliminate the need for people to submit their “Free” and “Lite” versions and make it easier for the developer not to have to maintain two systems. I mean, is it really that hard? Can’t be any more difficult than the XBox Live Filter that’s already there. Location is Everything The last thing on my bucket list is about location. When I launch Zune I’m running in my native location setting, Canada. What’s great is that I navigate to the Travel Tools section where I have one of my apps and behold the splendour that I see: There are my apps in the number 1 and number 4 slot for top selling in that category. I show it to my wife to make up for the sleepless nights writing this stuff and we dance around and celebrate. Then I change my location on my operation system to United States and re-launch Zune. WTF? My flight app has slipped to the 10th spot (I’m only showing 4 across here out of the 7 in Zune) and my border check app that was #1 is now in the 32nd spot! End of celebration. Not only is relevance being looked at here, I value the comments people make on may apps as do most developers. I want to respond to them and show them that I’m listening. The next version of my border app will provide multiple camera angles. However when I’m running in my native Canada location, I only see two reviews. Changing over to United States I see fourteen! While there are tools out there to provide with you a unified view, I shouldn’t have to rely on them. My own Zune desktop software should allow me to see everything. I realize that some developers will submit an app and only target it for some locations and that’s their choice. However I shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to see what apps are ahead of mine, or see people comments and ratings. Another proposal. Either unify the marketplace (i.e. when I’m looking at it show me everything combined) or let me choose a filter. I think the first option might be difficult as you’re trying to average out top selling apps across all markets and have to deal with some apps that have been omitted from some markets. Although I think you could come up with a set of use cases that would handle that, maybe that’s too much work. At the very least, let us developers view the markets in a drop down or something from within the Zune desktop. Having to shut down Zune, change our location, and re-launch Zune to see other perspectives is just too onerous. A Call to Action These are just one mans opinion. Do you agree? Disagree? Feel hungry for a bacon sandwich? Let everyone know via the comments below. Perhaps someone from Microsoft will be reading and take some of these ideas under advisement. Maybe not, but at least let’s get the word out that we really want to see some change. Egypt can do it, why not WP7 developers!

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• Example: Communication between Activity and Service using Messaging

  - by Lance Lefebure

  I couldn't find any examples of how to send messages between an activity and a service, and spent far too many hours figuring this out. Here is an example project for others to reference. This example allows you to start or stop a service directly, and separately bind/unbind from the service. When the service is running, it increments a number at 10Hz. If the activity is bound to the service, it will display the current value. Data is transferred as an Integer and as a String so you can see how to do that two different ways. There are also buttons in the activity to send messages to the service (changes the increment-by value). Screenshot: AndroidManifest.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <manifest xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" package="com.exampleservice" android:versionCode="1" android:versionName="1.0"> <application android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name"> <activity android:name=".MainActivity" android:label="@string/app_name"> <intent-filter> <action android:name="android.intent.action.MAIN" /> <category android:name="android.intent.category.LAUNCHER" /> </intent-filter> </activity> <service android:name=".MyService"></service> </application> <uses-sdk android:minSdkVersion="8" /> </manifest> res\values\strings.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <resources> <string name="app_name">ExampleService</string> <string name="service_started">Example Service started</string> <string name="service_label">Example Service Label</string> </resources> res\layout\main.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <LinearLayout xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android" android:orientation="vertical" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="fill_parent" > <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout01" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnStart" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Start Service"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnStop" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Stop Service" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout02" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnBind" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Bind to Service"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUnbind" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Unbind from Service" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> <TextView android:id="@+id/textStatus" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Status Goes Here" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/textIntValue" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Integer Value Goes Here" /> <TextView android:id="@+id/textStrValue" android:textSize="24sp" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="String Value Goes Here" /> <RelativeLayout android:id="@+id/RelativeLayout03" android:layout_width="fill_parent" android:layout_height="wrap_content"> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUpby1" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Increment by 1"></Button> <Button android:id="@+id/btnUpby10" android:layout_width="wrap_content" android:layout_height="wrap_content" android:text="Increment by 10" android:layout_alignParentRight="true"></Button> </RelativeLayout> </LinearLayout> src\com.exampleservice\MainActivity.java: package com.exampleservice; import android.app.Activity; import android.content.ComponentName; import android.content.Context; import android.content.Intent; import android.content.ServiceConnection; import android.os.Bundle; import android.os.Handler; import android.os.IBinder; import android.os.Message; import android.os.Messenger; import android.os.RemoteException; import android.util.Log; import android.view.View; import android.view.View.OnClickListener; import android.widget.Button; import android.widget.TextView; public class MainActivity extends Activity { Button btnStart, btnStop, btnBind, btnUnbind, btnUpby1, btnUpby10; TextView textStatus, textIntValue, textStrValue; Messenger mService = null; boolean mIsBound; final Messenger mMessenger = new Messenger(new IncomingHandler()); class IncomingHandler extends Handler { @Override public void handleMessage(Message msg) { switch (msg.what) { case MyService.MSG_SET_INT_VALUE: textIntValue.setText("Int Message: " + msg.arg1); break; case MyService.MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE: String str1 = msg.getData().getString("str1"); textStrValue.setText("Str Message: " + str1); break; default: super.handleMessage(msg); } } } private ServiceConnection mConnection = new ServiceConnection() { public void onServiceConnected(ComponentName className, IBinder service) { mService = new Messenger(service); textStatus.setText("Attached."); try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // In this case the service has crashed before we could even do anything with it } } public void onServiceDisconnected(ComponentName className) { // This is called when the connection with the service has been unexpectedly disconnected - process