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• Web Services Example - Part 2: Programmatic

  - by Denis T

  In this edition of the ADF Mobile blog we'll tackle part 2 of our Web Service examples.  In this posting we'll take a look at using a SOAP Web Service but calling it programmatically in code and parsing the return into a bean. Getting the sample code: Just click here to download a zip of the entire project.  You can unzip it and load it into JDeveloper and deploy it either to iOS or Android.  Please follow the previous blog posts if you need help getting JDeveloper or ADF Mobile installed.  Note: This is a different workspace than WS-Part1 Defining our Web Service: Just like our first installment, we are using the same public weather forecast web service provided free by CDYNE Corporation.  Sometimes this service goes down so please ensure you know it's up before reporting this example isn't working. We're going to concentrate on the same two web service methods, GetCityForecastByZIP and GetWeatherInformation. Defing the Application: The application setup is identical to the Weather1 version.  There are some improvements to the data that is displayed as part of this example though.  Now we are able to show the associated image along with each forecast line when using the Forecast By Zip feature.  We've also added the temperature Hi/Low values into the UI. Summary of Fundamental Changes In This Application The most fundamental change is that we're binding the UI to the Bean Data Controls instead of directly to the Web Service Data Controls.  This gives us much more flexibility to control the shape of the data and allows us to do caching of the data outside of the Web Service.  This way if your application is, say offline, your bean could still populate with data from a local cache and still show you some UI as opposed to completely failing because you don't have any connectivity. In general we promote this type of programming technique with ADF Mobile to insulate your application from any issues with network connectivity. What's different with this example? We have setup the Web Service DC the same way but now we have managed beans to process the data.  The following classes define the "Model" of our application:  CityInformation-CityForecast-Forecast, WeatherInformation-WeatherDescription.  We use WeatherBean for UI interaction to the model layer.  If you look through this example, we don't really do that much with the java code except use it to grab the image URL from the weather description.  In a more realistic example, you might be using some JDBC classes to persist the data to a local database. To have a good architecture it is always good to keep your model and UI layers separate.  This gets muddied if you start to use bindings on a page invoked from Java code and this java code starts to become your "model" layer.  Since bindings are page specific, your model layer starts to become entwined with your UI.  Not good!  To help with this, we've added some utility functions that let you invoke DC methods without having a binding and thus execute methods from your "model" layer without requiring a binding in your page definition.  We do this with the invokeDataControlMethod of the AdfmfJavaUtilities class.  An example of this method call is available in line 95 of WeatherInformation.java and line 93 of CityInformation.Java. What's a GenericType? Because Web Service Data Controls (and also URL Data Controls AKA REST) use generic name/value pairs to define their structure and don't have strongly typed objects, these are actually stored internally as GenericType objects.  The GenericType class is simply a property map of name/value pairs that can be hierarchical.  There are methods like getAttribute where you supply the index of the attribute or it's string property name.  Why is this important to know?  Because invokeDataControlMethod returns GenericType objects and developers either need to parse these GenericType objects themselves or use one of our helper functions. GenericTypeBeanSerializationHelper This class does exactly what it's name implies.  It's a helper class for developers to aid in serialization of GenericTypes to/from java objects.  This is extremely handy if you have a large GenericType object with many attributes (or you're just lazy like me!) and you just want to parse it out into a real java object you can use more easily.  Here you would use the fromGenericType method.  This method takes the class of the Java object you wish to return and the GenericType as parameters.  The method then parses through each attribute in the GenericType and uses reflection to set that same attribute in the Java class.  Then the method returns that new object of the class you specified.  This is obviously very handy to avoid a lot of shuffling code between GenericType and your own Java classes.  The reverse method, toGenericType is also available when you want to go the other way.  In this case you supply the string that represents the package location in the DataControl definition (Example: "MyDC.myParams.MyCollection") and then pass in the Java object you have that holds the data and a GenericType is returned to you.  Again, it will use reflection to calculate the attributes that match between the java class and the GenericType and call the getters/setters on those. Issues and Possible Improvements: In the next installment we'll show you how to make your web service calls asynchronously so your UI will fill dynamically when the service call returns but in the meantime you show the data you have locally in your bean fed from some local cache.  This gives your users instant delivery of some data while you fetch other data in the background.

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• A Basic Thread

  - by Joe Mayo

  Most of the programs written are single-threaded, meaning that they run on the main execution thread. For various reasons such as performance, scalability, and/or responsiveness additional threads can be useful. .NET has extensive threading support, from the basic threads introduced in v1.0 to the Task Parallel Library (TPL) introduced in v4.0. To get started with threads, it's helpful to begin with the basics; starting a Thread. Why Do I Care? The scenario I'll use for needing to use a thread is writing to a file.  Sometimes, writing to a file takes a while and you don't want your user interface to lock up until the file write is done. In other words, you want the application to be responsive to the user. How Would I Go About It? The solution is to launch a new thread that performs the file write, allowing the main thread to return to the user right away.  Whenever the file writing thread completes, it will let the user know.  In the meantime, the user is free to interact with the program for other tasks. The following examples demonstrate how to do this. Show Me the Code? The code we'll use to work with threads is in the System.Threading namespace, so you'll need the following using directive at the top of the file: using System.Threading; When you run code on a thread, the code is specified via a method.  Here's the code that will execute on the thread: private static void WriteFile() { Thread.Sleep(1000); Console.WriteLine("File Written."); } The call to Thread.Sleep(1000) delays thread execution. The parameter is specified in milliseconds, and 1000 means that this will cause the program to sleep for approximately 1 second.  This method happens to be static, but that's just part of this example, which you'll see is launched from the static Main method.  A thread could be instance or static.  Notice that the method does not have parameters and does not have a return type. As you know, the way to refer to a method is via a delegate.  There is a delegate named ThreadStart in System.Threading that refers to a method without parameters or return type, shown below: ThreadStart fileWriterHandlerDelegate = new ThreadStart(WriteFile); I'll show you the whole program below, but the ThreadStart instance above goes in the Main method. The thread uses the ThreadStart instance, fileWriterHandlerDelegate, to specify the method to execute on the thread: Thread fileWriter = new Thread(fileWriterHandlerDelegate); As shown above, the argument type for the Thread constructor is the ThreadStart delegate type. The fileWriterHandlerDelegate argument is an instance of the ThreadStart delegate type. This creates an instance of a thread and what code will execute, but the new thread instance, fileWriter, isn't running yet. You have to explicitly start it, like this: fileWriter.Start(); Now, the code in the WriteFile method is executing on a separate thread. Meanwhile, the main thread that started the fileWriter thread continues on it's own.  You have two threads running at the same time. Okay, I'm Starting to Get Glassy Eyed. How Does it All Fit Together? The example below is the whole program, pulling all the previous bits together. It's followed by its output and an explanation. using System; using System.Threading; namespace BasicThread { class Program { static void Main() { ThreadStart fileWriterHandlerDelegate = new ThreadStart(WriteFile); Thread fileWriter = new Thread(fileWriterHandlerDelegate); Console.WriteLine("Starting FileWriter"); fileWriter.Start(); Console.WriteLine("Called FileWriter"); Console.ReadKey(); } private static void WriteFile() { Thread.Sleep(1000); Console.WriteLine("File Written"); } } } And here's the output: Starting FileWriter Called FileWriter File Written So, Why are the Printouts Backwards? The output above corresponds to Console.Writeline statements in the program, with the second and third seemingly reversed. In a single-threaded program, "File Written" would print before "Called FileWriter". However, this is a multi-threaded (2 or more threads) program.  In multi-threading, you can't make any assumptions about when a given thread will run.  In this case, I added the Sleep statement to the WriteFile method to greatly increase the chances that the message from the main thread will print first. Without the Thread.Sleep, you could run this on a system with multiple cores and/or multiple processors and potentially get different results each time. Interesting Tangent but What Should I Get Out of All This? Going back to the main point, launching the WriteFile method on a separate thread made the program more responsive.  The file writing logic ran for a while, but the main thread returned to the user, as demonstrated by the print out of "Called FileWriter".  When the file write finished, it let the user know via another print statement. This was a very efficient use of CPU resources that made for a more pleasant user experience. Joe

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• Trouble with AABB collision response and physics

  - by WCM

  I have been racking my brain trying to figure out a problem I am having with physics and basic AABB collision response. I am fairly close as the physics are mostly right. Gravity feels good and movement is solid. The issue I am running into is that when I land on the test block in my project, I can jump off of it most of the time. If I repeatedly jump in place, I will eventually get stuck one or two pixels below the surface of the test block. If I try to jump, I can become free of the other block, but it will happen again a few jumps later. I feel like I am missing something really obvious with this. I have two functions that support the detection and function to return a vector for the overlap of the two rectangle bounding boxes. I have a single update method that is processing the physics and collision for the entity. I feel like I am missing something very simple, like an ordering of the physics vs. collision response handling. Any thoughts or help can be appreciated. I apologize for the format of the code, tis prototype code mostly. The collision detection function: public static bool Collides(Rectangle source, Rectangle target) { if (source.Right < target.Left || source.Bottom < target.Top || source.Left > target.Right || source.Top > target.Bottom) { return false; } return true; } The overlap function: public static Vector2 GetMinimumTranslation(Rectangle source, Rectangle target) { Vector2 mtd = new Vector2(); Vector2 amin = source.Min(); Vector2 amax = source.Max(); Vector2 bmin = target.Min(); Vector2 bmax = target.Max(); float left = (bmin.X - amax.X); float right = (bmax.X - amin.X); float top = (bmin.Y - amax.Y); float bottom = (bmax.Y - amin.Y); if (left > 0 || right < 0) return Vector2.Zero; if (top > 0 || bottom < 0) return Vector2.Zero; if (Math.Abs(left) < right) mtd.X = left; else mtd.X = right; if (Math.Abs(top) < bottom) mtd.Y = top; else mtd.Y = bottom; // 0 the axis with the largest mtd value. if (Math.Abs(mtd.X) < Math.Abs(mtd.Y)) mtd.Y = 0; else mtd.X = 0; return mtd; } The update routine (gravity = 0.001f, jumpHeight = 0.35f, moveAmount = 0.15f): public void Update(GameTime gameTime) { Acceleration.Y = gravity; Position += new Vector2((float)(movement * moveAmount * gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds), (float)(Velocity.Y * gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds)); Velocity.Y += Acceleration.Y; Vector2 previousPosition = new Vector2((int)Position.X, (int)Position.Y); KeyboardState keyboard = Keyboard.GetState(); movement = 0; if (keyboard.IsKeyDown(Keys.Left)) { movement -= 1; } if (keyboard.IsKeyDown(Keys.Right)) { movement += 1; } if (Position.Y + 16 > GameClass.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height) { Velocity.Y = 0; Position = new Vector2(Position.X, GameClass.Instance.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height - 16); IsOnSurface = true; } if (Collision.Collides(BoundingBox, GameClass.Instance.block.BoundingBox)) { Vector2 mtd = Collision.GetMinimumTranslation(BoundingBox, GameClass.Instance.block.BoundingBox); Position += mtd; Velocity.Y = 0; IsOnSurface = true; } if (keyboard.IsKeyDown(Keys.Space) && !previousKeyboard.IsKeyDown(Keys.Space)) { if (IsOnSurface) { Velocity.Y = -jumpHeight; IsOnSurface = false; } } previousKeyboard = keyboard; } This is also a full download to the project. https://www.box.com/s/3rkdtbso3xgfgc2asawy P.S. I know that I could do this with the XNA Platformer Starter Kit algo, but it has some deep flaws that I am going to try to live without. I'd rather go the route of collision response via an overlay function. Thanks for any and all insight!

