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• C++ linked list based tree structure. Sanely copy nodes between lists.

  - by krunk

  edit Clafification: The intention is not to remove the node from the original list. But to create an identical node (data and children wise) to the original and insert that into the new list. In other words, a "move" does not imply a "remove" from the original. endedit The requirements: Each Node in the list must contain a reference to its previous sibling Each Node in the list must contain a reference to its next sibling Each Node may have a list of child nodes Each child Node must have a reference to its parent node Basically what we have is a tree structure of arbitrary depth and length. Something like: -root(NULL) --Node1 ----ChildNode1 ------ChildOfChild --------AnotherChild ----ChildNode2 --Node2 ----ChildNode1 ------ChildOfChild ----ChildNode2 ------ChildOfChild --Node3 ----ChildNode1 ----ChildNode2 Given any individual node, you need to be able to either traverse its siblings. the children, or up the tree to the root node. A Node ends up looking something like this: class Node { Node* previoius; Node* next; Node* child; Node* parent; } I have a container class that stores these and provides STL iterators. It performs your typical linked list accessors. So insertAfter looks like: void insertAfter(Node* after, Node* newNode) { Node* next = after->next; after->next = newNode; newNode->previous = after; next->previous = newNode; newNode->next = next; newNode->parent = after->parent; } That's the setup, now for the question. How would one move a node (and its children etc) to another list without leaving the previous list dangling? For example, if Node* myNode exists in ListOne and I want to append it to listTwo. Using pointers, listOne is left with a hole in its list since the next and previous pointers are changed. One solution is pass by value of the appended Node. So our insertAfter method would become: void insertAfter(Node* after, Node newNode); This seems like an awkward syntax. Another option is doing the copying internally, so you'd have: void insertAfter(Node* after, const Node* newNode) { Node *new_node = new Node(*newNode); Node* next = after->next; after->next = new_node; new_node->previous = after; next->previous = new_node; new_node->next = next; new_node->parent = after->parent; } Finally, you might create a moveNode method for moving and prevent raw insertion or appending of a node that already has been assigned siblings and parents. // default pointer value is 0 in constructor and a operator bool(..) // is defined for the Node bool isInList(const Node* node) const { return (node->previous || node->next || node->parent); } // then in insertAfter and friends if(isInList(newNode) // throw some error and bail I thought I'd toss this out there and see what folks came up with.

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• Repeater not repeating :0) (asp.net)(vb)

  - by Phil

  Morning stackoverflow, I have a repeater, with the following code in my aspx page; <asp:Repeater ID="Contactinforepeater" runat="server"> <HeaderTemplate> <h1>Contact Information</h1> </HeaderTemplate> <ItemTemplate> <table width="50%"> <tr> <td colspan="2"><%#Container.DataItem("position")%></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Name:</td> <td><%#Container.DataItem("surname")%></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Telephone:</td> <td><%#Container.DataItem("telephone")%></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Fax:</td> <td><%#Container.DataItem("fax")%></td> </tr> <tr> <td>Email:</td> <td><%#Container.DataItem("email")%></td> </tr> </table> </ItemTemplate> <SeparatorTemplate> <br /><hr /><br /> </SeparatorTemplate> </asp:Repeater> Then I have this code in my aspx.vb to get the data; If did = 0 Then s = "sql works on db server" x = New SqlCommand(s, c) x.Parameters.Add("@contentid", Data.SqlDbType.Int) x.Parameters("@contentid").Value = contentid c.Open() r = x.ExecuteReader r.Read() Contactinforepeater.DataSource = r Contactinforepeater.DataBind() End If c.Close() r.Close() If Not did = 0 Then s = "sql works on db server" x = New SqlCommand(s, c) x.Parameters.Add("@contentid", SqlDbType.Int) x.Parameters("@contentid").Value = contentid x.Parameters.Add("@did", SqlDbType.Int) x.Parameters("@did").Value = did c.Open() r = x.ExecuteReader r.Read() Contactinforepeater.DataSource = r Contactinforepeater.DataBind() End If r.Close() c.Close() If 'did' is or is not '0' I still get no data outputted to the page. I just get the 'contact information' h1 header from the header template. I've tested the value of s in sqlsms and it works fine. Position, surname, telephone, fax, email all exist in the db. The particular page I am checking exists and has 1 set of contact information attached. Where am I going wrong? Thanks! ps. Does my syntax appear correct? pps. I am also open to different ways of achieving the same result. I tried via an sqldatasource but ran into problems when using variables as params (there is no option to select them, only controls, querystring etc)