crashed. mService = null; textStatus.setText("Disconnected."); } }; @Override public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); setContentView(R.layout.main); btnStart = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnStart); btnStop = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnStop); btnBind = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnBind); btnUnbind = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUnbind); textStatus = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textStatus); textIntValue = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textIntValue); textStrValue = (TextView)findViewById(R.id.textStrValue); btnUpby1 = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUpby1); btnUpby10 = (Button)findViewById(R.id.btnUpby10); btnStart.setOnClickListener(btnStartListener); btnStop.setOnClickListener(btnStopListener); btnBind.setOnClickListener(btnBindListener); btnUnbind.setOnClickListener(btnUnbindListener); btnUpby1.setOnClickListener(btnUpby1Listener); btnUpby10.setOnClickListener(btnUpby10Listener); restoreMe(savedInstanceState); CheckIfServiceIsRunning(); } @Override protected void onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState) { super.onSaveInstanceState(outState); outState.putString("textStatus", textStatus.getText().toString()); outState.putString("textIntValue", textIntValue.getText().toString()); outState.putString("textStrValue", textStrValue.getText().toString()); } private void restoreMe(Bundle state) { if (state!=null) { textStatus.setText(state.getString("textStatus")); textIntValue.setText(state.getString("textIntValue")); textStrValue.setText(state.getString("textStrValue")); } } private void CheckIfServiceIsRunning() { //If the service is running when the activity starts, we want to automatically bind to it. if (MyService.isRunning()) { doBindService(); } } private OnClickListener btnStartListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ startService(new Intent(MainActivity.this, MyService.class)); } }; private OnClickListener btnStopListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doUnbindService(); stopService(new Intent(MainActivity.this, MyService.class)); } }; private OnClickListener btnBindListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doBindService(); } }; private OnClickListener btnUnbindListener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ doUnbindService(); } }; private OnClickListener btnUpby1Listener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ sendMessageToService(1); } }; private OnClickListener btnUpby10Listener = new OnClickListener() { public void onClick(View v){ sendMessageToService(10); } }; private void sendMessageToService(int intvaluetosend) { if (mIsBound) { if (mService != null) { try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_SET_INT_VALUE, intvaluetosend, 0); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { } } } } void doBindService() { bindService(new Intent(this, MyService.class), mConnection, Context.BIND_AUTO_CREATE); mIsBound = true; textStatus.setText("Binding."); } void doUnbindService() { if (mIsBound) { // If we have received the service, and hence registered with it, then now is the time to unregister. if (mService != null) { try { Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MyService.MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT); msg.replyTo = mMessenger; mService.send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // There is nothing special we need to do if the service has crashed. } } // Detach our existing connection. unbindService(mConnection); mIsBound = false; textStatus.setText("Unbinding."); } } @Override protected void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); try { doUnbindService(); } catch (Throwable t) { Log.e("MainActivity", "Failed to unbind from the service", t); } } } src\com.exampleservice\MyService.java: package com.exampleservice; import java.util.ArrayList; import java.util.Timer; import java.util.TimerTask; import android.app.Notification; import android.app.NotificationManager; import android.app.PendingIntent; import android.app.Service; import android.content.Intent; import android.os.Bundle; import android.os.Handler; import android.os.IBinder; import android.os.Message; import android.os.Messenger; import android.os.RemoteException; import android.util.Log; public class MyService extends Service { private NotificationManager nm; private Timer timer = new Timer(); private int counter = 0, incrementby = 1; private static boolean isRunning = false; ArrayList<Messenger> mClients = new ArrayList<Messenger>(); // Keeps track of all current registered clients. int mValue = 0; // Holds last value set by a client. static final int MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT = 1; static final int MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT = 2; static final int MSG_SET_INT_VALUE = 3; static final int MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE = 4; final Messenger mMessenger = new Messenger(new IncomingHandler()); // Target we publish for clients to send messages to IncomingHandler. @Override public IBinder onBind(Intent intent) { return mMessenger.getBinder(); } class IncomingHandler extends Handler { // Handler of incoming messages from clients. @Override public void handleMessage(Message msg) { switch (msg.what) { case MSG_REGISTER_CLIENT: mClients.add(msg.replyTo); break; case MSG_UNREGISTER_CLIENT: mClients.remove(msg.replyTo); break; case MSG_SET_INT_VALUE: incrementby = msg.arg1; break; default: super.handleMessage(msg); } } } private void sendMessageToUI(int intvaluetosend) { for (int i=mClients.size()-1; i>=0; i--) { try { // Send data as an Integer mClients.get(i).send(Message.obtain(null, MSG_SET_INT_VALUE, intvaluetosend, 0)); //Send data as a String Bundle b = new Bundle(); b.putString("str1", "ab" + intvaluetosend + "cd"); Message msg = Message.obtain(null, MSG_SET_STRING_VALUE); msg.setData(b); mClients.get(i).send(msg); } catch (RemoteException e) { // The client is dead. Remove it from the list; we are going through the list from back to front so this is safe to do inside the loop. mClients.remove(i); } } } @Override public void onCreate() { super.onCreate(); Log.i("MyService", "Service Started."); showNotification(); timer.scheduleAtFixedRate(new TimerTask(){ public void run() {onTimerTick();}}, 0, 100L); isRunning = true; } private void showNotification() { nm = (NotificationManager)getSystemService(NOTIFICATION_SERVICE); // In this sample, we'll use the same text for the ticker and the expanded notification CharSequence text = getText(R.string.service_started); // Set the icon, scrolling text and timestamp Notification notification = new Notification(R.drawable.icon, text, System.currentTimeMillis()); // The PendingIntent to launch our activity if the user selects this notification PendingIntent contentIntent = PendingIntent.getActivity(this, 0, new Intent(this, MainActivity.class), 0); // Set the info for the views that show in the notification panel. notification.setLatestEventInfo(this, getText(R.string.service_label), text, contentIntent); // Send the notification. // We use a layout id because it is a unique number. We use it later to cancel. nm.notify(R.string.service_started, notification); } @Override public int onStartCommand(Intent intent, int flags, int startId) { Log.i("MyService", "Received start id " + startId + ": " + intent); return START_STICKY; // run until explicitly stopped. } public static boolean isRunning() { return isRunning; } private void onTimerTick() { Log.i("TimerTick", "Timer doing work." + counter); try { counter += incrementby; sendMessageToUI(counter); } catch (Throwable t) { //you should always ultimately catch all exceptions in timer tasks. Log.e("TimerTick", "Timer Tick Failed.", t); } } @Override public void onDestroy() { super.onDestroy(); if (timer != null) {timer.cancel();} counter=0; nm.cancel(R.string.service_started); // Cancel the persistent notification. Log.i("MyService", "Service Stopped."); isRunning = false; } }