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• Using Definition of Done to Drive Agile Maturity

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve been an Agile Coach at a lot of different clients over the years, and I want to share an approach I use to help them adopt and mature over time. It’s important to realize that “Agile” is not a black/white yes/no thing. Teams can be varying degrees of agile. I think of this as their agile maturity level. When I coach teams I want them to start out being a little agile, and get more agile as they mature. The approach I teach them is to use the definition of done as a technique to continuously improve their agile maturity over time. We’re probably all familiar with the concept of “Done Done” that represents what *actually* being done a feature means. Not just when a developer says he’s done right after he writes that last line of code that makes the feature kind-of work. Done Done means the coding is done, it’s been tested, installers and deployment packages have been created, user manuals have been updated, architecture docs have been updated, etc. To enable teams to internalize the concept of “Done Done”, they usually get together and come up with their Definition of Done (DoD) that defines all the activities that need to be completed before a feature is considered Done Done. The Done Done technique typically is applied only to features (aka User Stories). What I do is extend this to apply to several concepts such as User Stories, Sprints, Releases (and sometimes Check-Ins). During project kick-off I’ll usually sit down with the team and go through an exercise of creating DoD’s for each of these concepts (Stories/Sprints/Releases). We’ll usually start by just brainstorming a bunch of activities that could end up in these various DoD’s. Here’s some examples: Code Reviews StyleCop FxCop User Manuals Updated Architecture Docs Updated Tested by QA Tested by UAT Installers Created Support Knowledge Base Updated Deployment Instructions (for Ops) written Automated Unit Tests Run Automated Integration Tests Run Then we start by arranging these activities into the place they occur today (e.g. Do you do UAT testing only once per release? every sprint? every feature?). If the team was previously Waterfall most of these activities probably end up in the Release DoD. An extremely mature agile team would probably have most of these activities in the DoD for the User Stories (because an extremely mature agile team will probably do continuous deployment and release every story). So what we need to do as a team, is work to move these activities from their current home (Release DoD) down into the Sprint DoD and eventually into the User Story DoD (and maybe into the lower-level Check-In DoD if we decide to use that). We don’t have to move them all down to User Story immediately, but as a team we figure out what we think we’re capable of moving down to the Sprint cycle, and Story cycle immediately, and that becomes our starting DoD’s. Over time the team makes an effort to continue moving activities down from Release->Sprint->Story as they become more agile and more mature. I try to encourage them to envision a world in which they deploy to production as each User Story is completed. They would need to be updating User Manuals, creating installers, doing UAT testing (typical Release cycle activities) on every single User Story. They may never actually reach that point, but they should envision that, and strive to keep driving the activities down closer to the User Story cycle s they mature. This is a great technique to give a team an easy-to-follow roadmap to mature their agile practices over time. Sure there’s other aspects to maturity outside of this, but it’s a great technique, that’s easy to visualize, to drive agility into the team. Just keep moving those activities (aka “gates”) down the board from Release->Sprint->Story. I’ll try to give an example of what a recent client of mine had for their DoD’s (this is from memory, so probably not 100% accurate): Release Create/Update deployment Instructions For Ops Instructional Videos Updated Run manual regression test suite UAT Testing In this case that meant deploying to an environment shared across the enterprise that mirrored production and asking other business groups to test their own apps to ensure we didn’t break anything outside our system Sprint Deploy to UAT Environment But not necessarily actually request UAT testing occur User Guides updated Sprint Features Video Created In this case we decided to create a video each sprint showing off the progress (video version of Sprint Demo) User Story Manual Test scripts developed and run Tested by BA Deployed in shared QA environment Using automated deployment process Peer Code Review Code Check-In Compiled (warning-free) Passes StyleCop Passes FxCop Create installer packages Run Automated Tests Run Automated Integration Tests PS – One of my clients had a great question when we went through this activity. They said that if a Sprint is by definition done when the end-date rolls around (time-boxed), isn’t a DoD on a sprint meaningless – it’s done on the end-date regardless of whether those other activities are complete or not? My answer is that while that statement is true – the sprint is done regardless when the end date rolls around – if the DoD activities haven’t been completed I would consider the Sprint a failure (similar to not completing what was committed/planned – failure may be too strong a word but you get the idea). In the Retrospective that will become an agenda item to discuss and understand why we weren’t able to complete the activities we agreed would need to be completed each Sprint.

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• Performance triage

  - by Dave

  Folks often ask me how to approach a suspected performance issue. My personal strategy is informed by the fact that I work on concurrency issues. (When you have a hammer everything looks like a nail, but I'll try to keep this general). A good starting point is to ask yourself if the observed performance matches your expectations. Expectations might be derived from known system performance limits, prototypes, and other software or environments that are comparable to your particular system-under-test. Some simple comparisons and microbenchmarks can be useful at this stage. It's also useful to write some very simple programs to validate some of the reported or expected system limits. Can that disk controller really tolerate and sustain 500 reads per second? To reduce the number of confounding factors it's better to try to answer that question with a very simple targeted program. And finally, nothing beats having familiarity with the technologies that underlying your particular layer. On the topic of confounding factors, as our technology stacks become deeper and less transparent, we often find our own technology working against us in some unexpected way to choke performance rather than simply running into some fundamental system limit. A good example is the warm-up time needed by just-in-time compilers in Java Virtual Machines. I won't delve too far into that particular hole except to say that it's rare to find good benchmarks and methodology for java code. Another example is power management on x86. Power management is great, but it can take a while for the CPUs to throttle up from low(er) frequencies to full throttle. And while I love "turbo" mode, it makes benchmarking applications with multiple threads a chore as you have to remember to turn it off and then back on otherwise short single-threaded runs may look abnormally fast compared to runs with higher thread counts. In general for performance characterization I disable turbo mode and fix the power governor at "performance" state. Another source of complexity is the scheduler, which I've discussed in prior blog entries. Lets say I have a running application and I want to better understand its behavior and performance. We'll presume it's warmed up, is under load, and is an execution mode representative of what we think the norm would be. It should be in steady-state, if a steady-state mode even exists. On Solaris the very first thing I'll do is take a set of "pstack" samples. Pstack briefly stops the process and walks each of the stacks, reporting symbolic information (if available) for each frame. For Java, pstack has been augmented to understand java frames, and even report inlining. A few pstack samples can provide powerful insight into what's actually going on inside the program. You'll be able to see calling patterns, which threads are blocked on what system calls or synchronization constructs, memory allocation, etc. If your code is CPU-bound then you'll get a good sense where the cycles are being spent. (I should caution that normal C/C++ inlining can diffuse an otherwise "hot" method into other methods. This is a rare instance where pstack sampling might not immediately point to the key problem). At this point you'll need to reconcile what you're seeing with pstack and your mental model of what you think the program should be doing. They're often rather different. And generally if there's a key performance issue, you'll spot it with a moderate number of samples. I'll also use OS-level observability tools to lock for the existence of bottlenecks where threads contend for locks; other situations where threads are blocked; and the distribution of threads over the system. On Solaris some good tools are mpstat and too a lesser degree, vmstat. Try running "mpstat -a 5" in one window while the application program runs concurrently. One key measure is the voluntary context switch rate "vctx" or "csw" which reflects threads descheduling themselves. It's also good to look at the user; system; and idle CPU percentages. This can give a broad but useful understanding if your threads are mostly parked or mostly running. For instance if your program makes heavy use of malloc/free, then it might be the case you're contending on the central malloc lock in the default allocator. In that case you'd see malloc calling lock in the stack traces, observe a high csw/vctx rate as threads block for the malloc lock, and your "usr" time would be less than expected. Solaris dtrace is a wonderful and invaluable performance tool as well, but in a sense you have to frame and articulate a meaningful and specific question to get a useful answer, so I tend not to use it for first-order screening of problems. It's also most effective for OS and software-level performance issues as opposed to HW-level issues. For that reason I recommend mpstat & pstack as my the 1st step in performance triage. If some other OS-level issue is evident then it's good to switch to dtrace to drill more deeply into the problem. Only after I've ruled out OS-level issues do I switch to using hardware performance counters to look for architectural impediments.

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• Why do I get an exception when playing multiple sound instances?

  - by Boreal

  Right now, I'm adding a rudimentary sound engine to my game. So far, I am able to load in a WAV file and play it once, then free up the memory when I close the game. However, the game crashes with a nice ArgumentOutOfBoundsException when I try to play another sound instance. Specified argument was out of the range of valid values. Parameter name: readLength I'm following this tutorial pretty much exactly, but I still keep getting the aforementioned error. Here's my sound-related code. /// <summary> /// Manages all sound instances. /// </summary> public static class Audio { static XAudio2 device; static MasteringVoice master; static List<SoundInstance> instances; /// <summary> /// The XAudio2 device. /// </summary> internal static XAudio2 Device { get { return device; } } /// <summary> /// Initializes the audio device and master track. /// </summary> internal static void Initialize() { device = new XAudio2(); master = new MasteringVoice(device); instances = new List<SoundInstance>(); } /// <summary> /// Releases all XA2 resources. /// </summary> internal static void Shutdown() { foreach(SoundInstance i in instances) i.Dispose(); master.Dispose(); device.Dispose(); } /// <summary> /// Registers a sound instance with the system. /// </summary> /// <param name="instance">Sound instance</param> internal static void AddInstance(SoundInstance instance) { instances.Add(instance); } /// <summary> /// Disposes any sound instance that has stopped playing. /// </summary> internal static void Update() { List<SoundInstance> temp = new List<SoundInstance>(instances); foreach(SoundInstance i in temp) if(!i.Playing) { i.Dispose(); instances.Remove(i); } } } /// <summary> /// Loads sounds from various files. /// </summary> internal class SoundLoader { /// <summary> /// Loads a .wav sound file. /// </summary> /// <param name="format">The decoded format will be sent here</param> /// <param name="buffer">The data will be sent here</param> /// <param name="soundName">The path to the WAV file</param> internal static void LoadWAV(out WaveFormat format, out AudioBuffer buffer, string soundName) { WaveStream wave = new WaveStream(soundName); format = wave.Format; buffer = new AudioBuffer(); buffer.AudioData = wave; buffer.AudioBytes = (int)wave.Length; buffer.Flags = BufferFlags.EndOfStream; } } /// <summary> /// Manages the data for a single sound. /// </summary> public class Sound : IAsset { WaveFormat format; AudioBuffer buffer; /// <summary> /// Loads a sound from a file. /// </summary> /// <param name="soundName">The path to the sound file</param> /// <returns>Whether the sound loaded successfully</returns> public bool Load(string soundName) { if(soundName.EndsWith(".wav")) SoundLoader.LoadWAV(out format, out buffer, soundName); else return false; return true; } /// <summary> /// Plays the sound. /// </summary> public void Play() { Audio.AddInstance(new SoundInstance(format, buffer)); } /// <summary> /// Unloads the sound from memory. /// </summary> public void Unload() { buffer.Dispose(); } } /// <summary> /// Manages a single sound instance. /// </summary> public class SoundInstance { SourceVoice source; bool playing; /// <summary> /// Whether the sound is currently playing. /// </summary> public bool Playing { get { return playing; } } /// <summary> /// Starts a new instance of a sound. /// </summary> /// <param name="format">Format of the sound</param> /// <param name="buffer">Buffer holding sound data</param> internal SoundInstance(WaveFormat format, AudioBuffer buffer) { source = new SourceVoice(Audio.Device, format); source.BufferEnd += (s, e) => playing = false; source.Start(); source.SubmitSourceBuffer(buffer); // THIS IS WHERE THE EXCEPTION IS THROWN playing = true; } /// <summary> /// Releases memory used by the instance. /// </summary> internal void Dispose() { source.Dispose(); } } The exception occurs on line 156 when I am playing the sound: source.SubmitSourceBuffer(buffer);

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• NDepend Evaluation: Part 3

  - by Anthony Trudeau

  NDepend is a Visual Studio add-in designed for intense code analysis with the goal of high code quality. NDepend uses a number of metrics and aggregates the data in pleasing static and active visual reports. My evaluation of NDepend will be broken up into several different parts. In the first part of the evaluation I looked at installing the add-in.  And in the last part I went over my first impressions including an overview of the features.  In this installment I provide a little more detail on a few of the features that I really like. Dependency Matrix The dependency matrix is one of the rich visual components provided with NDepend.  At a glance it lets you know where you have coupling problems including cycles.  It does this with number indicating the weight of the dependency and a color-coding that indicates the nature of the dependency. Green and blue cells are direct dependencies (with the difference being whether the relationship is from row-to-column or column-to-row).  Black cells are the ones that you really want to know about.  These indicate that you have a cycle.  That is, type A refers to type B and type B also refers to Type A. But, that’s not the end of the story.  A handy pop-up appears when you hover over the cell in question.  It explains the color, the dependency, and provides several interesting links that will teach you more than you want to know about the dependency. You can double-click the problem cells to explode the dependency.  That will show the dependencies on a method-by-method basis allowing you to more easily target and fix the problem.  When you’re done you can click the back button on the toolbar. Dependency Graph The dependency graph is another component provided.  It’s complementary to the dependency matrix, but it isn’t as easy to identify dependency issues using the window. On a positive note, it does provide more information than the matrix. My biggest issue with the dependency graph is determining what is shown.  This was not readily obvious.  I ended up using the navigation buttons to get an acceptable view.  I would have liked to choose what I see. Once you see the types you want you can get a decent idea of coupling strength based on the width of the dependency lines.  Double-arrowed lines are problematic and are shown in red.  The size of the boxes will be related to the metric being displayed.  This is controlled using the Box Size drop-down in the toolbar.  Personally, I don’t find the size of the box to be helpful, so I change it to Constant Font. One nice thing about the display is that you can see the entire path of dependencies when you hover over a type.  This is done by color-coding the dependencies and dependants.  It would be nice if selecting the box for the type would lock the highlighting in place. I did find a perhaps unintended work-around to the color-coding.  You can lock the color-coding in by hovering over the type, right-clicking, and then clicking on the canvas area to clear the pop-up menu.  You can then do whatever with it including saving it to an image file with the color-coding. CQL NDepend uses a code query language (CQL) to work with your code just like it was a database.  CQL cannot be confused with the robustness of T-SQL or even LINQ, but it represents an impressive attempt at providing an expressive way to enumerate and interrogate your code. There are two main windows you’ll use when working with CQL.  The CQL Query Explorer allows you to define what queries (rules) are run as part of a report – I immediately unselected rules that I don’t want in my results.  The CQL Query Edit window is where you can view or author your own rules.  The explorer window is pretty self-explanatory, so I won’t mention it further other than to say that any queries you author will appear in the custom group. Authoring your own queries is really hard to screw-up.  The Intellisense-like pop-ups tell you what you can do while making composition easy.  I was able to create a query within two minutes of playing with the editor.  My query warns if any types that are interfaces don’t start with an “I”. WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT TYPES WHERE IsInterface AND !NameLike “I” The results from the CQL Query Edit window are immediate. That fact makes it useful for ad hoc querying.  It’s worth mentioning two things that could make the experience smoother.  First, out of habit from using Visual Studio I expect to be able to scroll and press Tab to select an item in the list (like Intellisense).  You have to press Enter when you scroll to the item you want.  Second, the commands are case-sensitive.  I don’t see a really good reason to enforce that. CQL has a lot of potential not just in enforcing code quality, but also enforcing architectural constraints that your enterprise has defined. Up Next My next update will be the final part of the evaluation.  I will summarize my experience and provide my conclusions on the NDepend add-in. ** View Part 1 of the Evaluation ** ** View Part 2 of the Evaluation ** Disclaimer: Patrick Smacchia contacted me about reviewing NDepend. I received a free license in return for sharing my experiences and talking about the capabilities of the add-in on this site. There is no expectation of a positive review elicited from the author of NDepend.