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• VBScript Multiple folder check if then statement

  - by user2868186

  I had this working before just fine with the exception of getting an error if one of the folders was not there, so I tried to fix it. Searched for a while (as much as I can at work) for a solution and tried different methods, still no luck and my IT tickets are stacking up at work, lol, woohoo. Thanks for any help provided. Getting syntax error on line 60 character 60, thanks again. Option Explicit Dim objFSO, Folder1, Folder2, Folder3, zipFile Dim ShellApp, zip, oFile, CurDate, MacAdd, objWMIService Dim MyTarget, MyHex, MyBinary, i, strComputer, objItem, FormatMAC Dim oShell, oCTF, CurDir, scriptPath, oRegEx, colItems Dim FoldPath1, FoldPath2, FoldPath3, foldPathArray Const FOF_SIMPLEPROGRESS = 256 'Grabs MAC from current machine strComputer = "." Set objWMIService = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2") Set colItems = objWMIService.ExecQuery _ ("Select * From Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration Where IPEnabled = True") For Each objItem in colItems MacAdd = objItem.MACAddress Next 'Finds the pattern of a MAC address then changes it for 'file naming purposes. You can change the FormatMAC line of the code 'in parenthesis where the periods are, to whatever you like 'as long as its within the standard file naming convention Set oRegEx = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp") oRegEx.Pattern = "([\dA-F]{2}).?([\dA-F]{2}).?([\dA-F]" _ & "{2}).?([\dA-F]{2}).?([\dA-F]{2}).?([\dA-F]{2})" FormatMAC = oRegEx.Replace(MacAdd, "$1.$2.$3.$4.$5.$6") 'Gets current date in a format for file naming 'Periods can be replaced with anything that is standard to 'file naming convention CurDate = Month(Date) & "." & Day(Date) & "." & Year(Date) 'Gets path of the directory where the script is being ran from Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") scriptPath = Wscript.ScriptFullName Set oFile = objFSO.GetFile(scriptPath) CurDir = objFSO.GetParentFolderName(oFile) 'where and what the zip file will be called/saved MyTarget = CurDir & "\" & "IRAP_LOGS_" & CurDate & "_" & FormatMAC & ".zip" 'Actual creation of the zip file MyHex = Array(80, 75, 5, 6, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,0, 0) For i = 0 To UBound(MyHex) MyBinary = MyBinary & Chr(MyHex(i)) Next Set oShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell") Set oCTF = objFSO.CreateTextFile(MyTarget, True) oCTF.Write MyBinary oCTF.Close Set oCTF = Nothing wScript.Sleep(3000) folder1 = True folder2 = True folder3 = True 'Adds folders to the zip file created earlier 'change these folders to whatever is needing to be copied into the zip folder 'Folder1 If not objFSO.FolderExists("C:\Windows\Temp\SMSTSLog") and If not objFSO.FolderExists("X:\Windows\Temp\SMSTSLog") then Folder1 = false End If If objFSO.FolderExists("C:\Windows\Temp\SMSTSLog") Then Folder1 = "C:\Windows\Temp\SMSTSLog" Set FoldPath1 = objFSO.getFolder(Folder1) Else Folder1 = "X:\windows\Temp\SMSTSLog" Set FoldPath1 = objFSO.getFolder(Folder1) End If 'Folder2 If not objFSO.FolderExists("C:\Windows\System32\CCM\Logs") and If not objFSO.FolderExists("X:\Windows\System32\CCM\Logs") then Folder2 = false End If If objFSO.FolderEXists("C:\Windows\System32\CCM\Logs") Then Folder2 = "C:\Windows\System32\CCM\Logs" Set FoldPath2 = objFSO.getFolder(Folder2) Else Folder2 = "X:\Windows\System32\CCM\Logs" Set FoldPath2 = objFSO.getFolder(Folder2) End If 'Folder3 If not objFSO.FolderExists("C:\Windows\SysWOW64\CCM\Logs") and If not objFSO.FolderExists("X:\Windows\SysWOW64\CCM\Logs") then Folder3 = false End If If objFSO.FolderExists("C:\Windows\SysWOW64\CCM\Logs") Then Folder3 = "C:\Windows\SysWOW64\CCM\Logs" set FolderPath3 =objFSO.getFolder(Folder3) Else Folder3 = "X:\Windows\SysWOW64\CCM\Logs" Set FoldPath3 = objFSO.getFolder(Folder3) End If set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject") objFSO.OpenTextFile(MyTarget, 2, True).Write "PK" & Chr(5) & Chr(6) _ & String(18, Chr(0)) Set ShellApp = CreateObject("Shell.Application") Set zip = ShellApp.NameSpace(MyTarget) 'checks if files are there before trying to copy 'otherwise it will error out If folder1 = True And FoldPath1.files.Count >= 1 Then zip.CopyHere Folder1 End If WScript.Sleep 3000 If folder2 = true And FoldPath2.files.Count >= 1 Then zip.CopyHere Folder2 End If WScript.Sleep 3000 If folder3 = true And FoldPath3.files.Count >= 1 Then zip.CopyHere Folder3 End If WScript.Sleep 5000 set ShellApp = Nothing set ZipFile = Nothing Set Folder1 = Nothing Set Folder2 = Nothing Set Folder3 = Nothing createobject("wscript.shell").popup "Zip File Created Successfully", 3