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• Pixel Shader Giving Black output

  - by Yashwinder

  I am coding in C# using Windows Forms and the SlimDX API to show the effect of a pixel shader. When I am setting the pixel shader, I am getting a black output screen but if I am not using the pixel shader then I am getting my image rendered on the screen. I have the following C# code using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Windows.Forms; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using SlimDX.Direct3D9; using SlimDX; using SlimDX.Windows; using System.Drawing; using System.Threading; namespace WindowsFormsApplication1 { // Vertex structure. [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] struct Vertex { public Vector3 Position; public float Tu; public float Tv; public static int SizeBytes { get { return Marshal.SizeOf(typeof(Vertex)); } } public static VertexFormat Format { get { return VertexFormat.Position | VertexFormat.Texture1; } } } static class Program { public static Device D3DDevice; // Direct3D device. public static VertexBuffer Vertices; // Vertex buffer object used to hold vertices. public static Texture Image; // Texture object to hold the image loaded from a file. public static int time; // Used for rotation caculations. public static float angle; // Angle of rottaion. public static Form1 Window =new Form1(); public static string filepath; static VertexShader vertexShader = null; static ConstantTable constantTable = null; static ImageInformation info; [STAThread] static void Main() { filepath = "C:\\Users\\Public\\Pictures\\Sample Pictures\\Garden.jpg"; info = new ImageInformation(); info = ImageInformation.FromFile(filepath); PresentParameters presentParams = new PresentParameters(); // Below are the required bare mininum, needed to initialize the D3D device. presentParams.BackBufferHeight = info.Height; // BackBufferHeight, set to the Window's height. presentParams.BackBufferWidth = info.Width+200; // BackBufferWidth, set to the Window's width. presentParams.Windowed =true; presentParams.DeviceWindowHandle = Window.panel2 .Handle; // DeviceWindowHandle, set to the Window's handle. // Create the device. D3DDevice = new Device(new Direct3D (), 0, DeviceType.Hardware, Window.Handle, CreateFlags.HardwareVertexProcessing, presentParams); // Create the vertex buffer and fill with the triangle vertices. (Non-indexed) // Remember 3 vetices for a triangle, 2 tris per quad = 6. Vertices = new VertexBuffer(D3DDevice, 6 * Vertex.SizeBytes, Usage.WriteOnly, VertexFormat.None, Pool.Managed); DataStream stream = Vertices.Lock(0, 0, LockFlags.None); stream.WriteRange(BuildVertexData()); Vertices.Unlock(); // Create the texture. Image = Texture.FromFile(D3DDevice,filepath ); // Turn off culling, so we see the front and back of the triangle D3DDevice.SetRenderState(RenderState.CullMode, Cull.None); // Turn off lighting D3DDevice.SetRenderState(RenderState.Lighting, false); ShaderBytecode sbcv = ShaderBytecode.CompileFromFile("C:\\Users\\yashwinder singh\\Desktop\\vertexShader.vs", "vs_main", "vs_1_1", ShaderFlags.None); constantTable = sbcv.ConstantTable; vertexShader = new VertexShader(D3DDevice, sbcv); ShaderBytecode sbc = ShaderBytecode.CompileFromFile("C:\\Users\\yashwinder singh\\Desktop\\pixelShader.txt", "ps_main", "ps_3_0", ShaderFlags.None); PixelShader ps = new PixelShader(D3DDevice, sbc); VertexDeclaration vertexDecl = new VertexDeclaration(D3DDevice, new[] { new VertexElement(0, 0, DeclarationType.Float3, DeclarationMethod.Default, DeclarationUsage.PositionTransformed, 0), new VertexElement(0, 12, DeclarationType.Float2 , DeclarationMethod.Default, DeclarationUsage.TextureCoordinate , 0), VertexElement.VertexDeclarationEnd }); Application.EnableVisualStyles(); MessagePump.Run(Window, () => { // Clear the backbuffer to a black color. D3DDevice.Clear(ClearFlags.Target | ClearFlags.ZBuffer, Color.Black, 1.0f, 0); // Begin the scene. D3DDevice.BeginScene(); // Setup the world, view and projection matrices. //D3DDevice.VertexShader = vertexShader; //D3DDevice.PixelShader = ps; // Render the vertex buffer. D3DDevice.SetStreamSource(0, Vertices, 0, Vertex.SizeBytes); D3DDevice.VertexFormat = Vertex.Format; // Setup our texture. Using Textures introduces the texture stage states, // which govern how Textures get blended together (in the case of multiple // Textures) and lighting information. D3DDevice.SetTexture(0, Image); // Now drawing 2 triangles, for a quad. D3DDevice.DrawPrimitives(PrimitiveType.TriangleList , 0, 2); // End the scene. D3DDevice.EndScene(); // Present the backbuffer contents to the screen. D3DDevice.Present(); }); if (Image != null) Image.Dispose(); if (Vertices != null) Vertices.Dispose(); if (D3DDevice != null) D3DDevice.Dispose(); } private static Vertex[] BuildVertexData() { Vertex[] vertexData = new Vertex[6]; vertexData[0].Position = new Vector3(-1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[0].Tu = 0.0f; vertexData[0].Tv = 0.0f; vertexData[1].Position = new Vector3(-1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[1].Tu = 0.0f; vertexData[1].Tv = 1.0f; vertexData[2].Position = new Vector3(1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[2].Tu = 1.0f; vertexData[2].Tv = 0.0f; vertexData[3].Position = new Vector3(-1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[3].Tu = 0.0f; vertexData[3].Tv = 1.0f; vertexData[4].Position = new Vector3(1.0f, -1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[4].Tu = 1.0f; vertexData[4].Tv = 1.0f; vertexData[5].Position = new Vector3(1.0f, 1.0f, 0.0f); vertexData[5].Tu = 1.0f; vertexData[5].Tv = 0.0f; return vertexData; } } } And my pixel shader and vertex shader code are as following // Pixel shader input structure struct PS_INPUT { float4 Position : POSITION; float2 Texture : TEXCOORD0; }; // Pixel shader output structure struct PS_OUTPUT { float4 Color : COLOR0; }; // Global variables sampler2D Tex0; // Name: Simple Pixel Shader // Type: Pixel shader // Desc: Fetch texture and blend with constant color // PS_OUTPUT ps_main( in PS_INPUT In ) { PS_OUTPUT Out; //create an output pixel Out.Color = tex2D(Tex0, In.Texture); //do a texture lookup Out.Color *= float4(0.9f, 0.8f, 0.0f, 1); //do a simple effect return Out; //return output pixel } // Vertex shader input structure struct VS_INPUT { float4 Position : POSITION; float2 Texture : TEXCOORD0; }; // Vertex shader output structure struct VS_OUTPUT { float4 Position : POSITION; float2 Texture : TEXCOORD0; }; // Global variables float4x4 WorldViewProj; // Name: Simple Vertex Shader // Type: Vertex shader // Desc: Vertex transformation and texture coord pass-through // VS_OUTPUT vs_main( in VS_INPUT In ) { VS_OUTPUT Out; //create an output vertex Out.Position = mul(In.Position, WorldViewProj); //apply vertex transformation Out.Texture = In.Texture; //copy original texcoords return Out; //return output vertex }