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• Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) is Available Now !

  - by Anand Akela

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman","serif";} Oracle today announced the availability of Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2). It is now available for download on OTN on ALL platforms. This is the first major release since the launch of Enterprise Manager 12c in October of 2011. This is the first time when Enterprise Manager release is available on all platforms simultaneously. This is primarily a stability release which incorporates many of issues and feedback reported by early adopters. In addition, this release contains many new features and enhancements in areas across the board. New Capabilities and Features Enhanced management capabilities for enterprise private clouds: Introduces new capabilities to allow customers to build and manage a Java Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud based on Oracle Weblogic Server. The new capabilities include guided set up of PaaS Cloud, self-service provisioning, automatic scale out and metering and chargeback. Enhanced lifecycle management capabilities for Oracle WebLogic Server environments: Combining in-context multiple domain, patching and configuration file synchronizations. Integrated Hardware-Software management for Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud through features such as rack schematics visualization and integrated monitoring of all hardware and software components. The latest management capabilities for business-critical applications include: Business Application Management: A new Business Application (BA) target type and dashboard with flexible definitions provides a logical view of an application’s business transactions, end-user experiences and the cloud infrastructure the monitored application is running on. Enhanced User Experience Reporting: Oracle Real User Experience Insight has been enhanced to provide reporting capabilities on client-side issues for applications running in the cloud and has been more tightly coupled with Oracle Business Transaction Management to help ensure that real-time user experience and transaction tracing data is provided to users in context. Several key improvements address ease of administration, reporting and extensibility for massively scalable cloud environments including dynamic groups, self-updateable monitoring templates, bulk operations against many events, etc. New and Revised Plug-Ins: Several plug-Ins have been updated as a part of this release resulting in either new versions or revisions. Revised plug-ins contain only bug-fixes and while new plug-ins incorporate both bug fixes as well as new functionality. Plug-In Name Version Enterprise Manager for Oracle Database 12.1.0.2 (revision) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Middleware 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Chargeback and Capacity Planning 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Fusion Applications 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Virtualization 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Exadata 12.1.0.3 (new) Enterprise Manager for Oracle Cloud 12.1.0.4 (new) Installation and Upgrade: All major platforms have been released simultaneously (Linux 32 / 64 bit, Solaris (SPARC), Solaris x86-64, IBM AIX 64-bit, and Windows x86-64 (64-bit) ) Enterprise Manager 12.1.0.2 is a complete release that includes both the EM OMS and Agent versions of 12.1.0.2. Installation options available with EM 12.1.0.2: User can do fresh Install or an upgrade from versions EM 10.2.0.5, 11.1, or 12.1.0.2 ( Bundle Patch 1 not mandatory). Upgrading to EM 12.1.0.2 from EM 12.1.0.1 is not a patch application (similar to Bundle Patch 1) but is achieved through a 1-system upgrade. Documentation: Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control Introduction Document provides a broad overview of capabilities and highlights"What's New" in EM 12.1.0.2. All updated Oracle Enterprise Manager documentation can be found on OTN Upgrade Guide Please feel free to ask questions related to the new Oracle Enterprise Manager Cloud Control 12c Release 2 (12.1.0.2) at the Oracle Enterprise Manager Forum . You could also share your feedback at twitter  using hash tag #em12c or at Facebook . Stay Connected: Twitter |  Face book |  You Tube |  Linked in |  Newsletter

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 2: Platforms and Features

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is part 2 in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. In the previous post I discussed what reasons a company might have for creating a smartphone application.  In this installment I will cover some of history and state of the different platforms as well as features that can be leveraged for building enterprise smartphone applications. Platforms Before you start choosing a platform to develop your solutions on it is good to understand how we got here and what features you can leverage. History To my memory we owe all of this to a product called the Apple Newton that came out in 1987. It was the first PDA and back then I was much more of an Apple fan.  I was very impressed with this device even though it never really went anywhere.  The Palm Pilot by US Robotics was the next major advancement in PDA. It had a simple short hand window that allowed for quick stylus entry.. Later, Windows CE came out and started the broadening of the PDA market. After that it was the Palm and CE operating systems that started showing up on cell phones and for some time these were the two dominant operating systems that were distributed with devices from multiple hardware vendors. Current The iPhone was the first smartphone to take away the stylus and give us a multi-touch interface.  It was a revolution in usability and really changed the attractiveness of smartphones for the general public.  This brought us to the beginning of the current state of the market with the concept of an online store that makes it easy for customers to get new features and functionality on demand. With Android, Google made this more than a one horse race.  Not only did they come to compete, their low cost actually made them the leading OS.  Of course what made Android so attractive also is its major fault.  It is so open that it has been a target for malware which leaves consumers exposed.  Fortunately for Google though, most consumers aren’t aware of the threat that they are under. Although Microsoft had put out one of the first smart phone operating systems with CE it had to play catch up and finally came out with the Windows Phone.  They have gone for a market approach between those of iOS and Android.  They support multiple hardware vendors like Google, but they kept a certification process for applications that is similar to Apple.  They also created a user interface that was different enough to give it a clear separation from the other two platforms. The result of all this is hundreds of millions of smartphones being sold monthly across all three platforms giving us a wide range of choices and challenges when it comes to developing solutions. Features So what are the features that make these devices flexible enough be considered for use in the enterprise? The biggest advantage of today's devices is network connectivity.  The ability to access information from multiple sources at a moment’s notice is critical for businesses.  Add to that the ability to communicate over a variety of text, voice and video modes and we have a powerful starting point. Every smartphone has a cameras and they are not just useful for posting to Instagram. We are seeing more applications such as Bing vision that allow us to scan just about any printed code or text to find information.  These capabilities have been made available to developers in the form of standard libraries for reading barcodes of just about an flavor and optical character recognition (OCR) interpretation. Bluetooth give us the ability to communicate with multiple devices. Whether these are headsets, keyboard or printers the wireless communication capabilities are just starting to evolve.  The more these wireless communication protocols grow, the more opportunities we will see to transfer data between users and a variety of devices. Local storage of information that can be called up even when the device cannot reach the network is the other big capability.  This give users the ability to work offline as well and transmit information when connections are restored. These are the tools that we have to work with to build applications that can be leveraged to gain a competitive advantage for companies that implement them. Coming Up In the third installment I will cover key concerns that you face when building enterprise smartphone apps. del.icio.us Tags: smartphones,enterprise smartphone Apps,architecture,iOS,Android,Windows Phone

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• WMemoryProfiler is Released

  - by Alois Kraus

  What is it? WMemoryProfiler is a managed profiling Api to aid integration testing. This free library can get managed heap statistics and memory usage for your own process (remember testing) and other processes as well. The best thing is that it does work from .NET 2.0 up to .NET 4.5 in x86 and x64. To make it more interesting it can attach to any running .NET process. The reason why I do mention this is that commercial profilers do support this functionality only for their professional editions. An normally only since .NET 4.0 since the profiling API only since then does support attaching to a running process. This thing does differ in many aspects from “normal” profilers because while profiling yourself you can get all objects from all managed heaps back as an object array. If you ever wanted to change the state of an object which does only exist a method local in another thread you can get your hands on it now … Enough theory. Show me some code /// <summary> /// Show feature to not only get statisics out of a process but also the newly allocated /// instances since the last call to MarkCurrentObjects. /// GetNewObjects does return the newly allocated objects as object array /// </summary> static void InstanceTracking() { using (var dumper = new MemoryDumper()) // if you have problems use to see the debugger windows true,true)) { dumper.MarkCurrentObjects(); Allocate(); ILookup<Type, object> newObjects = dumper.GetNewObjects() .ToLookup( x => x.GetType() ); Console.WriteLine("New Strings:"); foreach (var newStr in newObjects[typeof(string)] ) { Console.WriteLine("Str: {0}", newStr); } } } … New Strings: Str: qqd Str: String data: Str: String data: 0 Str: String data: 1 … This is really hot stuff. Not only you can get heap statistics but you can directly examine the new objects and make queries upon them. When I do find more time I can reconstruct the object root graph from it from my own process. It this cool or what? You can also peek into the Finalization Queue to check if you did accidentally forget to dispose a whole bunch of objects … /// <summary> /// .NET 4.0 or above only. Get all finalizable objects which are ready for finalization and have no other object roots anymore. /// </summary> static void NotYetFinalizedObjects() { using (var dumper = new MemoryDumper()) { object[] finalizable = dumper.GetObjectsReadyForFinalization(); Console.WriteLine("Currently {0} objects of types {1} are ready for finalization. Consider disposing them before.", finalizable.Length, String.Join(",", finalizable.ToLookup( x=> x.GetType() ) .Select( x=> x.Key.Name)) ); } } How does it work? The W of WMemoryProfiler is a good hint. It does employ Windbg and SOS dll to do the heavy lifting and concentrates on an easy to use Api which does hide completely Windbg. If you do not want to see Windbg you will never see it. In my experience the most complex thing is actually to download Windbg from the Windows 8 Stanalone SDK. This is described in the Readme and the exception you are greeted with if it is missing in much greater detail. So I will not go into this here.   What Next? Depending on the feedback I do get I can imagine some features which might be useful as well Calculate first order GC Roots from the actual object graph Identify global statics in Types in object graph Support read out of finalization queue of .NET 2.0 as well. Support Memory Dump analysis (again a feature only supported by commercial profilers in their professional editions if it is supported at all) Deserialize objects from a memory dump into a live process back (this would need some more investigation but it is doable) The last item needs some explanation. Why on earth would you want to do that? The basic idea is to store in your live process some logging/tracing data which can become quite big but since it is never written to it is very fast to generate. When your process crashes with a memory dump you could transfer this data structure back into a live viewer which can then nicely display your program state at the point it did crash. This is an advanced trouble shooting technique I have not seen anywhere yet but it could be quite useful. You can have here a look at the current feature list of WMemoryProfiler with some examples.   How To Get Started? First I would download the released source package (it is tiny). And compile the complete project. Then you can compile the Example project (it has this name) and uncomment in the main method the scenario you want to check out. If you are greeted with an exception it is time to install the Windows 8 Standalone SDK which is described in great detail in the exception text. Thats it for the first round. I have seen something more limited in the Java world some years ago (now I cannot find the link anymore) but anyway. Now we have something much better.