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• Which of CouchDB or MongoDB suits my needs?

  - by vonconrad

  Where I work, we use Ruby on Rails to create both backend and frontend applications. Usually, these applications interact with the same MySQL database. It works great for a majority of our data, but we have one situation which I would like to move to a NoSQL environment. We have clients, and our clients have what we call "inventories"--one or more of them. An inventory can have many thousands of items. This is currently done through two relational database tables, inventories and inventory_items. The problems start when two different inventories have different parameters: # Inventory item from inventory 1, televisions { inventory_id: 1 sku: 12345 name: Samsung LCD 40 inches model: 582903-4 brand: Samsung screen_size: 40 type: LCD price: 999.95 } # Inventory item from inventory 2, accomodation { inventory_id: 2 sku: 48cab23fa name: New York Hilton accomodation_type: hotel star_rating: 5 price_per_night: 395 } Since we obviously can't use brand or star_rating as the column name in inventory_items, our solution so far has been to use generic column names such as text_a, text_b, float_a, int_a, etc, and introduce a third table, inventory_schemas. The tables now look like this: # Inventory schema for inventory 1, televisions { inventory_id: 1 int_a: sku text_a: name text_b: model text_c: brand int_b: screen_size text_d: type float_a: price } # Inventory item from inventory 1, televisions { inventory_id: 1 int_a: 12345 text_a: Samsung LCD 40 inches text_b: 582903-4 text_c: Samsung int_a: 40 text_d: LCD float_a: 999.95 } This has worked well... up to a point. It's clunky, it's unintuitive and it lacks scalability. We have to devote resources to set up inventory schemas. Using separate tables is not an option. Enter NoSQL. With it, we could let each and every item have their own parameters and still store them together. From the research I've done, it certainly seems like a great alterative for this situation. Specifically, I've looked at CouchDB and MongoDB. Both look great. However, there are a few other bits and pieces we need to be able to do with our inventory: We need to be able to select items from only one (or several) inventories. We need to be able to filter items based on its parameters (eg. get all items from inventory 2 where type is 'hotel'). We need to be able to group items based on parameters (eg. get the lowest price from items in inventory 1 where brand is 'Samsung'). We need to (potentially) be able to retrieve thousands of items at a time. We need to be able to access the data from multiple applications; both backend (to process data) and frontend (to display data). Rapid bulk insertion is desired, though not required. Based on the structure, and the requirements, are either CouchDB or MongoDB suitable for us? If so, which one will be the best fit? Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for answers. EDIT: One of the reasons I like CouchDB is that it would be possible for us in the frontend application to request data via JavaScript directly from the server after page load, and display the results without having to use any backend code whatsoever. This would lead to better page load and less server strain, as the fetching/processing of the data would be done client-side.