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• Windows 8 Launch&ndash;Why OEM and Retailers Should STFU

  - by D'Arcy Lussier

  Microsoft has gotten a lot of flack for the Surface from OEM/hardware partners who create Windows-based devices and I’m sure, to an extent, retailers who normally stock and sell Windows-based devices. I mean we all know how this is supposed to work – Microsoft makes the OS, partners make the hardware, retailers sell the hardware. Now Microsoft is breaking the rules by not only offering their own hardware but selling them via online and through their Microsoft branded stores! The thought has been that Microsoft is trying to set a standard for the other hardware companies to reach for. Maybe. I hope, at some level, Microsoft may be covertly responding to frustrations associated with trusting the OEMs and Retailers to deliver on their part of the supply chain. I know as a consumer, I’m very frustrated with the Windows 8 launch. Aside from the Surface sales, there’s nothing happening at the retail level. Let me back up and explain. Over the weekend I visited a number of stores in hopes of trying out various Windows 8 devices. Out of three retailers (Staples, Best Buy, and Future Shop), not *one* met my expectations. Let me be honest with you Staples, I never really have high expectations from your computer department. If I need paper or pens, whatever, but computers – you’re not the top of my list for price or selection. Still, considering you flaunted Win 8 devices in your flyer I expected *something* – some sign of effort that you took the Windows 8 launch seriously. As I entered the 1910 Pembina Highway location in Winnipeg, there was nothing – no signage, no banners – nothing that would suggest Windows 8 had even launched. I made my way to the laptops. I had to play with each machine to determine which ones were running Windows 8. There wasn’t anything on the placards that made it obvious which were Windows 8 machines and which ones were Windows 7. Likewise, there was no easy way to identify the touch screen laptop (the HP model) from the others without physically touching the screen to verify. Horrible experience. In the same mall as the Staples I mentioned above, there’s a Future Shop. Surely they would be more on the ball. I walked in to the 1910 Pembina Highway location and immediately realized I would not get a better experience. Except for the sign by the front door mentioning Windows 8, there was *nothing* in the computer department pointing you to the Windows 8 devices. Like in Staples, the Win 8 laptops were mixed in with the Win 7 ones and there was nothing notable calling out which ones were running Win 8. I happened to hit up the St. James Street location today, thinking since its a busier store they must have more options. To their credit, they did have two staff members decked out in Windows 8 shirts and who were helping a customer understand Windows 8. But otherwise, there was nothing highlighting the Windows 8 devices and they were again mixed in with the rest of the Win 7 machines. Finally, we have the St. James Street Best Buy location here in Winnipeg. I’m sure Best Buy will have their act together. Nope, not even close. Same story as the others: minimal signage (there was a sign as you walked in with a link to this schedule of demo days), Windows 8 hardware mixed with the rest of the PC offerings, and no visible call-outs identifying which were Win 8 based. This meant that, like Future Shop and Staples, if you wanted to know which machine had Windows 8 you had to go and scrutinize each machine. Also, there was nothing identifying which ones were touch based and which were not. Just Another Day… To these retailers, it seemed that the Windows 8 launch was just another day, with another product to add to the showroom floor. Meanwhile, Apple has their dedicated areas *in all three stores*. It was dead simple to find where the Apple products were compared to the Windows 8 products. No wonder Microsoft is starting to push their own retail stores. No wonder Microsoft is trying to funnel orders through them instead of relying on these bloated retail big box stores who obviously can’t manage a product launch. It’s Not Just The Retailers… Remember when the Acer CEO, Founder, and President of Computer Global Operations all weighed in on how Microsoft releasing the Surface would have a “huge negative impact for the ecosystem and other brands may take a negative reaction”? Also remember the CEO stating “[making hardware] is not something you are good at so please think twice”? Well the launch day has come and gone, and so far Microsoft is the only one that delivered on having hardware available on the October 26th date. Oh sure, there are laptops running Windows 8 – but all in one desktop PCs? I’ve only seen one or two! And tablets are *non existent*, with some showing an early to late November availability on Best Buy’s website! So while the retailers could be doing more to make it easier to find Windows 8 devices, the manufacturers could help by *getting devices into stores*! That’s supposedly something that these companies are good at, according to the Acer CEO. So Here’s What the Retailers and Manufacturers Need To Do… Get Product Out The pivotal timeframe will be now to the end of November. We need to start seeing all these fantastic pieces of hardware ship – including the Samsung ATIV Smart PC Pro, the Acer Iconia, the Asus TAICHI 21, and the sexy Samsung Series 7 27” desktop. It’s not enough to see product announcements, we need to see actual devices. Make It Easy For Customers To Find Win8 Devices You want to make it easy to sell these things? Make it easy for people to find them! Have staff on hand that really know how these devices run and what can be done with them. Don’t just have a single demo day, have people who can demo it every day! Make It Easy to See the Features There’s touch screen desktops, touch screen laptops, tablets, non-touch laptops, etc. People need to easily find the features for each machine. If I’m looking for a touch-laptop, I shouldn’t need to sift through all the non-touch laptops to find them – at the least, I need to quickly be able to see which ones are touch. I feel silly even typing this because this should be retail 101 and I have no retail background (but I do have an extensive background as a customer). In Summary… Microsoft launching the Surface and selling them through their own channels isn’t slapping its OEM and retail partners in the face; its slapping them to wake the hell up and stop coasting through Windows launch events like they don’t matter. Unless I see some improvements from vendors and retailers in November, I may just hold onto my money for a Surface Pro even if I have to wait until early 2013. Your move OEM/Retailers. *Update – While my experience has been in Winnipeg, similar experiences have been voiced from colleagues in Calgary and Edmonton.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 06, 2012