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• Indexed Drawing in OpenGL not working

  - by user2050846

  I am trying to render 2 types of primitives- - points ( a Point Cloud ) - triangles ( a Mesh ) I am rendering points simply without any index arrays and they are getting rendered fine. To render the meshes I am using indexed drawing with the face list array having the indices of the vertices to be rendered as Triangles. Vertices and their corresponding vertex colors are stored in their corresponding buffers. But the indexed drawing command do not draw anything. The code is as follows- Main Display Function: void display() { simple->enable(); simple->bindUniform("MV",modelview); simple->bindUniform("P", projection); // rendering Point Cloud glBindVertexArray(vao); // Vertex buffer Point Cloud glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,vertexbuffer); glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glVertexAttribPointer(0,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); // Color Buffer point Cloud glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,colorbuffer); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer(1,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); // Render Colored Point Cloud //glDrawArrays(GL_POINTS,0,model->vertexCount); glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); // ---------------- END---------------------// //// Floor Rendering glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,fl); glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer(0,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); glVertexAttribPointer(1,4,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,(void *)48); glDrawArrays(GL_QUADS,0,4); glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); // -----------------END---------------------// //Rendering the Meshes //////////// PART OF CODE THAT IS NOT DRAWING ANYTHING //////////////////// glBindVertexArray(vid); for(int i=0;i<NUM_MESHES;i++) { glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,mVertex[i]); glEnableVertexAttribArray(0); glEnableVertexAttribArray(1); glVertexAttribPointer(0,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,0); glVertexAttribPointer(1,3,GL_FLOAT,GL_FALSE,0,(void *)(meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3))); //glDrawArrays(GL_TRIANGLES,0,meshes[i]->vertexCount); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,mFace[i]); //cout<<gluErrorString(glGetError()); glDrawElements(GL_TRIANGLES,meshes[i]->faceCount*3,GL_FLOAT,(void *)0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(0); glDisableVertexAttribArray(1); } glUseProgram(0); glutSwapBuffers(); glutPostRedisplay(); } Point Cloud Buffer Allocation Initialization: void initGLPointCloud() { glGenBuffers(1,&vertexbuffer); glGenBuffers(1,&colorbuffer); glGenBuffers(1,&fl); //Populates the position buffer glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,vertexbuffer); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, model->vertexCount * sizeof (glm::vec3), &model->positions[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); //Populates the color buffer glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, colorbuffer); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, model->vertexCount * sizeof (glm::vec3), &model->colors[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); model->FreeMemory(); // To free the not needed memory, as the data has been already // copied on graphic card, and wont be used again. glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,0); } Meshes Buffer Initialization: void initGLMeshes(int i) { glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,mVertex[i]); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3)*2,NULL,GL_STATIC_DRAW); glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,0,meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3),&meshes[i]->positions[0]); glBufferSubData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3),meshes[i]->vertexCount*sizeof(glm::vec3),&meshes[i]->colors[0]); glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,mFace[i]); glBufferData(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,meshes[i]->faceCount*sizeof(glm::vec3), &meshes[i]->faces[0],GL_STATIC_DRAW); meshes[i]->FreeMemory(); //glBindBuffer(GL_ELEMENT_ARRAY_BUFFER,0); } Initialize the Rendering, load and create shader and calls the mesh and PCD initializers. void initRender() { simple= new GLSLShader("shaders/simple.vert","shaders/simple.frag"); //Point Cloud //Sets up VAO glGenVertexArrays(1, &vao); glBindVertexArray(vao); initGLPointCloud(); //floorData glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, fl); glBufferData(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER, sizeof(floorData), &floorData[0], GL_STATIC_DRAW); glBindBuffer(GL_ARRAY_BUFFER,0); glBindVertexArray(0); //Meshes for(int i=0;i<NUM_MESHES;i++) { if(i==0) // SET up the new vertex array state for indexed Drawing { glGenVertexArrays(1, &vid); glBindVertexArray(vid); glGenBuffers(NUM_MESHES,mVertex); glGenBuffers(NUM_MESHES,mColor); glGenBuffers(NUM_MESHES,mFace); } initGLMeshes(i); } glEnable(GL_DEPTH_TEST); } Any help would be much appreciated, I have been breaking my head on this problem since 3 days, and still it is unsolved.

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• iOS Support with Windows Azure Mobile Services – now with Push Notifications

  - by ScottGu

  A few weeks ago I posted about a number of improvements to Windows Azure Mobile Services. One of these was the addition of an Objective-C client SDK that allows iOS developers to easily use Mobile Services for data and authentication.  Today I'm excited to announce a number of improvement to our iOS SDK and, most significantly, our new support for Push Notifications via APNS (Apple Push Notification Services).  This makes it incredibly easy to fire push notifications to your iOS users from Windows Azure Mobile Service scripts. Push Notifications via APNS We've provided two complete tutorials that take you step-by-step through the provisioning and setup process to enable your Windows Azure Mobile Service application with APNS (Apple Push Notification Services), including all of the steps required to configure your application for push in the Apple iOS provisioning portal: Getting started with Push Notifications - iOS Push notifications to users by using Mobile Services - iOS Once you've configured your application in the Apple iOS provisioning portal and uploaded the APNS push certificate to the Apple provisioning portal, it's just a matter of uploading your APNS push certificate to Mobile Services using the Windows Azure admin portal: Clicking the “upload” within the “Push” tab of your Mobile Service allows you to browse your local file-system and locate/upload your exported certificate.  As part of this you can also select whether you want to use the sandbox (dev) or production (prod) Apple service: Now, the code to send a push notification to your clients from within a Windows Azure Mobile Service is as easy as the code below: push.apns.send(deviceToken, {      alert: 'Toast: A new Mobile Services task.',      sound: 'default' }); This will cause Windows Azure Mobile Services to connect to APNS (Apple Push Notification Service) and send a notification to the iOS device you specified via the deviceToken: Check out our reference documentation for full details on how to use the new Windows Azure Mobile Services apns object to send your push notifications. Feedback Scripts An important part of working with any PNS (Push Notification Service) is handling feedback for expired device tokens and channels. This typically happens when your application is uninstalled from a particular device and can no longer receive your notifications. With Windows Notification Services you get an instant response from the HTTP server.  Apple’s Notification Services works in a slightly different way and provides an additional endpoint you can connect to poll for a list of expired tokens. As with all of the capabilities we integrate with Mobile Services, our goal is to allow developers to focus more on building their app and less on building infrastructure to support their ideas. Therefore we knew we had to provide a simple way for developers to integrate feedback from APNS on a regular basis.  This week’s update now includes a new screen in the portal that allows you to optionally provide a script to process your APNS feedback – and it will be executed by Mobile Services on an ongoing basis: This script is invoked periodically while your service is active. To poll the feedback endpoint you can simply call the apns object's getFeedback method from within this script: push.apns.getFeedback({       success: function(results) {           // results is an array of objects with a deviceToken and time properties      } }); This returns you a list of invalid tokens that can now be removed from your database. iOS Client SDK improvements Over the last month we've continued to work with a number of iOS advisors to make improvements to our Objective-C SDK. The SDK is being developed under an open source license (Apache 2.0) and is available on github. Many of the improvements are behind the scenes to improve performance and memory usage. However, one of the biggest improvements to our iOS Client API is the addition of an even easier login method.  Below is the Objective-C code you can now write to invoke it: [client loginWithProvider:@"twitter"                     onController:self                        animated:YES                      completion:^(MSUser *user, NSError *error) {      // if no error, you are now logged in via twitter }]; This code will automatically present and dismiss our login view controller as a modal dialog on the specified controller.  This does all the hard work for you and makes login via Twitter, Google, Facebook and Microsoft Account identities just a single line of code. My colleague Josh just posted a short video demonstrating these new features which I'd recommend checking out: Summary The above features are all now live in production and are available to use immediately.  If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using Mobile Services today. Visit the Windows Azure Mobile Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with Mobile Services. 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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• Coherence Data Guarantees for Data Reads - Basic Terminology

  - by jpurdy

  When integrating Coherence into applications, each application has its own set of requirements with respect to data integrity guarantees. Developers often describe these requirements using expressions like "avoiding dirty reads" or "making sure that updates are transactional", but we often find that even in a small group of people, there may be a wide range of opinions as to what these terms mean. This may simply be due to a lack of familiarity, but given that Coherence sits at an intersection of several (mostly) unrelated fields, it may be a matter of conflicting vocabularies (e.g. "consistency" is similar but different in transaction processing versus multi-threaded programming). Since almost all data read consistency issues are related to the concept of concurrency, it is helpful to start with a definition of that, or rather what it means for two operations to be concurrent. Rather than implying that they occur "at the same time", concurrency is a slightly weaker statement -- it simply means that it can't be proven that one event precedes (or follows) the other. As an example, in a Coherence application, if two client members mutate two different cache entries sitting on two different cache servers at roughly the same time, it is likely that one update will precede the other by a significant amount of time (say 0.1ms). However, since there is no guarantee that all four members have their clocks perfectly synchronized, and there is no way to precisely measure the time it takes to send a given message between any two members (that have differing clocks), we consider these to be concurrent operations since we can not (easily) prove otherwise. So this leads to a question that we hear quite frequently: "Are the contents of the near cache always synchronized with the underlying distributed cache?". It's easy to see that if an update on a cache server results in a message being sent to each near cache, and then that near cache being updated that there is a window where the contents are different. However, this is irrelevant, since even if the application reads directly from the distributed cache, another thread update the cache before the read is returned to the application. Even if no other member modifies a cache entry prior to the local near cache entry being updated (and subsequently read), the purpose of reading a cache entry is to do something with the result, usually either displaying for consumption by a human, or by updating the entry based on the current state of the entry. In the former case, it's clear that if the data is updated faster than a human can perceive, then there is no problem (and in many cases this can be relaxed even further). For the latter case, the application must assume that the value might potentially be updated before it has a chance to update it. This almost aways the case with read-only caches, and the solution is the traditional optimistic transaction pattern, which requires the application to explicitly state what assumptions it made about the old value of the cache entry. If the application doesn't want to bother stating those assumptions, it is free to lock the cache entry prior to reading it, ensuring that no other threads will mutate the entry, a pessimistic approach. The optimistic approach relies on what is sometimes called a "fuzzy read". In other words, the application assumes that the read should be correct, but it also acknowledges that it might not be. (I use the qualifier "sometimes" because in some writings, "fuzzy read" indicates the situation where the application actually sees an original value and then later sees an updated value within the same transaction -- however, both definitions are roughly equivalent from an application design perspective). If the read is not correct it is called a "stale read". Going back to the definition of concurrency, it may seem difficult to precisely define a stale read, but the practical way of detecting a stale read is that is will cause the encompassing transaction to roll back if it tries to update that value. The pessimistic approach relies on a "coherent read", a guarantee that the value returned is not only the same as the primary copy of that value, but also that it will remain that way. In most cases this can be used interchangeably with "repeatable read" (though that term has additional implications when used in the context of a database system). In none of cases above is it possible for the application to perform a "dirty read". A dirty read occurs when the application reads a piece of data that was never committed. In practice the only way this can occur is with multi-phase updates such as transactions, where a value may be temporarily update but then withdrawn when a transaction is rolled back. If another thread sees that value prior to the rollback, it is a dirty read. If an application uses optimistic transactions, dirty reads will merely result in a lack of forward progress (this is actually one of the main risks of dirty reads -- they can be chained and potentially cause cascading rollbacks). The concepts of dirty reads, fuzzy reads, stale reads and coherent reads are able to describe the vast majority of requirements that we see in the field. However, the important thing is to define the terms used to define requirements. A quick web search for each of the terms in this article will show multiple meanings, so I've selected what are generally the most common variations, but it never hurts to state each definition explicitly if they are critical to the success of a project (many applications have sufficiently loose requirements that precise terminology can be avoided).

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• Windows 8/Surface Lunch Event Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  Today was a big day for Microsoft with two separate launch event.  The first for Windows 8 and all of it’s hardware partners.  The second was specifically to introduce the Microsoft Windows 8 Surface tablet.  Below are some of the take-aways I got from the webcasts. Windows 8 Launch The three general area that Microsoft focused on were the release of the OS itself, the public unveiling of the Windows Store and the new devices available from its hardware partners. The release of the OS focused on the fact that it will be available at mid-night tonight for both new PCs and for upgrades.  I can’t say that this interested me that much since it was already known to most people.  I think what they did show well was how easy the OS really is to use. The Windows Store is also not a new feature to those of us who have been running the pre-release versions of Windows 8 or have owned Windows Phone 7 for the past 2 years.  What was interesting is that the Windows Store launches with more apps available than any other platforms store at their respective launch.  I think this says a lot about how Microsoft focuses on the ability of developers to create software and make it available.  The of course were sure to emphasize that the Windows Store has better monetary terms for developers than its competitors. The also showed off the fact that XBox Music streaming is available for to all Windows 8 user for free.  Couple this with the Bing suite of apps that give you news, weather, sports and finance right out of the box and I think most people will find the environment a joy to use. I think the hardware demo, while quick and furious, really show where Windows shine: CHOICE!  They made a statement that over 1000 devices have been certified for Windows 8.  They showed tablets, laptops, desktops, all-in-ones and convertibles.  Since these devices have industry standard connectors they give a much wider variety of accessories and devices that you can use with them. Steve Balmer then came on stage and tried to see how many times he could use the “magical”.  He focused on how the Windows 8 OS is designed to integrate with SkyDrive, Skype and Outlook.com.  He also enforced that they think Windows 8 is the best choice for the Enterprise when it comes to protecting data and integrating across devices including Windows Phone 8. With that we were left to wait for the second event of the day. Surface Launch The second event of the day started with kids with magnets.  Ok, they were adults, but who doesn’t like playing with magnets.  Steven Sinofsky detached and reattached the Surface keyboard repeatedly, clearly enjoying himself.  It turns out that there are 4 magnets in the cover, 2 for alignment and 2 as connectors. They then went to giving us the details on the display.  The 10.6” display is optically bonded to the case and is optimized to reduce glare.  I think this came through very well in the demonstrations. The properties of the case were also a great selling point.  The VaporMg allowed them to drop the device on stage, on purpose, and continue working.  Of course they had to bring out the skate boards made from Surface devices. “It just has to feel right” was the reason they gave for many of their design decisions from the weight and size of the device to the way the kickstand and camera work together.  While this gave you the feeling that the whole process was trial and error you could tell that a lot of science went into the specs.  This included making sure that the magnets were strong enough to hold the cover on and still have a 3 year old remove the cover without effort. I am glad that they also decided the a USB port would be part of the spec since it give so many options.  They made the point that this allows Surface to leverage over 420 million existing devices.  That works for me. The last feature that I really thought was important was the microSD port.  Begin stuck with the onboard memory has been an aggravation of mine with many of the devices in the market today. I think they did job of really getting the audience to understand why you want this platform and this particular device.  Using personal examples like creating a video of a birthday party and being in it or the fact that the device was being used to live blog the event and control the lights and presentation.  They showed very well that it was not only fun but very capable of getting real work done.  Handing out tablets to the crowd didn’t hurt either.  In the end I really wanted a Surface even though I really have no need for one on a daily basis.  Great job Microsoft! del.icio.us Tags: Windows 8,Win8,Windows 8 Luanch

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• Inside Red Gate - Be Reasonable!