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• mine phrases (up to 3 words) from a given text

  - by DS_web_developer

  I asked before for a simple solution to my problem (using sphinx search service) but I got nowhere... someone has kindly provided me with this code <?php /** * $Project: GeoGraph $ * $Id$ * * GeoGraph geographic photo archive project * This file copyright (C) 2005 Barry Hunter ([email protected]) * * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License * as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 * of the License, or (at your option) any later version. * * This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, * but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of * MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the * GNU General Public License for more details. * * You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License * along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software * Foundation, Inc., 59 Temple Place - Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307, USA. */ /** * Provides the methods for updating the worknet tables * * @package Geograph * @author Barry Hunter <[email protected]> * @version $Revision$ */ function addTwoLetterPhrase($phrase) { global $w2; $w2[$phrase] = (isset($w2[$phrase]))?($w2[$phrase]+1):1; } function addThreeLetterPhrase($phrase) { global $w3; $w3[$phrase] = (isset($w3[$phrase]))?($w3[$phrase]+1):1; } function updateWordnet(&$db,$text,$field,$id) { global $w1,$w2,$w3; $alltext = strtolower(preg_replace('/\W+/',' ',str_replace("'",'',$text))); if (strlen($text)< 1) return; $words = preg_split('/ /',$alltext); $w1 = array(); $w2 = array(); $w3 = array(); //build a list of one word phrases foreach ($words as $word) { $w1[$word] = (isset($w1[$word]))?($w1[$word]+1):1; } //build a list of two word phrases $text = $alltext; $text = preg_replace('/(\w+) (\w+)/e','addTwoLetterPhrase("$1 $2")',$text); $text = $alltext; $text = preg_replace('/(\w+)/','',$text,1); $text = preg_replace('/(\w+) (\w+)/e','addTwoLetterPhrase("$1 $2")',$text); //build a list of three word phrases $text = $alltext; $text = preg_replace('/(\w+) (\w+) (\w+)/e','addThreeLetterPhrase("$1 $2 $3")',$text); $text = $alltext; $text = preg_replace('/(\w+)/','',$text,1); $text = preg_replace('/(\w+) (\w+) (\w+)/e','addThreeLetterPhrase("$1 $2 $3")',$text); $text = $alltext; $text = preg_replace('/(\w+) (\w+)/','',$text,1); $text = preg_replace('/(\w+) (\w+) (\w+)/e','addThreeLetterPhrase("$1 $2 $3")',$text); foreach ($w1 as $word=>$count) { $db->Execute("insert into wordnet1 set gid = $id,words = '$word',$field = $count");// ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE $field=$field+$count"); } foreach ($w2 as $word=>$count) { $db->Execute("insert into wordnet2 set gid = $id,words = '$word',$field = $count"); } foreach ($w3 as $word=>$count) { $db->Execute("insert into wordnet3 set gid = $id,words = '$word',$field = $count"); } } ?> It works fine and does almost exactly what I need....... except.... it is not utf8 friendly... I mean... it splits whole words into parts (on special chars) where it shouldn't! so my guess is I should use multibyte functions instead of regular preg_replace... I tried to replace preg_replace with mb_ereg_replace but it is not working as it should... at least not for 2 and 3 words phrases any ideas?

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• PHP will not Echo

  - by user2981166

  I've tried to look into why this isn't echoing but every result the persons trying use php on an html page so this is why I'm here asking. I have 3 php files, a login file, a global config file, and a theme file. The login page echo's the login script but it connects to the global file. The global file connects to the theme file and the db config file. The theme file is a simple table. Here's my files <? include('../tools/global.php'); switch($_POST[act]){ case "setlogin": set($login); break; case "refresh": refresh(); break; case "logout": lout(); break; default: login($mes); break; } function login($mes){ if (isset($_COOKIE["user"])){ $out[body]="<br /> <center> <table width='90%' border='0' cellspacing='1' cellpadding='1' bgcolor='#BDBDBD'> <tr bgcolor='##ff80ff'> <td width='100%' valign='center' align='left' colspan='2' background='#BDBDBD'> <strong>Login</strong> </td> </tr> <tr bgcolor='#BDBDBD'> <td width='100%' valign='center' align='left'><center> <b>You are already logged in! Would you like to <a href='http://www.fivedesignguys.com/dir/panel/login.php?act=refresh&type=logout'>Logout?</a></center></td></tr> </table> </center><br /><br /><br /><br />"; }else{ $out[body]=" <br /> <center> <table width='400' border='0' cellspacing='1' bgcolor='#BDBDBD' cellpadding='1'> <form method='post'> <tr bgcolor='$config[altcolor]'> <td background='#BDBDBD' width='100%' valign='center' align='left' colspan='2'> <strong>Login</strong>"; It continues but I know it's going to echo me the first option, Heres the global php file <?php include('../theme/default.php'); include('config.php'); ?> and finally the default.php theme file <table border='0'> <tr> <td colspan='2'> <center>bar</center> </td> </tr> <tr> <td width='10%'> hey<br>hey<br> </td> <td> hello <?php echo $out[body]; ?> </td> </tr> </table> as you can tell I want it to echo $out[body] but it doesn't want to. Yes all the files are PHP but this is where I'm stuck.