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, September 06, 2012Popular Releasesmenu4web: menu4web 0.4.1 - javascript menu for web sites: This release is for those who believe that global variables are evil. menu4web has been wrapped into m4w singleton object. Added "Vertical Tabs" example which illustrates object notation.WinRT XAML Toolkit: WinRT XAML Toolkit - 1.2.1: WinRT XAML Toolkit based on the Windows 8 RTM SDK. Download the latest source from the SOURCE CODE page. For compiled version use NuGet. You can add it to your project in Visual Studio by going to View/Other Windows/Package Manager Console and entering: PM> Install-Package winrtxamltoolkit Features AsyncUI extensions Controls and control extensions Converters Debugging helpers Imaging IO helpers VisualTree helpers Samples Recent changes NOTE: Namespace changes DebugConsol...iPDC - Free Phasor Data Concentrator: iPDC-v1.3.1: iPDC suite version-1.3.1, Modifications and Bug Fixed (from v 1.3.0) New User Manual for iPDC-v1.3.1 available on websites. Bug resolved : PMU Simulator TCP connection error and hang connection for client (PDC). Now PMU Simulator (server) can communicate more than one PDCs (clients) over TCP and UDP parallely. PMU Simulator is now sending the exact data frames as mentioned in data rate by user. PMU Simulator data rate has been verified by iPDC database entries and PMU Connection Tes...Microsoft SQL Server Product Samples: Database: AdventureWorks OData Feed: The AdventureWorks OData service exposes resources based on specific SQL views. The SQL views are a limited subset of the AdventureWorks database that results in several consuming scenarios: CompanySales Documents ManufacturingInstructions ProductCatalog TerritorySalesDrilldown WorkOrderRouting How to install the sample You can consume the AdventureWorks OData feed from http://services.odata.org/AdventureWorksV3/AdventureWorks.svc. You can also consume the AdventureWorks OData fe...Desktop Google Reader: 1.4.6: Sorting feeds alphabetical is now optional (see preferences window)DotNetNuke® Community Edition CMS: 06.02.03: Major Highlights Fixed issue where mailto: links were not working when sending bulk email Fixed issue where uses did not see friendship relationships Problem is in 6.2, which does not show in the Versions Affected list above. Fixed the issue with cascade deletes in comments in CoreMessaging_Notification Fixed UI issue when using a date fields as a required profile property during user registration Fixed error when running the product in debug mode Fixed visibility issue when...Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 4.65: Fixed null-reference error in the build task constructor.Active Forums for DotNetNuke CMS: Active Forums 5.0.0 RC: RC release of Active Forums 5.0.Droid Explorer: Droid Explorer 0.8.8.7 Beta: Bug in the display icon for apk's, will fix with next release Added fallback icon if unable to get the image/icon from the Cloud Service Removed some stale plugins that were either out dated or incomplete. Added handler for *.ab files for restoring backups Added plugin to create device backups Backups stored in %USERPROFILE%\Android Backups\%DEVICE_ID%\ Added custom folder icon for the android backups directory better error handling for installing an apk bug fixes for the Runn...BI System Monitor: v2.1: Data Audits report and supporting SQL, and SSIS package Environment Overview report enhancements, improving the appearance, addition of data audit finding indicators Note: SQL 2012 version coming soon.Hidden Capture (HC): Hidden Capture 1.1: Hidden Capture 1.1 by Mohsen E.Dawatgar http://Hidden-Capture.blogfa.comExt Spec: Ext Spec 0.2.1: Refined examples and improved distribution options.The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: Version 1: --Nearforums - ASP.NET MVC forum engine: Nearforums v8.5: Version 8.5 of Nearforums, the ASP.NET MVC Forum Engine. New features include: Built-in search engine using Lucene.NET Flood control improvements Notifications improvements: sync option and mail body View Roadmap for more details webdeploy package sha1 checksum: 961aff884a9187b6e8a86d68913cdd31f8deaf83WiX Toolset: WiX Toolset v3.6: WiX Toolset v3.6 introduces the Burn bootstrapper/chaining engine and support for Visual Studio 2012 and .NET Framework 4.5. Other minor functionality includes: WixDependencyExtension supports dependency checking among MSI packages. WixFirewallExtension supports more features of Windows Firewall. WixTagExtension supports Software Id Tagging. WixUtilExtension now supports recursive directory deletion. Melt simplifies pure-WiX patching by extracting .msi package content and updating .w...Iveely Search Engine: Iveely Search Engine （0.2.0）: ????ISE?0.1.0??，?????，ISE?0.2.0?????????，???????，????????20???follow?ISE，????，??ISE??????????，??????????，?????????，?????????0.2.0??????，??????????。 Iveely Search Engine ?0.2.0?????????“??????????”，??????，?????????，???????，???????????????????，????、????????????。???0.1.0????????????： 1. ??“????” ??。??????????，?????????，???????????????????。??：????????，????????????，??????????????????。??????。 2. ??“????”??。?0.1.0??????，???????，???????????????，?????????????，????????，?0.2.0?，???????...GmailDefaultMaker: GmailDefaultMaker 3.0.0.2: Add QQ Mail BugfixSmart Data Access layer: Smart Data access Layer Ver 3: In this version support executing inline query is added. Check Documentation section for detail.DotNetNuke® Form and List: 06.00.04: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.04 Don't forget to backup your installation before upgrade. Changes in 06.00.04 Fix: Sql Scripts for 6.003 missed object qualifiers within stored procedures Fix: added missing resource "cmdCancel.Text" in form.ascx.resx Changes in 06.00.03 Fix: MakeThumbnail was broken if the application pool was configured to .Net 4 Change: Data is now stored in nvarchar(max) instead of ntext Changes in 06.00.02 The scripts are now compatible with SQL Azure, tested in a ne...Coevery - Free CRM: Coevery 1.0.0.24: Add a sample database, and installation instructions.New ProjectsAny-Service: AnyService is a .net 4.0 Windows service shell. It hosts any windows application in non-gui mode to run as a service.BabyCloudDrives - the multi cloud drive desktop's application: wpf ????BLACK ORANGE: Download The HPAD TEXT EDITOR and use it Wisely.. CodePlex New Release Checker: CodePlex New Release Checker is a small library that makes it easy to add, "New Version Available!" functionality to your CodePlex project.Collect: ????????！CSVManager: CSV??CSV?????，????CSV??，??????Exam Project: My Exam Project. Computer Vision, C and OpenCV-FTP: Hey guys thanks for checking out my ftp!Haushaltsbuch: 1ModMaker.Lua: ModMaker.Lua is an open source .NET library that parses and executes Lua code.MyJabbr: MyJabbr netduinoscope: Design shield and software to use netduino as oscilloscopeNetSurveillance Web Application: Net Surveillance Web ApplicationNiconicoApiHelper: ????API?????????OStega: A simple library for encrypt text into an bmp or png image.OURORM: ormTFS Cloud Deployment Toolkit: The TFS Cloud Deployment Toolkit is a set of tools that integrate with TFS 2010 to help manage configuration and deployment to various remote environments.The Visual Guide for Building Team Foundation Server 2012 Environments: A step-by-step guide for building Team Foundation Server 2012 environments that include SharePoint Server 2010, SQL Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 and more!WinRT LineChart: An attempt at creating an usable LineChart for everyone to use in his/her own Windows 8 Apps

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• Feedback on meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius

  Once upon a time in a country far far away... Okay, actually it's not that bad but it has been a while since the last meeting of the Linux User Group of Mauritius (LUGM). There have been plans in the past but it never really happened. Finally, Selven took the opportunity and organised a new meetup with low administrative overhead, proper scheduling on alternative dates and a small attendee's survey on the preferred option. All the pre-work was nicely executed. First, I wasn't sure whether it would be possible to attend. Luckily I got some additional information, like children should come, too, and I was sold to this community gathering. According to other long-term members of the LUGM it was the first time 'ever' that a gathering was organised outside of Quatre Bornes, and I have to admit it was great! LUGM - user group meeting on the 15.06.2013 in L'Escalier Quick overview of Linux & the LUGM With a little bit of delay the LUGM meeting officially started with a quick overview and introduction to Linux presented by Avinash. During the session he told the audience that there had been quite some activity over the island some years ago but unfortunately it had been quiet during recent times. Of course, we also spoke about the acknowledged world dominance of Linux - thanks to Android - and the interesting possibilities for countries like Mauritius. It is known that a couple of public institutions have there back-end infrastructure running on Red Hat Linux systems but the presence on the desktop is still very low. Users are simply hanging on to Windows XP and older versions of Microsoft Office. Following the introduction of the LUGM Ajay joined into the session and it quickly changed into a panel discussion with lots of interesting questions and answers, sharing of first-hand experience either on the job or in private use of Linux, and a couple of ideas about how the LUGM could promote Linux a bit more in Mauritius. It was great to get an insight into other attendee's opinion and activities. Especially taking into consideration that I'm already using Linux since around 1996/97. Frankly speaking, I bought a SuSE 4.x distribution back in those days because I couldn't achieve certain tasks on Windows NT 4.0 without spending a fortune. OpenELEC Mediacenter Next, Selven gave us decent introduction on OpenELEC: Open Embedded Linux Entertainment Center (OpenELEC) is a small Linux distribution built from scratch as a platform to turn your computer into an XBMC media center. OpenELEC is designed to make your system boot fast, and the install is so easy that anyone can turn a blank PC into a media machine in less than 15 minutes. I didn't know about it until this presentation. In the past, I was mainly attached to Video Disk Recorder (VDR) as it allows the use of satellite receiver cards very easily. Hm, somehow I'm still missing my precious HTPC that I had to leave back in Germany years ago. It was great piece of hardware and software; self-built PC in a standard HiFi-sized (43cm) black desktop casing with 2 full-featured Hauppauge DVB-s cards, an old-fashioned Voodoo graphics card, WiFi card, Pioneer slot-in DVD drive, and fully remote controlled via infra-red thanks to Debian, VDR and LIRC. With EP Guide, scheduled recordings and general multimedia centre it offered all the necessary comfort in the living room, besides a Nintendo game console; actually a GameCube at that time... But I have to admit that putting OpenELEC on a Raspberry Pi would be a cool DIY project in the near future. LUGM - our next generation of linux users (15.06.2013) Project Evil Genius (PEG) Don't be scared of the paragraph header. Ish gave us a cool explanation why he named it PEG - Project Evil Genius; it's because of the time of the day when he was scripting down his ideas to be able to build, package and provide software applications to various Linux distributions. The main influence came from openSuSE but the platform didn't cater for his needs and ideas, so he started to work out something on his own. During his passionate session he also talked about the amazing experience he had due to other Linux users from all over the world. During the next couple of days Ish promised to put his script to GitHub... Looking forward to that. Check out Ish's personal blog over at hacklog.in. Highly recommended to read. Why India? Simply because the registration fees per year for an Indian domain are approximately 20 times less than for a Mauritian domain (.mu). Exploring the beach of L'Escalier af the meeting 'After-party' at the beach of L'Escalier Puh, after such interesting sessions, ideas around Linux and good conversation during the breaks and over lunch it was time for a little break-out. Selven suggested that we all should head down to the beach of L'Escalier and get some impressions of nature down here in the south of the island. Talking about 'beach' ;-) - absolutely not comparable to the white-sanded ones here in Flic en Flac... There are no lagoons down at the south coast of Mauriitus, and watching the breaking waves is a different experience and joy after all. Unfortunately, I was a little bit worried about the thoughtless littering at such a remote location. You have to drive on natural paths through the sugar cane fields and I was really shocked by the amount of rubbish lying around almost everywhere. Sad, really sad and it concurs with Yasir's recent article on the same topic. Resumé & outlook It was a great event. I met with new people, had some good conversations, and even my children enjoyed themselves the whole day. The location was well-chosen, enough space for each and everyone, parking spaces and even a playground for the children. Also, a big "Thank You" to Selven and his helpers for the organisation and preparation of lunch. I'm kind of sure that this was an exceptional meeting of LUGM and I'm really looking forward to the next gathering of Linux geeks. Hopefully, soon. All images are courtesy of Avinash Meetoo. More pictures are available on Flickr.