  - by simonc

  As I discussed in my previous posts, divisions and project teams within Red Gate are allowed a lot of autonomy to manage themselves. It's not just the teams though, there's an awful lot of freedom given to individual employees within the company as well. Reasonableness How Red Gate treats it's employees is embodied in the phrase 'You will be reasonable with us, and we will be reasonable with you'. As an employee, you are trusted to do your job to the best of you ability. There's no one looking over your shoulder, no one clocking you in and out each day. Everyone is working at the company because they want to, and one of the core ideas of Red Gate is that the company exists to 'let people do the best work of their lives'. Everything is geared towards that. To help you do your job, office services and the IT department are there. If you need something to help you work better (a third or fourth monitor, footrests, or a new keyboard) then ask people in Information Systems (IS) or Office Services and you will be given it, no questions asked. Everyone has administrator access to their own machines, and you can install whatever you want on it. If there's a particular bit of software you need, then ask IS and they will buy it. As an example, last year I wanted to replace my main hard drive with an SSD; I had a summer job at school working in a computer repair shop, so knew what to do. I went to IS and asked for 'an SSD, a SATA cable, and a screwdriver'. And I got it there and then, even the screwdriver. Awesome. I screwed it in myself, copied all my main drive files across, and I was good to go. Of course, if you're not happy doing that yourself, then IS will sort it all out for you, no problems. If you need something that the company doesn't have (say, a book off Amazon, or you need some specifications printing off & bound), then everyone has a expense limit of £100 that you can use without any sign-off needed from your managers. If you need a company credit card for whatever reason, then you can get it. This freedom extends to working hours and holiday; you're expected to be in the office 11am-3pm each day, but outside those times you can work whenever you want. If you need a half-day holiday on a days notice, or even the same day, then you'll get it, unless there's a good reason you're needed that day. If you need to work from home for a day or so for whatever reason, then you can. If it's reasonable, then it's allowed. Trust issues? A lot of trust, and a lot of leeway, is given to all the people in Red Gate. Everyone is expected to work hard, do their jobs to the best of their ability, and there will be a minimum of bureaucratic obstacles that stop you doing your work. What happens if you abuse this trust? Well, an example is company trip expenses. You're free to expense what you like; food, drink, transport, etc, but if you expenses are not reasonable, then you will never travel with the company again. Simple as that. Everyone knows when they're abusing the system, so simply don't do it. Along with reasonableness, another phrase used is 'Don't be an a**hole'. If you act like an a**hole, and abuse any of the trust placed in you, even if you're the best tester, salesperson, dev, or manager in the company, then you won't be a part of the company any more. From what I know about other companies, employee trust is highly variable between companies, all the way up to CCTV trained on employee's monitors. As a dev, I want to produce well-written & useful code that solves people's problems. Being able to get whatever I need - install whatever tools I need, get time off when I need to, obtain reference books within a day - all let me do my job, and so let Red Gate help other people do their own jobs through the tools we produce. Plus, I don't think I would like working for a company that doesn't allow admin access to your own machine and blocks Facebook! Cross posted from Simple Talk.

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• University teaches DOS-style C++, how to deal with it

  - by gaidal

  Half a year ago I had a look at available programming educations. I chose this one because unlike most of the choices: The majority of the courses seemed to be about something concrete and useful; the languages used are C++ and Java which are platform-independent; later courses include developing for mobile devices and a course on Android development, which seemed modern and relevant. Now after two introductory courses we're just starting with C++, and my programming professor seems a bit weird. He's tested us on things like "why should you use constants" and "why are globals bad" in a kind of mechanical way, without much context, before teaching actual programming. His handouts use system("pause"), system("cls"), and getch() from some conio.h that seems ancient according to what I've read. I just did a task that was about printing the "ASCII letters from 32 to 255" (huh?), with an example picture showing a table with Windows' Extended ASCII - of course I got other results for 128-255 on my Arch Linux that uses Unicode, and this isn't mentioned at all. I don't know, it just doesn't seem right... As if he is teaching programming because he has to, perhaps? Should I bring such things up? Hmm. I was looking forward to learning from someone who really knows stuff, and in an academic, rigorous way, like SICP or something. Aren't professors in programming supposed to be like that? I studied math for a while and every teacher and assistant there were really precise about what they said, but this is my second programming teacher that is sort of disappointing. Oh well. Now, question: Is this what to expect from universities or Not OK, and how do I deal with it? I have never touched the language C++ (or C) until now, and am not the right person to jump up and say "This is So Wrong!", so if I google something and find 10 people who say "xxx is blasphemy", how do I skillfully communicate this? I do think it would be better for those classmates who are total beginners not to learn bad habits (such as these vibes of total ignorance of other platforms!) during the upcoming courses, but don't want to disrespect the teacher. I don't know if it's reasonable or just cocky to bring up things like "what about other platforms?" or "but what about this article or stackoverflow answer that I read that said..." for every assignment? Or, if he keeps ignoring non-Windows-programming, should I give up and focus on my own projects or somehow argue that this really isn't OK nowadays? Are there any programming teachers out there, what do you think? By the way these are web-based courses, all interaction between teachers and students takes place in a forum. EDIT: A few answers seem to be making some incorrect assumptions, so maybe I should add a few things. I have been doing programming for fun on and off for 10 years, am pretty comfortable in 3 languages and read programming blogs et c regularly. Also, I feel kind of done being a student, having a degree in another field. I just need another, relevant diploma to work as a programmer, so I'm going back for that. Studying computer science for 5 years is not for me anymore, even though I enjoy learning and solving problems in my free time. Second, let me highlight that I don't expect it to be like the industry at all, quite the contrary. I expect it to be academic, dry and unnecessarily correct. No, it's not just math. Every professor I have had in math, or Japanese (major) or Chinese (minor) have been very very academic, discussing subtle points for hours with passion. But the courses I'm taking now and a previous one in programming don't seem serious. They neither resemble industry NOR academia. That is the problem. And it's not because I can't learn programming anyway. Third, I don't necessarily want to learn C++ or Android development, and I know I could teach myself those and anything else if I wanted to. But I am going back to school anyway, and those platform-independent languages and mobile stuff made me think that maybe they're serious about teaching something relevant here. Seems like I got this wrong, but we'll see.

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• No More NCrunch For Me

  - by Steve Wilkes

  When I opened up Visual Studio this morning, I was greeted with this little popup: NCrunch is a Visual Studio add-in which runs your tests while you work so you know if and when you've broken anything, as well as providing coverage indicators in the IDE and coverage metrics on demand. It recently went commercial (which I thought was fair enough), and time is running out for the free version I've been using for the last couple of months. From my experiences using NCrunch I'm going to let it expire, and go about my business without it. Here's why. Before I start, let me say that I think NCrunch is a good product, which is to say it's had a positive impact on my programming. I've used it to help test-drive a library I'm making right from the start of the project, and especially at the beginning it was very useful to have it run all my tests whenever I made a change. The first problem is that while that was cool to start with, it’s recently become a bit of a chore. Problems Running Tests NCrunch has two 'engine modes' in which it can run tests for you - it can run all your tests when you make a change, or it can figure out which tests were impacted and only run those. Unfortunately, it became clear pretty early on that that second option (which is marked as 'experimental') wasn't really working for me, so I had to have it run everything. With a smallish number of tests and while I was adding new features that was great, but I've now got 445 tests (still not exactly loads) and am more in a 'clean and tidy' mode where I know that a change I'm making will probably only affect a particular subset of the tests. With that in mind it's a bit of a drag sitting there after I make a change and having to wait for NCrunch to run everything. I could disable it and manually run the tests I know are impacted, but then what's the point of having NCrunch? If the 'impacted only' engine mode worked well this problem would go away, but that's not what I found. Secondly, what's wrong with this picture? I've got 445 tests, and NCrunch has queued 455 tests to run. So it's queued duplicate tests - in this quickly-screenshotted case 10, but I've seen the total queue get up over 600. If I'm already itchy waiting for it to run all my tests against a change I know only affects a few, I'm even itchier waiting for it to run a lot of them twice. Problems With Code Coverage NCrunch marks each line of code with a dot to say if it's covered by tests - a black dot says the line isn't covered, a red dot says it's covered but at least one of the covering tests is failing, and a green dot means all the covering tests pass. It also calculates coverage statistics for you. Unfortunately, there's a couple of flaws in the coverage. Firstly, it doesn't support ExcludeFromCodeCoverage attributes. This feature has been requested and I expect will be included in a later release, but right now it doesn't. So this: ...is counted as a non-covered line, and drags your coverage statistics down. Hmph. As well as that, coverage of certain types of code is missed. This: ...is definitely covered. I am 100% absolutely certain it is, by several tests. NCrunch doesn't pick it up, down go my coverage statistics. I've had NCrunch find genuinely uncovered code which I've been able to remove, and that's great, but what's the coverage percentage on this project? Umm... I don't know. Conclusion None of these are major, tool-crippling problems, and I expect NCrunch to get much better in future releases. The current version has some great features, like this: ...that's a line of code with a failing test covering it, and NCrunch can run that failing test and take me to that line exquisitely easily. That's awesome! I'd happily pay for a tool that can do that. But here's the thing: NCrunch (currently) costs $159 (about £100) for a personal licence and $289 (about £180) for a commercial one. I'm not sure which one I'd need as my project is a personal one which I'm intending to open-source, but I'm a professional, self-employed developer, but in any case - that seems like a lot of money for an imperfect tool. If it did everything it's advertised to do more or less perfectly I'd consider it, but it doesn't. So no more NCrunch for me.

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• Windows Phone 8 Launch Event Summary

  - by Tim Murphy

  Today was the official coming out party for Windows Phone 8.  Below is a summary of the launch event.  There is a lot here to stay with me. They started with a commercial staring Joe Belfiore show how his Windows Phone 8 was personal too him which highlights something I think Microsoft has done well over the last couple of event: spotlight how Windows Phone is a different experience from other smartphones.  Joe actually called iPhone and Android “tired old metaphors" and explained that the idea around Windows Phone was to “reinvent the smartphone around you” as “the most personal smartphone operating system”.  The is the message that they need to drive home in their adds. The only real technical aspect we found out was that they have optimized the operating system around the dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon chip set.  It seems like all of the other hardware goodies had already been announced.  The remainder of the event was centered around new features of the OS and app announcements. So what are we getting?  The integrated features included lock screen live tile, Data Sense, Rooms and Kids corner.  There wasn’t a lot of information about it, but Joe also talked about apps not just having live tiles, but being live apps that could integrate with wallet and the hub. The lock screen will now be able to be personalized with live tile data or even a photo slide show.  This gives the lock screen an even better ability to give you the information you want to know before you even unlock the phone. The Kids Corner allows you as a parent to setup an area on your phone that you kids can go into an use it without disturbing your apps.  They can play games or use apps that you have designated and will only see those apps.  It even has a special lock screen gesture just for the kids corner. Rooms allow you to organize your phone around the groups of people in your life.  You get a shared calendar, a room wall as well as shared notes beyond just being able to send messages to a group.  You can also invite people not on the Windows Phone platform to access an online version of the room. Data Sense is a new feature that gives you better control and understanding of your data plan usage.  You can see which applications are using data and it can automatically adjust they way your phone behaves as you get close to your data limit. Add to these features the fact that the entire Windows ecosystem is integrated with SkyDrive and you have an available anywhere experience that is unequaled by any other platform.  Your document, photos and music are available on your Windows Phone, Window 8 device and Xbox.  SkyDrive also doesn’t limit how long you can keep files like the competing cloud platforms and give more free storage. It was interesting the way they made the launch event more personal.  First Joe brought out his own kids to demo the Kids Corner.  They followed this up by bringing out Jessica Alba to discuss her experience on the Windows Phone 8.  They need to keep putting a face on the product instead of just showing features as a cold list. Then we get to apps.  We knew that the new Skype was coming, but we found out that it was created in such a way that it can receive calls without running consistently in the background which would eat up battery.  This announcement was follow by the coming Facebook app that is optimized for Windows Phone 8.  As a matter of fact they indicated that just after launch the marketplace would have 46 out of the top 50 apps used by all smartphone platforms.  In a rational world this tide with over 120,000 apps currently in the marketplace there should be no more argument about the Windows Phone ecosystem. For those of us who develop for Windows Phone and weren’t on the early adoption program will finally get access to the SDK tomorrow after an announcement at Build (more waiting).  Perhaps we will get a few new features then. In the end I wouldn’t say there were any huge surprises, but I am really excited about getting my hands on the devices next month and starting to develop.  Stay tuned. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Windows Phone 8,Winodws Phone 8 Launch,Joe Belfiore,Jessica Alba

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• Are there Negative Impact of opensource on commercial environment?