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• Mobile enabled web apps with ASP.NET MVC 3 and jQuery Mobile

  - by shiju

  In my previous blog posts, I have demonstrated a simple web app using ASP.NET MVC 3 and EF Code First. In this post, I will be focus on making this application for mobile devices. A single web site will be used for both mobile browsers and desktop browsers. If users are accessing the web app from mobile browsers, users will be redirect to mobile specific pages and will get normal pages if users are accessing from desktop browsers. In this demo app, the mobile specific pages are maintained in an ASP.NET MVC Area named Mobile and mobile users will be redirect to MVC Area Mobile. Let’s add a new area named Mobile to the ASP.NET MVC app. For adding Area, right click the ASP.NET MVC project and  select Area from Add option. Our mobile specific pages using jQuery Mobile will be maintained in the Mobile Area. ASP.NET MVC Global filter for redirecting mobile visitors to Mobile area Let’s add an ASP.NET MVC Global filter for redirecting mobile visitors to Mobile area. The below Global filter is taken from the sample app http://aspnetmobilesamples.codeplex.com/ created by the ASP.NET team. The below filer will redirect the Mobile visitors to an ASP.NET MVC Area Mobile. public class RedirectMobileDevicesToMobileAreaAttribute : AuthorizeAttribute     {         protected override bool AuthorizeCore(System.Web.HttpContextBase httpContext)         {             // Only redirect on the first request in a session             if (!httpContext.Session.IsNewSession)                 return true;               // Don't redirect non-mobile browsers             if (!httpContext.Request.Browser.IsMobileDevice)                 return true;               // Don't redirect requests for the Mobile area             if (Regex.IsMatch(httpContext.Request.Url.PathAndQuery, "/Mobile($|/)"))                 return true;               return false;         }           protected override void HandleUnauthorizedRequest(AuthorizationContext filterContext)         {             var redirectionRouteValues = GetRedirectionRouteValues(filterContext.RequestContext);             filterContext.Result = new RedirectToRouteResult(redirectionRouteValues);         }           // Override this method if you want to customize the controller/action/parameters to which         // mobile users would be redirected. This lets you redirect users to the mobile equivalent         // of whatever resource they originally requested.         protected virtual RouteValueDictionary GetRedirectionRouteValues(RequestContext requestContext)         {             return new RouteValueDictionary(new { area = "Mobile", controller = "Home", action = "Index" });         }     } Let’s add the global filer RedirectMobileDevicesToMobileAreaAttribute to the global filter collection in the Application_Start() of Global.asax.cs file   GlobalFilters.Filters.Add(new RedirectMobileDevicesToMobileAreaAttribute(), 1); Now your mobile visitors will be redirect to the Mobile area. But the browser detection logic in the RedirectMobileDevicesToMobileAreaAttribute filter will not be working in some modern browsers and some conditions. But the good news is that ASP.NET’s browser detection feature is extensible and will be greatly working with the open source framework 51Degrees.mobi. 51Degrees.mobi is a Browser Capabilities Provider that will be working with ASP.NET’s Request.Browser and will provide more accurate and detailed information. For more details visit the documentation page at http://51degrees.codeplex.com/documentation. Let’s add a reference to 51Degrees.mobi library using NuGet We can easily add the 51Degrees.mobi from NuGet and this will update the web.config for necessary configuartions. Mobile Web App using jQuery Mobile Framework jQuery Mobile Framework is built on top of jQuery that provides top-of-the-line JavaScript in a unified User Interface that works across the most-used smartphone web browsers and tablet form factors. It provides an easy way to develop user interfaces for mobile web apps. The current version of the framework is jQuery Mobile Alpha 3. We need to include the following files to use jQuery Mobile. The jQuery Mobile CSS file (jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.css) The jQuery library (jquery-1.5.min.js) The jQuery Mobile library (jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.js) Let’s add the required jQuery files directly from jQuery CDN . You can download the files and host them on your own server. jQuery Mobile page structure The basic jQuery Mobile page structure is given below <!DOCTYPE html> <html>   <head>   <title>Page Title</title>   <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a3/jquery.mobile-1.0a1.min.css" />   <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5.min.js"></script>   <script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a3/jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.js"></script> </head> <body> <div data-role="page">   <div data-role="header">     <h1>Page Title</h1>   </div>   <div data-role="content">     <p>Page content goes here.