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

  - by ScottGu

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

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• Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Microsoft BI Conference 2010)

  - by smisner

  "Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a Cajun phrase that I heard frequently when I lived in New Orleans in the mid-1990s. It means "Let the good times roll!" and encapsulates a feeling of happy expectation. As I met with many of my peers and new acquaintances at the Microsoft BI Conference last week, this phrase kept running through my mind as people spoke about their plans in their respective businesses, the benefits and opportunities that the recent releases in the BI stack are providing, and their expectations about the future of the BI stack. Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don't care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while. Self-Service BI Self-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when "every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively" and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI. This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves--from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me: PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It's important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it's impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they're thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.) Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It's confusing enough. I haven't seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.) One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.) Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days--Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven't seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I'm skeptical about its practicality. However, I'm looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.) Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough--overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.) This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI - a phrase I've heard repeated from time to time over the last decade - but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users. It's one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it's another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled "PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?" I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie's observations. Collaborative BI I have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest - as they say - is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time. Fast forward to 2010, and I'm still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session "Collaborative Decision Making." As I suspected, the tools aren't quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, "People don't trust data, they trust people." The Microsoft BI Stack in General A question I hear all the time from students when I'm teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I've never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, "So Many BI Tools, So Little Time." I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio's Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren't there yet. Maybe in another 5 years. Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors' offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, "How Does the Microsoft BI Stack...Stack Up?" Expo Hall I had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn't manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I'll share here. Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you've seen what this product can do, you won't want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions. Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O'Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven't heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O'Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O'Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O'Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it's hard to lug my reference library with me. Today's e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don't have to worry about keeping track of where I've stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I'm compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That's a winning combination in my mind! Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn't attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below. Share this post: email it! | bookmark it! | digg it! | reddit! | kick it! | live it!

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• You should NOT be writing jQuery in SharePoint if&hellip;

  - by Mark Rackley

  Yes… another one of these posts. What can I say? I’m a pot stirrer.. a rabble rouser *rabble rabble* jQuery in SharePoint seems to be a fairly polarizing issue with one side thinking it is the most awesome thing since Princess Leia as the slave girl in Return of the Jedi and the other half thinking it is the worst idea since Mannequin 2: On the Move. The correct answer is OF COURSE “it depends”. But what are those deciding factors that make jQuery an awesome fit or leave a bad taste in your mouth? Let’s see if I can drive the discussion here with some polarizing comments of my own… I know some of you are getting ready to leave your comments even now before reading the rest of the blog, which is great! Iron sharpens iron… These discussions hopefully open us up to understanding the entire process better and think about things in a different way. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are not a developer… Let’s start off with my most polarizing and rant filled portion of the blog post. If you don’t know what you are doing or you don’t have a background that helps you understand the implications of what you are writing then you should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint! I truly believe that one of the biggest reasons for the jQuery haters is because of all the bad jQuery out there. If you don’t know what you are doing you can do some NASTY things! One of the best stories I’ve heard about this is from my good friend John Ferringer (@ferringer). John tells this story during our Mythbusters session we do together. One of his clients was undergoing a Denial of Service attack and they couldn’t figure out what was going on! After much searching they found that some genius jQuery developer wrote some code for an image rotator, but did not take into account what happens when there are no images to load! The code just kept hitting the servers over and over and over again which prevented anything else from getting done! Now, I’m NOT saying that I have not done the same sort of thing in the past or am immune from such mistakes. My point is that if you don’t know what you are doing, there are very REAL consequences that can have a major impact on your organization AND they will be hard to track down.  Think how happy your boss will be after you copy and pasted some jQuery from a blog without understanding what it does, it brings down the farm, AND it takes them 3 days to track it back to you.  :/ Good times will not be had. Like it or not JavaScript/jQuery is a programming language. While you .NET people sit on your high horses because your code is compiled and “runs faster” (also debatable), the rest of us will be actually getting work done and delivering solutions while you are trying to figure out why your widget won’t deploy. I can pick at that scab because I write .NET code too and speak from experience. I can do both, and do both well. So, I am not speaking from ignorance here. In JavaScript/jQuery you have variables, loops, conditionals, functions, arrays, events, and built in methods. If you are not a developer you just aren’t going to take advantage of all of that and use it correctly. Ahhh.. but there is hope! There is a lot of jQuery resources out there to help you learn and learn well! There are many experts on the subject that will gladly tell you when you are smoking crack. I just this minute saw a tweet from @cquick with a link to: “jQuery Fundamentals”. I just glanced through it and this may be a great primer for you aspiring jQuery devs. Take advantage of all the resources and become a developer! Hey, it will look awesome on your resume right? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if it depends too much on client resources for a good user experience I’ve said it once and I’ll say it over and over until you understand. jQuery is executed on the client’s computer. Got it? If you are looping through hundreds of rows of data, searching through an enormous DOM, or performing many calculations it is going to take some time! AND if your user happens to be sitting on some old PC somewhere that they picked up at a garage sale their experience will be that much worse! If you can’t give the user a good experience they will not use the site. So, if jQuery is causing the user to have a bad experience, don’t use it. I sometimes go as far to say that you should NOT go to jQuery as a first option for external facing web sites because you have ZERO control over what the end user’s computer will be. You just can’t guarantee an awesome user experience all of the time. Ahhh… but you have no choice? (where have I heard that before?). Well… if you really have no choice, here are some tips to help improve the experience: Avoid screen scraping This is not 1999 and SharePoint is not an old green screen from a mainframe… so why are you treating it like it is? Screen scraping is time consuming and client intensive. Take advantage of tools like SPServices to do your data retrieval when possible. Fine tune your DOM searches A lot of time can be eaten up just searching the DOM and ignoring table rows that you don’t need. Write better jQuery to only loop through tables rows that you need, or only access specific elements you need. Take advantage of Element ID’s to return the one element you are looking for instead of looping through all the DOM over and over again. Write better jQuery Remember this is development. Think about how you can write cleaner, faster jQuery. This directly relates to the previous point of improving your DOM searches, but also when using arrays, variables and loops. Do you REALLY need to loop through that array 3 times? How can you knock it down to 2 times or even 1? When you have lots of calculations and data that you are manipulating every operation adds up. Think about how you can streamline it. Back in the old days before RAM was abundant, Cores were plentiful and dinosaurs roamed the earth, us developers had to take performance into account in everything we did. It’s a lost art that really needs to be used here. You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if you are sending a lot of data over the wire… Developer:  “Awesome… you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” Administrator: “Crap! you can easily call SharePoint’s web services to retrieve and write data using SPServices!” SPServices may indeed be the best thing that happened to SharePoint since the invention of SharePoint Saturdays by Godfather Lotter… BUT you HAVE to use it wisely! (I REFUSE to make the Spiderman reference). If you do not know what you are doing your code will bring back EVERY field and EVERY row from a list and push that over the internet with all that lovely XML wrapped around it. That can be a HUGE amount of data and will GREATLY impact performance! Calling several web service methods at the same time can cause the same problem and can negatively impact your SharePoint servers. These problems, thankfully, are not difficult to rectify if you are careful: Limit list data retrieved Use CAML to reduce the number of rows returned and limit the fields returned using ViewFields.  You should definitely be doing this regardless. If you aren’t I hope your admin thumps you upside the head. Batch large list updates You may or may not have noticed that if you try to do large updates (hundreds of rows) that the performance is either completely abysmal or it fails over half the time. You can greatly improve performance and avoid timeouts by breaking up your updates into several smaller updates. I don’t know if there is a magic number for best performance, it really depends on how much data you are sending back more than the number of rows. However, I have found that 200 rows generally works well.  Play around and find the right number for your situation. Delay Web Service calls when possible One of the cool things about jQuery and SPServices is that you can delay queries to the server until they are actually needed instead of doing them all at once. This can lead to performance improvements over DataViewWebParts and even .NET code in the right situations. So, don’t load the data until it’s needed. In some instances you may not need to retrieve the data at all, so why retrieve it ALL the time? You should not be writing jQuery in SharePoint if there is a better solution… jQuery is NOT the silver bullet in SharePoint, it is not the answer to every question, it is just another tool in the developers toolkit. I urge all developers to know what options exist out there and choose the right one! Sometimes it will be jQuery, sometimes it will be .NET,  sometimes it will be XSL, and sometimes it will be some other choice… So, when is there a better solution to jQuery? When you can’t get away from performance problems Sometimes jQuery will just give you horrible performance regardless of what you do because of unavoidable obstacles. In these situations you are going to have to figure out an alternative. Can I do it with a DVWP or do I have to crack open Visual Studio? When you need to do something that jQuery can’t do There are lots of things you can’t do in jQuery like elevate privileges, event handlers, workflows, or interact with back end systems that have no web service interface. It just can’t do everything. When it can be done faster and more efficiently another way Why are you spending time to write jQuery to do a DataViewWebPart that would take 5 minutes? Or why are you trying to implement complicated logic that would be simple to do in .NET? If your answer is that you don’t have the option, okay. BUT if you do have the option don’t reinvent the wheel! Take advantage of the other tools. The answer is not always jQuery… sorry… the kool-aid tastes good, but sweet tea is pretty awesome too. You should not be using jQuery in SharePoint if you are a moron… Let’s finish up the blog on a high note… Yes.. it’s true, I sometimes type things just to get a reaction… guess this section title might be a good example, but it feels good sometimes just to type the words that a lot of us think… So.. don’t be that guy! Another good buddy of mine that works for Microsoft told me. “I loved jQuery in SharePoint…. until I had to support it.”. He went on to explain that some user was making several web service calls on a page using jQuery and then was calling Microsoft and COMPLAINING because the page took so long to load… DUH! What do you expect to happen when you are pushing that much data over the wire and are making that many web service calls at once!! It’s one thing to write that kind of code and accept it’s just going to take a while, it’s COMPLETELY another issue to do that and then complain when it’s not lightning fast!  Someone’s gene pool needs some chlorine. So, I think this is a nice summary of the blog… DON’T be that guy… don’t be a moron. How can you stop yourself from being a moron? Ah.. glad you asked, here are some tips: Think Is jQuery the right solution to my problem? Is there a better approach? What are the implications and pitfalls of using jQuery in this situation? Search What are others doing? Does someone have a better solution? Is there a third party library that does the same thing I need? Plan Write good jQuery. Limit calculations and data sent over the wire and don’t reinvent the wheel when possible. Test Okay, it works well on your machine. Try it on others ESPECIALLY if this is for an external site. Test with empty data. Test with hundreds of rows of data. Test as many scenarios as possible. Monitor those server resources to see the impact there as well. Ask the experts As smart as you are, there are people smarter than you. Even the experts talk to each other to make sure they aren't doing something stupid. And for the MOST part they are pretty nice guys. Marc Anderson and Christophe Humbert are two guys who regularly keep me in line. Make sure you aren’t doing something stupid. Repeat So, when you think you have the best solution possible, repeat the steps above just to be safe.  Conclusion jQuery is an awesome tool and has come in handy on many occasions. I’m even teaching a 1/2 day SharePoint & jQuery workshop at the upcoming SPTechCon in Boston if you want to berate me in person. However, it’s only as awesome as the developer behind the keyboard. It IS development and has its pitfalls. Knowledge and experience are invaluable to giving the user the best experience possible.  Let’s face it, in the end, no matter our opinions, prejudices, or ego providing our clients, customers, and users with the best solution possible is what counts. Period… end of sentence…