  - by Lostsoul

  I know this is not a good fit for Stack Overflow but wasn't sure if it was good for this site also so let me know if its not and I'll delete it. I love programming for fun but my role in my company is not technical. I have always loved the hacker culture and have been trying to drive that openness within my company from day one. My company has a very broad range of products and there are a few that are not strategic to us so I wanted to open source them (so we can focus on what makes us unique and open source the products that every firm has). Our industry does not open source(we would be the first firm to try this) and the feedback I'm getting from my management team is either 1) we'll destroy the industry or 2) all competitive commercial firms will unite against us and we'll be wiped out either way. I disagreed on both points because I think transparency will only grow our industry and our firm (think of McDonalds/KFC sharing their recipe openly, people may copy you, competitors may target you, but customers also may feel more comfortable buying your product. The value add, I believe, is in the delivery and experience not in hoarding the recipe). It's a big battle in my firm right now between the IT people who have seen the positive effects of sharing and the business people who think we'll be giving up everything (they prefer we sell parts we want to opensource, but in their defense this is standard when divesting something). Our industry is very secretive and I don't want to put anyone(even my competitors employees) out of a job yet I don't want to protect inefficient people by not being open with everyone. Yet I've seen so many amazing technologies created in interesting ways just by giving people freedom to take apart code and put it back together. I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts(doesn't have to be to my specific situation, I'm looking for the general lessons). Its a very stressful decision(but one I feel I must make) because if we go the open source route then there will be no going back. So what are your thoughts? Does open sourcing apply generally or is it only really applicable to software? Is it overall good for people in the industry and outside? I'm actually more interested in the negativeness effects(although positive are welcomed as well) Update: Long story short, although code is involved this is not so much about code as it is more about the idea of open sourcing. We are a mid sized quant hedge fund. We have some unique strategies but also have the standard long/short, arbitrage, global macro, etc.. funds. We are keeping the unique funds we have but the other stuff that everyone else has we are considering open sourcing (We have put in years of work & millions of dollars into. Our funds is pretty popular and our performance is either in first or second quartile so I suspect there will be interest but I don't know to what extent). The goal is not to get a community to work for us or anything, the goal is to let anyone who wants to tinker with it do so and create anything they want (it will not be part of our product line although I may unofficially allocate some our of staff's time to assist any community that grows). Although the code base is quite large, the value in this is the industry knowledge and approaches we have acquired (there are many books on artificial intelligence and quant trading but they are often years behind what's really going on as most firms forbid their staff from discussing what they are doing). We are also considering after we move our clients out to let the software still run and output the resulting portfolios for free as well so people can at least see the results(as long as we have avail. infrastructure). I think our main choices are, we can continue to fight for market share in a products that are becoming commoditized, we can shut the funds/products down(and keep the code but no one outside of our firm will ever learn from it) or we can open source it and let people do what they want. By open sourcing it, my idea is that the talent pool in the industry will grow because right now most of our hires have the same background (CFA, MBA, similar school, same experience,etc.. because we can't spend time training people so the industry 'standardizes' most people and thus the firms themselves start to look/act similar) but this may allow us to identify talent that has never been in the industry before (if we put a GPU license then as people learn from what we did, we can learn from what they do as well and maybe apply it to other areas of our firm). I see a lot of benefits but not many negatives while my peers at the company see the opposite.

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• ADF Partner Community News Session - Open Invitation: "ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps - the biggest ADF project ever (in English)"

  - by Frank Nimphius

  After a successful guest performance of Ted Farrell in 2011, this year's international ADF speaker to speak during an ADF News session is Chris Muir from Oracle.  ADF News Session - Friday September 14, 8:30 AM - 9.00 AM (CET) - Topic: ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps - the biggest ADF project ever (in English) +++ this webcast will be conducted in English +++ dial-in numbers conc. ADF News Session, Sep. 14 2012 You are invited to join the next ADF News Session, that is going to take place September 14 2012 speaker:  Chris Muir / Oracle time:         8:30 AM (CET) duration:  30 minutes topic:        ADF as a basis of Fusion Apps - the biggest ADF project ever (in English) dial-in webconf: https://oraclemeetings.webex.com conf ID:      595 484 157 confkey:    123456 Please enter your name and an abbreviation of you company name when dialing in (please don´t use blanks and special characters). Please notice that this information will be visible to all participants of the webcast. Thank you. dial-in telco:           +49 (0)69 2222 16 106 or +49 (0)800 66 485 15           ConfCode: 208 503 9           SecurityPasscode: 112233  Other toll-free dial in numbers for EMEA countries are listed below (information is supplied without liability): Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} table.MsoTableGrid {mso-style-name:"Table Grid"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-priority:59; mso-style-unhide:no; border:solid windowtext 1.0pt; mso-border-alt:solid windowtext .5pt; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-border-insideh:.5pt solid windowtext; mso-border-insidev:.5pt solid windowtext; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Austria 0800005967 Belgium 080048331 Croatia 0800222323 Czech Republic 800701080 Denmark  80889099 Estonia 8000111325 Egypt 08000000213 Finland 0800112073 France 0805632866 Greece 00800127897 Hungary 0680011201 Iceland 8008779 Ireland 1800932479 Israel 1809452571 Italy 800897629 Latvia 80002397 Luxembourg 80026598 Netherlands 08000235028 Norway 80010796 Poland 8001213557 Portugal 800814990 Romania 0800895563 Russia 81080029351012 Saudi Arabia 8008444320 Slovak Republic 0800001586 Slovenia 080080466 South Africa 0800980961 Spain 800098600 Sweden 856619465 Switzerland 0800650026 Turkey 00800 44632129 Ukraine 0800500166 United Arab Emirates 8000440344 United Kingdom 08006948154  

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• ASP.NET: Including JavaScript libraries conditionally from CDN

  - by DigiMortal

  When developing cloud applications it is still useful to build them so they can run also on local machine without network connection. One thing you use from CDN when in cloud and from app folder when not connected are common JavaScript libraries. In this posting I will show you how to add support for local and CDN script stores to your ASP.NET MVC web application. Our solution is simple. We will add new configuration setting to our web.config file (including cloud transform file of it) and new property to our web application. In master page where scripts are included we will include scripts from CDN conditionally. There is nothing complex, all changes we make are simple ones. 1. Adding new property to web application Although I am using ASP.NET MVC web application these modifications work also very well with ASP.NET Forms. Open Global.asax and add new static property to your application class. public static bool UseCdn {     get     {         var valueString = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["useCdn"];         bool useCdn;           bool.TryParse(valueString, out useCdn);         return useCdn;     } } If you want less round-trips to configuration data you can keep some nullable boolean in your application class scope and load CDN setting first time it is asked. 2. Adding new configuration setting to web.config By default my application uses local scripts. Although my application runs on cloud I can do a lot of stuff without staging environment in cloud. So by default I don’t have costs on traffic when including scripts from application folders. <appSettings>   <add key="UseCdn" value="false" /> </appSettings> You can also set UseCdn value to true and change it to false when you are not connected to network. 3. Modifying web.config cloud transform I have special configuration for my solution that I use when deploying my web application to cloud. This configuration is called Cloud and transform for this configuration is located in web.cloud.config. To make application using CDN when deployed to cloud we need the following transform. <appSettings>   <add key="UseCdn"        value="true"        xdt:Transform="SetAttributes"        xdt:Locator="Match(key)" /> </appSettings> Now when you publish your application to cloud it uses CDN by default. 4. Including scripts in master pages The last thing we need to change is our master page. My solution is simple. I check if I have to include scripts from CDN and if it is true then I include scripts from there. Otherwise my scripts will be included from application folder. @if (MyWeb.MvcApplication.UseCdn) {     <script src="http://ajax.microsoft.com/ajax/jquery/jquery-1.4.4.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> } else {     <script src="@Url.Content("~/Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js")" type="text/javascript"></script> } Although here is only one script shown you can add all your scripts that are also available in some CDN in this if-else block. You are free to include scripts from different CDN services if you need. Conclusion As we saw it was very easy to modify our application to make it use CDN for JavaScript libraries in cloud and local scripts when run on local machine. We made only small changes to our application code, configuration and master pages to get different script sources supported. Our application is now more independent from external sources when we are working on it.

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• Can't control connection bit rate using iwconfig with Atheros TL-WN821N (AR7010)

  - by Paul H

  I'm trying to reduce the connection bit rate on my Atheros TP-Link TL-WN821N v3 usb wifi adapter due to frequent instability issues (reported connection speed goes down to 1Mb/s and I have to physically reconnect the adapter to regain a connection). I know this is a common problem with this device, and I have tried everything I can think of to fix it, including using drivers from linux-backports; compiling and installing a custom firmware (following instructions on https://wiki.debian.org/ath9k_htc#fw-free) and (as a last resort) using ndiswrapper. When using ndiswrapper, the wifi adapter is stable and operates in g mode at 54Mb/s (whilst when using the default ath9k_htc module, the adapter connects in n mode and the bit rate fluctuates constantly). Unfortunately, with this setup I have to run my processor using only one core, since using SMP with ndiswrapper causes a kernel oops on my system. So I want to lock my bit rate to 54Mb/s (or less, if need be) for connection stability, using the ath9k_htc module. I've tried 'sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M'; the command runs with no error but when I check the bit rate with 'sudo iwlist wlan0 bitrate' the command returns: wlan0 unknown bit-rate information. Current Bit Rate:78 Mb/s Any ideas? Here's some info (hopefully relevant) on my setup: Xubuntu (12.04.3) 64bit (kernel 3.2.0-55.85-generic) using Network Manager. My Router is from Virgin Media, the VMDG480. lshw -C network : *-network description: Wireless interface physical id: 1 bus info: usb@1:4 logical name: wlan0 serial: 74:ea:3a:8f:16:b6 capabilities: ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k_htc driverversion=3.2.0-55 firmware=1.3 ip=192.168.0.9 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn lsusb -v: Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0cf3:7015 Atheros Communications, Inc. TP-Link TL-WN821N v3 802.11n [Atheros AR7010+AR9287] Device Descriptor: bLength 18 bDescriptorType 1 bcdUSB 2.00 bDeviceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class bDeviceSubClass 255 Vendor Specific Subclass bDeviceProtocol 255 Vendor Specific Protocol bMaxPacketSize0 64 idVendor 0x0cf3 Atheros Communications, Inc. idProduct 0x7015 TP-Link TL-WN821N v3 802.11n [Atheros AR7010+AR9287] bcdDevice 2.02 iManufacturer 16 ATHEROS iProduct 32 UB95 iSerial 48 12345 bNumConfigurations 1 Configuration Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 2 wTotalLength 60 bNumInterfaces 1 bConfigurationValue 1 iConfiguration 0 bmAttributes 0x80 (Bus Powered) MaxPower 500mA Interface Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 4 bInterfaceNumber 0 bAlternateSetting 0 bNumEndpoints 6 bInterfaceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class bInterfaceSubClass 0 bInterfaceProtocol 0 iInterface 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x01 EP 1 OUT bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes bInterval 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x82 EP 2 IN bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes bInterval 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x83 EP 3 IN bmAttributes 3 Transfer Type Interrupt Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes bInterval 1 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x04 EP 4 OUT bmAttributes 3 Transfer Type Interrupt Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes bInterval 1 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x05 EP 5 OUT bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes bInterval 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x06 EP 6 OUT bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes bInterval 0 Device Qualifier (for other device speed): bLength 10 bDescriptorType 6 bcdUSB 2.00 bDeviceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class bDeviceSubClass 255 Vendor Specific Subclass bDeviceProtocol 255 Vendor Specific Protocol bMaxPacketSize0 64 bNumConfigurations 1 Device Status: 0x0000 (Bus Powered) iwlist wlan0 scanning: wlan0 Scan completed : Cell 01 - Address: C4:3D:C7:3A:1F:5D Channel:1 Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1) Quality=37/70 Signal level=-73 dBm Encryption key:on ESSID:"my essid" Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s Mode:Master Extra:tsf=00000070cca77186 Extra: Last beacon: 5588ms ago IE: Unknown: 0007756E69636F726E IE: Unknown: 010882848B962430486C IE: Unknown: 030101 IE: Unknown: 2A0100 IE: Unknown: 2F0100 IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1 Group Cipher : TKIP Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: Unknown: 32040C121860 IE: Unknown: 2D1AFC181BFFFF000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: 3D1601080400000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: DD7E0050F204104A0001101044000102103B00010310470010F99C335D7BAC57FB00137DFA79600220102100074E657467656172102300074E6574676561721024000631323334353610420007303030303030311054000800060050F20400011011000743473331303144100800022008103C0001011049000600372A000120 IE: Unknown: DD090010180203F02C0000 IE: WPA Version 1 Group Cipher : TKIP Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: Unknown: DD180050F2020101800003A4000027A4000042435E0062322F00 iwconfig: lo no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"my essid" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: C4:3D:C7:3A:1F:5D Bit Rate=78 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=36/70 Signal level=-74 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0,

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• Web optimization

  - by hmloo

  1. CSS Optimization Organize your CSS code Good CSS organization helps with future maintainability of the site, it helps you and your team member understand the CSS more quickly and jump to specific styles. Structure CSS code For small project, you can break your CSS code in separate blocks according to the structure of the page or page content. for example you can break your CSS document according the content of your web page(e.g. Header, Main Content, Footer) Structure CSS file For large project, you may feel having too much CSS code in one place, so it's the best to structure your CSS into more CSS files, and use a master style sheet to import these style sheets. this solution can not only organize style structure, but also reduce server request./*--------------Master style sheet--------------*/ @import "Reset.css"; @import "Structure.css"; @import "Typography.css"; @import "Forms.css"; Create index for your CSS Another important thing is to create index at the beginning of your CSS file, index can help you quickly understand the whole CSS structure./*---------------------------------------- 1. Header 2. Navigation 3. Main Content 4. Sidebar 5. Footer ------------------------------------------*/ Writing efficient CSS selectors keep in mind that browsers match CSS selectors from right to left and the order of efficiency for selectors 1. id (#myid) 2. class (.myclass) 3. tag (div, h1, p) 4. adjacent sibling (h1 + p) 5. child (ul > li) 6. descendent (li a) 7. universal (*) 8. attribute (a[rel="external"]) 9. pseudo-class and pseudo element (a:hover, li:first) the rightmost selector is called "key selector", so when you write your CSS code, you should choose more efficient key selector. Here are some best practice: Don't tag-qualify Never do this:div#myid div.myclass .myclass#myid IDs are unique, classes are more unique than a tag so they don't need a tag. Doing so makes the selector less efficient. Avoid overqualifying selectors for example#nav a is more efficient thanul#nav li a Don't repeat declarationExample: body {font-size:12px;}h1 {font-size:12px;font-weight:bold;} since h1 is already inherited from body, so you don't need to repeate atrribute. Using 0 instead of 0px Always using #selector { margin: 0; } There’s no need to include the px after 0, removing all those superfluous px can reduce the size of your CSS file. Group declaration Example: h1 { font-size: 16pt; } h1 { color: #fff; } h1 { font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } it’s much better to combine them:h1 { font-size: 16pt; color: #fff; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } Group selectorsExample: h1 { color: #fff; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } h2 { color: #fff; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } it would be much better if setup as:h1, h2 { color: #fff; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } Group attributeExample: h1 { color: #fff; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } h2 { color: #fff; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 16pt; } you can set different rules for specific elements after setting a rule for a grouph1, h2 { color: #fff; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } h2 { font-size: 16pt; } Using Shorthand PropertiesExample: #selector { margin-top: 8px; margin-right: 4px; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: 4px; }Better: #selector { margin: 8px 4px 8px 4px; }Best: #selector { margin: 8px 4px; } a good diagram illustrated how shorthand declarations are interpreted depending on how many values are specified for margin and padding property. instead of using:#selector { background-image: url(”logo.png”); background-position: top left; background-repeat: no-repeat; } is used:#selector { background: url(logo.png) no-repeat top left; } 2. Image Optimization Image Optimizer Image Optimizer is a free Visual Studio2010 extension that optimizes PNG, GIF and JPG file sizes without quality loss. It uses SmushIt and PunyPNG for the optimization. Just right click on any folder or images in Solution Explorer and choose optimize images, then it will automatically optimize all PNG, GIF and JPEG files in that folder. CSS Image Sprites CSS Image Sprites are a way to combine a collection of images to a single image, then use CSS background-position property to shift the visible area to show the required image, many images can take a long time to load and generates multiple server requests, so Image Sprite can reduce the number of server requests and improve site performance. You can use many online tools to generate your image sprite and CSS, and you can also try the Sprite and Image Optimization framework released by The ASP.NET team.

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• 11gR2 ??????????

  - by Allen Gao

  ???????11gR2 GI????????????????????,?10g????,???????GI?????????????1.Ocssd.bin:????????10g??????????,???????(Node Monitoring)????(Group Management)?????????????“??????????”????????2.Cssdagent.bin/Cssdmonitor.bin:?2????11gR2??????????????ocssd.bin??????(Local HeartBeat),??????1??????????????????ocssd.bin???????????,????????ocssd.bin????????,??????,???????????10g??oclsomon/oclsvmon(?????????????)?oprocd????,????11gR2???????—rebootless restart,?????????11.2.0.2????????????,????????????(????????)??????ocssd.bin?????,??????????????,??????????GI stack?????,??GI stack??????????(short disk I/O timeout)??graceful shutdown,????????,??,????????????????????????11gR2 ??????????????1.Ocssd.log2.Cssdagent ? cssdmonitor logs<GI_home>/log/<node_name>/agent/ohasd/oracssdagent_root/oracssdagent_root.log<GI_home>/log/<node_name>/agent/ohasd/oracssdmonitor_root_root/oracssdmonitor_root.log3.Cluster alert log<GI_home>/log/<node_name>/alert<node_name>.log4.OS log5.OSW ?? CHM ????,??????????????????1.???????????????????????????????,??????10g???????????????????????????GI alert log ??,?????node2?2012-08-15 16:30:06.554 [cssd(11011) ]CRS-1612:Network communication with node node1 (1) missing for 50% of timeout interval.  Removal of this node from cluster in 14.510 seconds2012-08-15 16:30:13.586 [cssd(11011) ]CRS-1611:Network communication with node node1 (1) missing for 75% of timeout interval.  Removal of this node from cluster in 7.470 seconds2012-08-15 16:30:18.606 [cssd(11011) ]CRS-1610:Network communication with node node1 (1) missing for 90% of timeout interval.  Removal of this node from cluster in 2.450 seconds2012-08-15 16:30:21.073 [cssd(11011) ]CRS-1632:Node node1 is being removed from the cluster in cluster incarnation 2363798322012-08-15 16:30:21.086 [cssd(11011) ]CRS-1601:CSSD Reconfiguration complete. Active nodes are node2 .?????????????node1?????????????????,???????, node2?? node1 ?????????node1 ???,???node1 ???????????????(????os log ??OSW ????),??node1 ???????node2??node1?????????,????node1??????????,???reconfiguration,????????????,????????????,?11.2.0.2??,??rebootless restart???,node eviction ????????GI stack??,????????????,???node2?node1?????????,node1?ocssd.bin??????(????ocssd.log??)??node1???????????????,??node1??????GI node eviction????2.???????????????,?????10g???????,???????????3.??ocssd.bin ????Cssdagent/Cssdmonitor.bin????????????,??????,????,????oracssdagent_root.log ?oracssdmonitor_root.log ????????2012-07-23 14:09:58.506: [ USRTHRD][1095805248] (:CLSN00111: )clsnproc_needreboot: Impending reboot at 75% of limit 28030; disk timeout 28030, network timeout 26380, last heartbeat from CSSD at epoch seconds 1343023777.410, 21091 milliseconds ago based on invariant clock 269251595; now polling at 100 ms……2012-07-23 14:10:02.704: [ USRTHRD][1095805248] (:CLSN00111: )clsnproc_needreboot: Impending reboot at 90% of limit 28030; disk timeout 28030, network timeout 26380, last heartbeat from CSSD at epoch seconds 1343023777.410, 25291 milliseconds ago based on invariant clock 269251595; now polling at 100 ms……???????????????timeout???28 ???(misscount – reboot time)?4.?????????????????? ??????????????????????,????ocssd.bin??????,?????????????,?????????????ocssd.bin??,????????os???????????OSW??,???? ??????? cpu ???Linux OSWbb v5.0 node1SNAP_INTERVAL 30CPU_COUNT 8OSWBB_ARCHIVE_DEST /osw/archiveprocs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- -----cpu------r  b   swpd   free   buff  cache   si   so    bi    bo   in    cs us sy id wa……zzz ***Mon Aug 30 17:55:21 CST 2012158  6 4200956 923940   7664 19088464    0    0  1296  3574 11153 231579  0 100  0  0  0zzz ***Mon Aug 30 17:55:53 CST 2012135  4 4200956 923760   7812 19089344    0    0     4    45  570 14563  0 100  0  0  0zzz ***Mon Aug 30 17:56:53 CST 2012126  2 4200956 923784   8396 19083620    0    0   196  1121  651 15941  2 98  0  0  0?????????????,????10g??????11gR2????????????????,??????,????????Note 1050693.1 : Troubleshooting 11.2 Clusterware Node Evictions (Reboots)

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• Invalid algorithm specified on Windows 2003 Server only