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• Windows Azure: Major Updates for Mobile Backend Development

  - by ScottGu

  This week we released some great updates to Windows Azure that make it significantly easier to develop mobile applications that use the cloud. These new capabilities include: Mobile Services: Custom API support Mobile Services: Git Source Control support Mobile Services: Node.js NPM Module support Mobile Services: A .NET API via NuGet Mobile Services and Web Sites: Free 20MB SQL Database Option for Mobile Services and Web Sites Mobile Notification Hubs: Android Broadcast Push Notification Support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note: some are still in preview).  Below are more details about them. Mobile Services: Custom APIs, Git Source Control, and NuGet Windows Azure Mobile Services provides the ability to easily stand up a mobile backend that can be used to support your Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS, Android and HTML5 client applications.  Starting with the first preview we supported the ability to easily extend your data backend logic with server side scripting that executes as part of client-side CRUD operations against your cloud back data tables. With today’s update we are extending this support even further and introducing the ability for you to also create and expose Custom APIs from your Mobile Service backend, and easily publish them to your Mobile clients without having to associate them with a data table. This capability enables a whole set of new scenarios – including the ability to work with data sources other than SQL Databases (for example: Table Services or MongoDB), broker calls to 3rd party APIs, integrate with Windows Azure Queues or Service Bus, work with custom non-JSON payloads (e.g. Windows Periodic Notifications), route client requests to services back on-premises (e.g. with the new Windows Azure BizTalk Services), or simply implement functionality that doesn’t correspond to a database operation.  The custom APIs can be written in server-side JavaScript (using Node.js) and can use Node’s NPM packages.  We will also be adding support for custom APIs written using .NET in the future as well. Creating a Custom API Adding a custom API to an existing Mobile Service is super easy.  Using the Windows Azure Management Portal you can now simply click the new “API” tab with your Mobile Service, and then click the “Create a Custom API” button to create a new Custom API within it: Give the API whatever name you want to expose, and then choose the security permissions you’d like to apply to the HTTP methods you expose within it.  You can easily lock down the HTTP verbs to your Custom API to be available to anyone, only those who have a valid application key, only authenticated users, or administrators.  Mobile Services will then enforce these permissions without you having to write any code: When you click the ok button you’ll see the new API show up in the API list.  Selecting it will enable you to edit the default script that contains some placeholder functionality: Today’s release enables Custom APIs to be written using Node.js (we will support writing Custom APIs in .NET as well in a future release), and the Custom API programming model follows the Node.js convention for modules, which is to export functions to handle HTTP requests. The default script above exposes functionality for an HTTP POST request. To support a GET, simply change the export statement accordingly.  Below is an example of some code for reading and returning data from Windows Azure Table Storage using the Azure Node API: After saving the changes, you can now call this API from any Mobile Service client application (including Windows 8, Windows Phone, iOS, Android or HTML5 with CORS). Below is the code for how you could invoke the API asynchronously from a Windows Store application using .NET and the new InvokeApiAsync method, and data-bind the results to control within your XAML:     private async void RefreshTodoItems() {         var results = await App.MobileService.InvokeApiAsync<List<TodoItem>>("todos", HttpMethod.Get, parameters: null);         ListItems.ItemsSource = new ObservableCollection<TodoItem>(results);     }    Integrating authentication and authorization with Custom APIs is really easy with Mobile Services. Just like with data requests, custom API requests enjoy the same built-in authentication and authorization support of Mobile Services (including integration with Microsoft ID, Google, Facebook and Twitter authentication providers), and it also enables you to easily integrate your Custom API code with other Mobile Service capabilities like push notifications, logging, SQL, etc. Check out our new tutorials to learn more about to use new Custom API support, and starting adding them to your app today. Mobile Services: Git Source Control Support Today’s Mobile Services update also enables source control integration with Git.  The new source control support provides a Git repository as part your Mobile Service, and it includes all of your existing Mobile Service scripts and permissions. You can clone that git repository on your local machine, make changes to any of your scripts, and then easily deploy the mobile service to production using Git. This enables a really great developer workflow that works on any developer machine (Windows, Mac and Linux). To use the new support, navigate to the dashboard for your mobile service and select the Set up source control link: If this is your first time enabling Git within Windows Azure, you will be prompted to enter the credentials you want to use to access the repository: Once you configure this, you can switch to the configure tab of your Mobile Service and you will see a Git URL you can use to use your repository: You can use this URL to clone the repository locally from your favorite command line: > git clone https://scottgutodo.scm.azure-mobile.net/ScottGuToDo.git Below is the directory structure of the repository: As you can see, the repository contains a service folder with several subfolders. Custom API scripts and associated permissions appear under the api folder as .js and .json files respectively (the .json files persist a JSON representation of the security settings for your endpoints). Similarly, table scripts and table permissions appear as .js and .json files, but since table scripts are separate per CRUD operation, they follow the naming convention of <tablename>.<operationname>.js. Finally, scheduled job scripts appear in the scheduler folder, and the shared folder is provided as a convenient location for you to store code shared by multiple scripts and a few miscellaneous things such as the APNS feedback script. Lets modify the table script todos.js file so that we have slightly better error handling when an exception occurs when we query our Table service: todos.js tableService.queryEntities(query, function(error, todoItems){     if (error) {         console.error("Error querying table: " + error);         response.send(500);     } else {         response.send(200, todoItems);     }        }); Save these changes, and now back in the command line prompt commit the changes and push them to the Mobile Services: > git add . > git commit –m "better error handling in todos.js" > git push Once deployment of the changes is complete, they will take effect immediately, and you will also see the changes be reflected in the portal: With the new Source Control feature, we’re making it really easy for you to edit your mobile service locally and push changes in an atomic fashion without sacrificing ease of use in the Windows Azure Portal. Mobile Services: NPM Module Support The new Mobile Services source control support also allows you to add any Node.js module you need in the scripts beyond the fixed set provided by Mobile Services. For example, you can easily switch to use Mongo instead of Windows Azure table in our example above. Set up Mongo DB by either purchasing a MongoLab subscription (which provides MongoDB as a Service) via the Windows Azure Store or set it up yourself on a Virtual Machine (either Windows or Linux). Then go the service folder of your local git repository and run the following command: > npm install mongoose This will add the Mongoose module to your Mobile Service scripts.  After that you can use and reference the Mongoose module in your custom API scripts to access your Mongo database: var mongoose = require('mongoose'); var schema = mongoose.Schema({ text: String, completed: Boolean });   exports.get = function (request, response) {     mongoose.connect('<your Mongo connection string> ');     TodoItemModel = mongoose.model('todoitem', schema);     TodoItemModel.find(function (err, items) {         if (err) {             console.log('error:' + err);             return response.send(500);         }         response.send(200, items);     }); }; Don’t forget to push your changes to your mobile service once you are done > git add . > git commit –m "Switched to use Mongo Labs" > git push Now our Mobile Service app is using Mongo DB! Note, with today’s update usage of custom Node.js modules is limited to Custom API scripts only. We will enable it in all scripts (including data and custom CRON tasks) shortly. New Mobile Services NuGet package, including .NET 4.5 support A few months ago we announced a new pre-release version of the Mobile Services client SDK based on portable class libraries (PCL). Today, we are excited to announce that this new library is now a stable .NET client SDK for mobile services and is no longer a pre-release package. Today’s update includes full support for Windows Store, Windows Phone 7.x, and .NET 4.5, which allows developers to use Mobile Services from ASP.NET or WPF applications. You can install and use this package today via NuGet. Mobile Services and Web Sites: Free 20MB Database for Mobile Services and Web Sites Starting today, every customer of Windows Azure gets one Free 20MB database to use for 12 months free (for both dev/test and production) with Web Sites and Mobile Services. When creating a Mobile Service or a Web Site, simply chose the new “Create a new Free 20MB database” option to take advantage of it: You can use this free SQL Database together with the 10 free Web Sites and 10 free Mobile Services you get with your Windows Azure subscription, or from any other Windows Azure VM or Cloud Service. Notification Hubs: Android Broadcast Push Notification Support Earlier this year, we introduced a new capability in Windows Azure for sending broadcast push notifications at high scale: Notification Hubs. In the initial preview of Notification Hubs you could use this support with both iOS and Windows devices.  Today we’re excited to announce new Notification Hubs support for sending push notifications to Android devices as well. Push notifications are a vital component of mobile applications.  They are critical not only in consumer apps, where they are used to increase app engagement and usage, but also in enterprise apps where up-to-date information increases employee responsiveness to business events.  You can use Notification Hubs to send push notifications to devices from any type of app (a Mobile Service, Web Site, Cloud Service or Virtual Machine). Notification Hubs provide you with the following capabilities: Cross-platform Push Notifications Support. Notification Hubs provide a common API to send push notifications to iOS, Android, or Windows Store at once.  Your app can send notifications in platform specific formats or in a platform-independent way.  Efficient Multicast. Notification Hubs are optimized to enable push notification broadcast to thousands or millions of devices with low latency.  Your server back-end can fire one message into a Notification Hub, and millions of push notifications can automatically be delivered to your users.  Devices and apps can specify a number of per-user tags when registering with a Notification Hub. These tags do not need to be pre-provisioned or disposed, and provide a very easy way to send filtered notifications to an infinite number of users/devices with a single API call.   Extreme Scale. Notification Hubs enable you to reach millions of devices without you having to re-architect or shard your application.  The pub/sub routing mechanism allows you to broadcast notifications in a super-efficient way.  This makes it incredibly easy to route and deliver notification messages to millions of users without having to build your own routing infrastructure. Usable from any Backend App. Notification Hubs can be easily integrated into any back-end server app, whether it is a Mobile Service, a Web Site, a Cloud Service or an IAAS VM. It is easy to configure Notification Hubs to send push notifications to Android. Create a new Notification Hub within the Windows Azure Management Portal (New->App Services->Service Bus->Notification Hub): Then register for Google Cloud Messaging using https://code.google.com/apis/console and obtain your API key, then simply paste that key on the Configure tab of your Notification Hub management page under the Google Cloud Messaging Settings: Then just add code to the OnCreate method of your Android app’s MainActivity class to register the device with Notification Hubs: gcm = GoogleCloudMessaging.getInstance(this); String connectionString = "<your listen access connection string>"; hub = new NotificationHub("<your notification hub name>", connectionString, this); String regid = gcm.register(SENDER_ID); hub.register(regid, "myTag"); Now you can broadcast notification from your .NET backend (or Node, Java, or PHP) to any Windows Store, Android, or iOS device registered for “myTag” tag via a single API call (you can literally broadcast messages to millions of clients you have registered with just one API call): var hubClient = NotificationHubClient.CreateClientFromConnectionString(                   “<your connection string with full access>”,                   "<your notification hub name>"); hubClient.SendGcmNativeNotification("{ 'data' : {'msg' : 'Hello from Windows Azure!' } }", "myTag”); Notification Hubs provide an extremely scalable, cross-platform, push notification infrastructure that enables you to efficiently route push notification messages to millions of mobile users and devices.  It will make enabling your push notification logic significantly simpler and more scalable, and allow you to build even better apps with it. Learn more about Notification Hubs here on MSDN . Summary The above features are now live and available to start using immediately (note: some of the services are still in preview).  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using them today.  Visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• Laissez les bon temps rouler! (Microsoft BI Conference 2010)