  - by JL

  I am decoding a file using the following method: string outFileName = zfoFileName.Replace(".zfo", "_tmp.zfo"); FileStream inFile = null; FileStream outFile = null; inFile = File.Open(zfoFileName, FileMode.Open); outFile = File.Create(outFileName); LargeCMS.CMS cms = new LargeCMS.CMS(); cms.Decode(inFile, outFile); This is working fine on my Win 7 dev machine, but on a Windows 2003 server production machine it fails with the following exception: Exception: System.Exception: CryptMsgUpdate error #-2146893816 --- System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception: Invalid algorithm specified --- End of inner exception stack trace --- at LargeCMS.CMS.Decode(FileStream inFile, FileStream outFile) Here are the classes below which I call to do the decoding, if needed I can upload a sample file for decoding, its just strange it works on Win 7, and not on Win2k3 server: using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.IO; using System.Security.Cryptography; using System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.ComponentModel; namespace LargeCMS { class CMS { // File stream to use in callback function private FileStream m_callbackFile; // Streaming callback function for encoding private Boolean StreamOutputCallback(IntPtr pvArg, IntPtr pbData, int cbData, Boolean fFinal) { // Write all bytes to encoded file Byte[] bytes = new Byte[cbData]; Marshal.Copy(pbData, bytes, 0, cbData); m_callbackFile.Write(bytes, 0, cbData); if (fFinal) { // This is the last piece. Close the file m_callbackFile.Flush(); m_callbackFile.Close(); m_callbackFile = null; } return true; } // Encode CMS with streaming to support large data public void Encode(X509Certificate2 cert, FileStream inFile, FileStream outFile) { // Variables Win32.CMSG_SIGNER_ENCODE_INFO SignerInfo; Win32.CMSG_SIGNED_ENCODE_INFO SignedInfo; Win32.CMSG_STREAM_INFO StreamInfo; Win32.CERT_CONTEXT[] CertContexts = null; Win32.BLOB[] CertBlobs; X509Chain chain = null; X509ChainElement[] chainElements = null; X509Certificate2[] certs = null; RSACryptoServiceProvider key = null; BinaryReader stream = null; GCHandle gchandle = new GCHandle(); IntPtr hProv = IntPtr.Zero; IntPtr SignerInfoPtr = IntPtr.Zero; IntPtr CertBlobsPtr = IntPtr.Zero; IntPtr hMsg = IntPtr.Zero; IntPtr pbPtr = IntPtr.Zero; Byte[] pbData; int dwFileSize; int dwRemaining; int dwSize; Boolean bResult = false; try { // Get data to encode dwFileSize = (int)inFile.Length; stream = new BinaryReader(inFile); pbData = stream.ReadBytes(dwFileSize); // Prepare stream for encoded info m_callbackFile = outFile; // Get cert chain chain = new X509Chain(); chain.Build(cert); chainElements = new X509ChainElement[chain.ChainElements.Count]; chain.ChainElements.CopyTo(chainElements, 0); // Get certs in chain certs = new X509Certificate2[chainElements.Length]; for (int i = 0; i < chainElements.Length; i++) { certs[i] = chainElements[i].Certificate; } // Get context of all certs in chain CertContexts = new Win32.CERT_CONTEXT[certs.Length]; for (int i = 0; i < certs.Length; i++) { CertContexts[i] = (Win32.CERT_CONTEXT)Marshal.PtrToStructure(certs[i].Handle, typeof(Win32.CERT_CONTEXT)); } // Get cert blob of all certs CertBlobs = new Win32.BLOB[CertContexts.Length]; for (int i = 0; i < CertContexts.Length; i++) { CertBlobs[i].cbData = CertContexts[i].cbCertEncoded; CertBlobs[i].pbData = CertContexts[i].pbCertEncoded; } // Get CSP of client certificate key = (RSACryptoServiceProvider)certs[0].PrivateKey; bResult = Win32.CryptAcquireContext( ref hProv, key.CspKeyContainerInfo.KeyContainerName, key.CspKeyContainerInfo.ProviderName, key.CspKeyContainerInfo.ProviderType, 0 ); if (!bResult) { throw new Exception("CryptAcquireContext error #" + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error().ToString(), new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error())); } // Populate Signer Info struct SignerInfo = new Win32.CMSG_SIGNER_ENCODE_INFO(); SignerInfo.cbSize = Marshal.SizeOf(SignerInfo); SignerInfo.pCertInfo = CertContexts[0].pCertInfo; SignerInfo.hCryptProvOrhNCryptKey = hProv; SignerInfo.dwKeySpec = (int)key.CspKeyContainerInfo.KeyNumber; SignerInfo.HashAlgorithm.pszObjId = Win32.szOID_OIWSEC_sha1; // Populate Signed Info struct SignedInfo = new Win32.CMSG_SIGNED_ENCODE_INFO(); SignedInfo.cbSize = Marshal.SizeOf(SignedInfo); SignedInfo.cSigners = 1; SignerInfoPtr = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(Marshal.SizeOf(SignerInfo)); Marshal.StructureToPtr(SignerInfo, SignerInfoPtr, false); SignedInfo.rgSigners = SignerInfoPtr; SignedInfo.cCertEncoded = CertBlobs.Length; CertBlobsPtr = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(Marshal.SizeOf(CertBlobs[0]) * CertBlobs.Length); for (int i = 0; i < CertBlobs.Length; i++) { Marshal.StructureToPtr(CertBlobs[i], new IntPtr(CertBlobsPtr.ToInt64() + (Marshal.SizeOf(CertBlobs[i]) * i)), false); } SignedInfo.rgCertEncoded = CertBlobsPtr; // Populate Stream Info struct StreamInfo = new Win32.CMSG_STREAM_INFO(); StreamInfo.cbContent = dwFileSize; StreamInfo.pfnStreamOutput = new Win32.StreamOutputCallbackDelegate(StreamOutputCallback); // TODO: CMSG_DETACHED_FLAG // Open message to encode hMsg = Win32.CryptMsgOpenToEncode( Win32.X509_ASN_ENCODING | Win32.PKCS_7_ASN_ENCODING, 0, Win32.CMSG_SIGNED, ref SignedInfo, null, ref StreamInfo ); if (hMsg.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { throw new Exception("CryptMsgOpenToEncode error #" + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error().ToString(), new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error())); } // Process the whole message gchandle = GCHandle.Alloc(pbData, GCHandleType.Pinned); pbPtr = gchandle.AddrOfPinnedObject(); dwRemaining = dwFileSize; dwSize = (dwFileSize < 1024 * 1000 * 100) ? dwFileSize : 1024 * 1000 * 100; while (dwRemaining > 0) { // Update message piece by piece bResult = Win32.CryptMsgUpdate( hMsg, pbPtr, dwSize, (dwRemaining <= dwSize) ? true : false ); if (!bResult) { throw new Exception("CryptMsgUpdate error #" + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error().ToString(), new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error())); } // Move to the next piece pbPtr = new IntPtr(pbPtr.ToInt64() + dwSize); dwRemaining -= dwSize; if (dwRemaining < dwSize) { dwSize = dwRemaining; } } } finally { // Clean up if (gchandle.IsAllocated) { gchandle.Free(); } if (stream != null) { stream.Close(); } if (m_callbackFile != null) { m_callbackFile.Close(); } if (!CertBlobsPtr.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { Marshal.FreeHGlobal(CertBlobsPtr); } if (!SignerInfoPtr.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { Marshal.FreeHGlobal(SignerInfoPtr); } if (!hProv.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { Win32.CryptReleaseContext(hProv, 0); } if (!hMsg.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { Win32.CryptMsgClose(hMsg); } } } // Decode CMS with streaming to support large data public void Decode(FileStream inFile, FileStream outFile) { // Variables Win32.CMSG_STREAM_INFO StreamInfo; Win32.CERT_CONTEXT SignerCertContext; BinaryReader stream = null; GCHandle gchandle = new GCHandle(); IntPtr hMsg = IntPtr.Zero; IntPtr pSignerCertInfo = IntPtr.Zero; IntPtr pSignerCertContext = IntPtr.Zero; IntPtr pbPtr = IntPtr.Zero; IntPtr hStore = IntPtr.Zero; Byte[] pbData; Boolean bResult = false; int dwFileSize; int dwRemaining; int dwSize; int cbSignerCertInfo; try { // Get data to decode dwFileSize = (int)inFile.Length; stream = new BinaryReader(inFile); pbData = stream.ReadBytes(dwFileSize); // Prepare stream for decoded info m_callbackFile = outFile; // Populate Stream Info struct StreamInfo = new Win32.CMSG_STREAM_INFO(); StreamInfo.cbContent = dwFileSize; StreamInfo.pfnStreamOutput = new Win32.StreamOutputCallbackDelegate(StreamOutputCallback); // Open message to decode hMsg = Win32.CryptMsgOpenToDecode( Win32.X509_ASN_ENCODING | Win32.PKCS_7_ASN_ENCODING, 0, 0, IntPtr.Zero, IntPtr.Zero, ref StreamInfo ); if (hMsg.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { throw new Exception("CryptMsgOpenToDecode error #" + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error().ToString(), new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error())); } // Process the whole message gchandle = GCHandle.Alloc(pbData, GCHandleType.Pinned); pbPtr = gchandle.AddrOfPinnedObject(); dwRemaining = dwFileSize; dwSize = (dwFileSize < 1024 * 1000 * 100) ? dwFileSize : 1024 * 1000 * 100; while (dwRemaining > 0) { // Update message piece by piece bResult = Win32.CryptMsgUpdate( hMsg, pbPtr, dwSize, (dwRemaining <= dwSize) ? true : false ); if (!bResult) { throw new Exception("CryptMsgUpdate error #" + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error().ToString(), new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error())); } // Move to the next piece pbPtr = new IntPtr(pbPtr.ToInt64() + dwSize); dwRemaining -= dwSize; if (dwRemaining < dwSize) { dwSize = dwRemaining; } } // Get signer certificate info cbSignerCertInfo = 0; bResult = Win32.CryptMsgGetParam( hMsg, Win32.CMSG_SIGNER_CERT_INFO_PARAM, 0, IntPtr.Zero, ref cbSignerCertInfo ); if (!bResult) { throw new Exception("CryptMsgGetParam error #" + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error().ToString(), new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error())); } pSignerCertInfo = Marshal.AllocHGlobal(cbSignerCertInfo); bResult = Win32.CryptMsgGetParam( hMsg, Win32.CMSG_SIGNER_CERT_INFO_PARAM, 0, pSignerCertInfo, ref cbSignerCertInfo ); if (!bResult) { throw new Exception("CryptMsgGetParam error #" + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error().ToString(), new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error())); } // Open a cert store in memory with the certs from the message hStore = Win32.CertOpenStore( Win32.CERT_STORE_PROV_MSG, Win32.X509_ASN_ENCODING | Win32.PKCS_7_ASN_ENCODING, IntPtr.Zero, 0, hMsg ); if (hStore.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { throw new Exception("CertOpenStore error #" + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error().ToString(), new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error())); } // Find the signer's cert in the store pSignerCertContext = Win32.CertGetSubjectCertificateFromStore( hStore, Win32.X509_ASN_ENCODING | Win32.PKCS_7_ASN_ENCODING, pSignerCertInfo ); if (pSignerCertContext.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { throw new Exception("CertGetSubjectCertificateFromStore error #" + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error().ToString(), new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error())); } // Set message for verifying SignerCertContext = (Win32.CERT_CONTEXT)Marshal.PtrToStructure(pSignerCertContext, typeof(Win32.CERT_CONTEXT)); bResult = Win32.CryptMsgControl( hMsg, 0, Win32.CMSG_CTRL_VERIFY_SIGNATURE, SignerCertContext.pCertInfo ); if (!bResult) { throw new Exception("CryptMsgControl error #" + Marshal.GetLastWin32Error().ToString(), new Win32Exception(Marshal.GetLastWin32Error())); } } finally { // Clean up if (gchandle.IsAllocated) { gchandle.Free(); } if (!pSignerCertContext.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { Win32.CertFreeCertificateContext(pSignerCertContext); } if (!pSignerCertInfo.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { Marshal.FreeHGlobal(pSignerCertInfo); } if (!hStore.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { Win32.CertCloseStore(hStore, Win32.CERT_CLOSE_STORE_FORCE_FLAG); } if (stream != null) { stream.Close(); } if (m_callbackFile != null) { m_callbackFile.Close(); } if (!hMsg.Equals(IntPtr.Zero)) { Win32.CryptMsgClose(hMsg); } } } } } and using System; using System.Collections.Generic; using System.Linq; using System.Text; using System.Runtime.InteropServices; using System.Security.Cryptography.X509Certificates; using System.ComponentModel; using System.Security.Cryptography; namespace LargeCMS { class Win32 { #region "CONSTS" public const int X509_ASN_ENCODING = 0x00000001; public const int PKCS_7_ASN_ENCODING = 0x00010000; public const int CMSG_SIGNED = 2; public const int CMSG_DETACHED_FLAG = 0x00000004; public const int AT_KEYEXCHANGE = 1; public const int AT_SIGNATURE = 2; public const String szOID_OIWSEC_sha1 = "1.3.14.3.2.26"; public const int CMSG_CTRL_VERIFY_SIGNATURE = 1; public const int CMSG_CERT_PARAM = 12; public const int CMSG_SIGNER_CERT_INFO_PARAM = 7; public const int CERT_STORE_PROV_MSG = 1; public const int CERT_CLOSE_STORE_FORCE_FLAG = 1; #endregion #region "STRUCTS" [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct CRYPT_ALGORITHM_IDENTIFIER { public String pszObjId; BLOB Parameters; } [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct CERT_ID { public int dwIdChoice; public BLOB IssuerSerialNumberOrKeyIdOrHashId; } [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct CMSG_SIGNER_ENCODE_INFO { public int cbSize; public IntPtr pCertInfo; public IntPtr hCryptProvOrhNCryptKey; public int dwKeySpec; public CRYPT_ALGORITHM_IDENTIFIER HashAlgorithm; public IntPtr pvHashAuxInfo; public int cAuthAttr; public IntPtr rgAuthAttr; public int cUnauthAttr; public IntPtr rgUnauthAttr; public CERT_ID SignerId; public CRYPT_ALGORITHM_IDENTIFIER HashEncryptionAlgorithm; public IntPtr pvHashEncryptionAuxInfo; } [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct CERT_CONTEXT { public int dwCertEncodingType; public IntPtr pbCertEncoded; public int cbCertEncoded; public IntPtr pCertInfo; public IntPtr hCertStore; } [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct BLOB { public int cbData; public IntPtr pbData; } [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct CMSG_SIGNED_ENCODE_INFO { public int cbSize; public int cSigners; public IntPtr rgSigners; public int cCertEncoded; public IntPtr rgCertEncoded; public int cCrlEncoded; public IntPtr rgCrlEncoded; public int cAttrCertEncoded; public IntPtr rgAttrCertEncoded; } [StructLayout(LayoutKind.Sequential)] public struct CMSG_STREAM_INFO { public int cbContent; public StreamOutputCallbackDelegate pfnStreamOutput; public IntPtr pvArg; } #endregion #region "DELEGATES" public delegate Boolean StreamOutputCallbackDelegate(IntPtr pvArg, IntPtr pbData, int cbData, Boolean fFinal); #endregion #region "API" [DllImport("advapi32.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Auto, SetLastError = true)] public static extern Boolean CryptAcquireContext( ref IntPtr hProv, String pszContainer, String pszProvider, int dwProvType, int dwFlags ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern IntPtr CryptMsgOpenToEncode( int dwMsgEncodingType, int dwFlags, int dwMsgType, ref CMSG_SIGNED_ENCODE_INFO pvMsgEncodeInfo, String pszInnerContentObjID, ref CMSG_STREAM_INFO pStreamInfo ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern IntPtr CryptMsgOpenToDecode( int dwMsgEncodingType, int dwFlags, int dwMsgType, IntPtr hCryptProv, IntPtr pRecipientInfo, ref CMSG_STREAM_INFO pStreamInfo ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern Boolean CryptMsgClose( IntPtr hCryptMsg ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern Boolean CryptMsgUpdate( IntPtr hCryptMsg, Byte[] pbData, int cbData, Boolean fFinal ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern Boolean CryptMsgUpdate( IntPtr hCryptMsg, IntPtr pbData, int cbData, Boolean fFinal ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern Boolean CryptMsgGetParam( IntPtr hCryptMsg, int dwParamType, int dwIndex, IntPtr pvData, ref int pcbData ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern Boolean CryptMsgControl( IntPtr hCryptMsg, int dwFlags, int dwCtrlType, IntPtr pvCtrlPara ); [DllImport("advapi32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern Boolean CryptReleaseContext( IntPtr hProv, int dwFlags ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern IntPtr CertCreateCertificateContext( int dwCertEncodingType, IntPtr pbCertEncoded, int cbCertEncoded ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern Boolean CertFreeCertificateContext( IntPtr pCertContext ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern IntPtr CertOpenStore( int lpszStoreProvider, int dwMsgAndCertEncodingType, IntPtr hCryptProv, int dwFlags, IntPtr pvPara ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern IntPtr CertGetSubjectCertificateFromStore( IntPtr hCertStore, int dwCertEncodingType, IntPtr pCertId ); [DllImport("Crypt32.dll", SetLastError = true)] public static extern IntPtr CertCloseStore( IntPtr hCertStore, int dwFlags ); #endregion } }

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