  - by smisner

  Laissez les bons temps rouler" is a Cajun phrase that I heard frequently when I lived in New Orleans in the mid-1990s. It means "Let the good times roll!" and encapsulates a feeling of happy expectation. As I met with many of my peers and new acquaintances at the Microsoft BI Conference last week, this phrase kept running through my mind as people spoke about their plans in their respective businesses, the benefits and opportunities that the recent releases in the BI stack are providing, and their expectations about the future of the BI stack.Notwithstanding some jabs here and there to point out the platform is neither perfect now nor will be anytime soon (along with admissions that the competitors are also not perfect), and notwithstanding several missteps by the event organizers (which I don't care to enumerate), the overarching mood at the conference was positive. It was a refreshing change from the doom and gloom hovering over several conferences that I attended in 2009. Although many people expect economic hardships to continue over the coming year or so, everyone I know in the BI field is busier than ever and expects to stay busy for quite a while.Self-Service BISelf-service was definitely a theme of the BI conference. In the keynote, Ted Kummert opened with a look back to a fairy tale vision of self-service BI that he told in 2008. At that time, the fairy tale future was a time when "every end user was able to use BI technologies within their job in order to move forward more effectively" and transitioned to the present time in which SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010, and SharePoint 2010 are available to deliver managed self-service BI.This set of technologies is presumably poised to address the needs of the 80% of users that Kummert said do not use BI today. He proceeded to outline a series of activities that users ought to be able to do themselves--from simple changes to a report like formatting or an addtional data visualization to integration of an additional data source. The keynote then continued with a series of demonstrations of both current and future technology in support of self-service BI. Some highlights that interested me:PowerPivot, of course, is the flagship product for self-service BI in the Microsoft BI stack. In the TechEd keynote, which was open to the BI conference attendees, Amir Netz (twitter) impressed the audience by demonstrating interactivity with a workbook containing 100 million rows. He upped the ante at the BI keynote with his demonstration of a future-state PowerPivot workbook containing over 2 billion records. It's important to note that this volume of data is being processed by a server engine, and not in the PowerPivot client engine. (Yes, I think it's impressive, but none of my clients are typically wrangling with 2 billion records at a time. Maybe they're thinking too small. This ability to work quickly with large data sets has greater implications for BI solutions than for self-service BI, in my opinion.)Amir also demonstrated KPIs for the future PowerPivot, which appeared to be easier to implement than in any other Microsoft product that supports KPIs, apart from simple KPIs in SharePoint. (My initial reaction is that we have one more place to build KPIs. Great. It's confusing enough. I haven't seen how well those KPIs integrate with other BI tools, which will be important for adoption.)One more PowerPivot feature that Amir showed was a graphical display of the lineage for calculations. (This is hugely practical, especially if you build up calculations incrementally. You can more easily follow the logic from calculation to calculation. Furthermore, if you need to make a change to one calculation, you can assess the impact on other calculations.)Another product demonstration will be available within the next 30 days--Pivot for Reporting Services. If you haven't seen this technology yet, check it out at www.getpivot.com. (It definitely has a wow factor, but I'm skeptical about its practicality. However, I'm looking forward to trying it out with data that I understand.)Michael Tejedor (twitter) demonstrated a feature that I think is really interesting and not emphasized nearly enough--overshadowed by PowerPivot, no doubt. That feature is the Microsoft Business Intelligence Indexing Connector, which enables search of the content of Excel workbooks and Reporting Services reports. (This capability existed in MOSS 2007, but was more cumbersome to implement. The search results in SharePoint 2010 are not only cooler, but more useful by describing whether the content is found in a table or a chart, for example.)This may yet be the dawning of the age of self-service BI - a phrase I've heard repeated from time to time over the last decade - but I think BI professionals are likely to stay busy for a long while, and need not start looking for a new line of work. Kummert repeatedly referenced strategic BI solutions in contrast to self-service BI to emphasize that self-service BI is not a replacement for the services that BI professionals provide. After all, self-service BI does not appear magically on user desktops (or whatever device they want to use). A supporting infrastructure is necessary, and grows in complexity in proportion to the need to simplify BI for users.It's one thing to hear the party line touted by Microsoft employees at the BI keynote, but it's another to hear from the people who are responsible for implementing and supporting it within an organization. Rob Collie (blog | twitter), Kasper de Jonge (blog | twitter), Vidas Matelis (site | twitter), and I were invited to join Andrew Brust (blog | twitter) as he led a Birds of a Feather session at TechEd entitled "PowerPivot: Is It the BI Deal-Changer for Developers and IT Pros?" I would single out the prevailing concern in this session as the issue of control. On one side of this issue were those who were concerned that they would lose control once PowerPivot is implemented. On the other side were those who believed that data should be freely accessible to users in PowerPivot, and even acknowledgment that users would get the data they want even if it meant they would have to manually enter into a workbook to have it ready for analysis. For another viewpoint on how PowerPivot played out at the conference, see Rob Collie's observations.Collaborative BII have been intrigued by the notion of collaborative BI for a very long time. Before I discovered BI, I was a Lotus Notes developer and later a manager of developers, working in a software company that enabled collaboration in the legal industry. Not only did I help create collaborative systems for our clients, I created a complete project management from the ground up to collaboratively manage our custom development work. In that case, collaboration involved my team, my client contacts, and me. I was also able to produce my own BI from that system as well, but didn't know that's what I was doing at the time. Only in recent years has SharePoint begun to catch up with the capabilities that I had with Lotus Notes more than a decade ago. Eventually, I had the opportunity at that job to formally investigate BI as another product offering for our software, and the rest - as they say - is history. I built my first data warehouse with Scott Cameron (who has also ventured into the authoring world by writing Analysis Services 2008 Step by Step and was at the BI Conference last week where I got to reminisce with him for a bit) and that began a career that I never imagined at the time.Fast forward to 2010, and I'm still lauding the virtues of collaborative BI, if only the tools will catch up to my vision! Thus, I was anxious to see what Donald Farmer (blog | twitter) and Rita Sallam of Gartner had to say on the subject in their session "Collaborative Decision Making." As I suspected, the tools aren't quite there yet, but the vendors are moving in the right direction. One thing I liked about this session was a non-Microsoft perspective of the state of the industry with regard to collaborative BI. In addition, this session included a better demonstration of SharePoint collaborative BI capabilities than appeared in the BI keynote. Check out the video in the link to the session to see the demonstration. One of the use cases that was demonstrated was linking from information to a person, because, as Donald put it, "People don't trust data, they trust people."The Microsoft BI Stack in GeneralA question I hear all the time from students when I'm teaching is how to know what tools to use when there is overlap between products in the BI stack. I've never taken the time to codify my thoughts on the subject, but saw that my friend Dan Bulos provided good insight on this topic from a variety of perspectives in his session, "So Many BI Tools, So Little Time." I thought one of his best points was that ideally you should be able to design in your tool of choice, and then deploy to your tool of choice. Unfortunately, the ideal is yet to become real across the platform. The closest we come is with the RDL in Reporting Services which can be produced from two different tools (Report Builder or Business Intelligence Development Studio's Report Designer), manually, or by a third-party or custom application. I have touted the idea for years (and publicly said so about 5 years ago) that eventually more products would be RDL producers or consumers, but we aren't there yet. Maybe in another 5 years.Another interesting session that covered the BI stack against a backdrop of competitive products was delivered by Andrew Brust. Andrew did a marvelous job of consolidating a lot of information in a way that clearly communicated how various vendors' offerings compared to the Microsoft BI stack. He also made a particularly compelling argument about how the existence of an ecosystem around the Microsoft BI stack provided innovation and opportunities lacking for other vendors. Check out his presentation, "How Does the Microsoft BI Stack...Stack Up?"Expo HallI had planned to spend more time in the Expo Hall to see who was doing new things with the BI stack, but didn't manage to get very far. Each time I set out on an exploratory mission, I got caught up in some fascinating conversations with one or more of my peers. I find interacting with people that I meet at conferences just as important as attending sessions to learn something new. There were a couple of items that really caught me eye, however, that I'll share here.Pragmatic Works. Whether you develop SSIS packages, build SSAS cubes, or author SSRS reports (or all of the above), you really must take a look at BI Documenter. Brian Knight (twitter) walked me through the key features, and I must say I was impressed. Once you've seen what this product can do, you won't want to document your BI projects any other way. You can download a free single-user database edition, or choose from more feature-rich standard or professional editions.Microsoft Press ebooks. I also stopped by the O'Reilly Media booth to meet some folks that one of my acquisitions editors at Microsoft Press recommended. In case you haven't heard, Microsoft Press has partnered with O'Reilly Media for distribution and publishing. Apart from my interest in learning more about O'Reilly Media as an author, an advertisement in their booth caught me eye which I think is a really great move. When you buy Microsoft Press ebooks through the O'Reilly web site, you can receive it in any (or all) of the following formats where possible: PDF, epub, .mobi for Kindle and .apk for Android. You also have lifetime DRM-free access to the ebooks. As someone who is an avid collector of books, I fnd myself running out of room for storage. In addition, I travel a lot, and it's hard to lug my reference library with me. Today's e-reader options make the move to digital books a more viable way to grow my library. Having a variety of formats means I am not limited to a single device, and lifetime access means I don't have to worry about keeping track of where I've stored my files. Because the e-books are DRM-free, I can copy and paste when I'm compiling notes, and I can print pages when necessary. That's a winning combination in my mind!Overall, I was pleased with the BI conference. There were many more sessions that I couldn't attend, either because the room was full when I got there or there were multiple sessions running concurrently that I wanted to see. Fortunately, many of the sessions are accessible for viewing online at http://www.msteched.com/2010/NorthAmerica along with the TechEd sessions. You can spot the BI sessions by the yellow skyline on the title slide of the presentation as shown below. 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• How to ThinApp a Database Application & SQL Server 2005

  - by dandan78

  To make it easier for potential clients to try out our software without having to go to the trouble of installing SQL Server, a test database, setting up an ODBC connection and so on, we want to package the whole thing with VMWare ThinApp. Ideally, there'd be a single executable and all the user would have to do is run it. I've been reading up on ThinApp on the VMWare website but am still unsure how to go about doing this. Is the correct approach to put SQL Server and the application in separate packages, reverting to a clean version of the virtual enviroment prior to each packaging? That seems somewhat problematic because the app needs the DBMS to run, as well as an ODBC connection. Like I said, we'd prefer to go with a single package (package = executable?), but two executables are also acceptable if an alternative can't be found. I realize that the same result can probably be achieved by way of a custom SQL Server Express installation but ThinApp looks like a better and more elegant solution.

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