</p>      </div>   <div data-role="footer">     <h4>Page Footer</h4>   </div> </div> </body> </html> The data- attributes are the new feature of HTML5 so that jQuery Mobile will be working on browsers that supporting HTML 5. You can get a detailed browser support details from http://jquerymobile.com/gbs/ . In the Head section we have included the Core jQuery javascript file and jQuery Mobile Library and the core CSS Library for the UI Element Styling. These jQuery files are minified versions and will improve the performance of page load on Mobile Devices. The jQuery Mobile pages are identified with an element with the data-role="page" attribute inside the <body> tag. <div data-role="page"> </div> Within the "page" container, any valid HTML markup can be used, but for typical pages in jQuery Mobile, the immediate children of a "page" are div element with data-roles of "header", "content", and "footer". <div data-role="page">     <div data-role="header">...</div>     <div data-role="content">...</div>     <div data-role="footer">...</div> </div> The div data-role="content" holds the main content of the HTML page and will be used for making user interaction elements. The div data-role="header" is header part of the page and div data-role="footer" is the footer part of the page. Creating Mobile specific pages in the Mobile Area Let’s create Layout page for our Mobile area <!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head>     <title>@ViewBag.Title</title>     <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a3/jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.css" />     <script src="http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.5.min.js"></script>     <script src="http://code.jquery.com/mobile/1.0a3/jquery.mobile-1.0a3.min.js"></script>     </head>      <body> @RenderBody()    </body> </html> In the Layout page, I have given reference to jQuery Mobile JavaScript files and the CSS file. Let’s add an Index view page Index.chtml @{     ViewBag.Title = "Index"; } <div data-role="page"> <div data-role="header">      <h1>Expense Tracker Mobile</h1> </div> <div data-role="content">   <ul data-role="listview">     <li>@Html.Partial("_LogOnPartial")</li>      <li>@Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index", "Home")</li>      <li>@Html.ActionLink("Category", "Index", "Category")</li>                          <li>@Html.ActionLink("Expense", "Index", "Expense")</li> </ul> </div> <div data-role="footer">           Shiju Varghese | <a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese">Blog     </a> | <a href="http://twitter.com/shijucv">Twitter</a>   </div> </div>   In the Index page, we have used data-role “listview” for showing our content as List View Let’s create a data entry screen create.cshtml @model MyFinance.Domain.Category @{     ViewBag.Title = "Create Category"; }   <div data-role="page"> <div data-role="header">      <h1>Create Category</h1>             @Html.ActionLink("Home", "Index","Home",null, new { @class = "ui-btn-right" })      </div>       <div data-role="content">     @using (Html.BeginForm("Create","Category",FormMethod.Post))     {       <div data-role="fieldcontain">        @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Name)        @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Name)        <div>           @Html.ValidationMessageFor(m => m.Name)        </div>         </div>         <div data-role="fieldcontain">         @Html.LabelFor(model => model.Description)         @Html.EditorFor(model => model.Description)                   </div>                    <div class="ui-body ui-body-b">         <button type="submit" data-role="button" data-theme="b">Save</button>       </div>     }        </div> </div>   In jQuery Mobile, the form elements should be placed inside the data-role="fieldcontain" The below screen shots show the pages rendered in mobile browser Index Page Create Page Source Code You can download the source code from http://efmvc.codeplex.com   Summary We have created a single  web app for desktop browsers and mobile browsers. If a user access the site from desktop browsers, users will get normal web pages and get mobile specific pages if users access from mobile browsers. If users are accessing the website from mobile devices, we will redirect to a ASP.NET MVC area Mobile. For redirecting to the Mobile area, we have used a Global filer for the redirection logic and used open source framework 51Degrees.mobi for the better support for mobile browser detection. In the Mobile area, we have created the pages using jQuery Mobile and users will get mobile friendly web pages. We can create great mobile web apps using ASP.NET MVC  and jQuery Mobile Framework.

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• jQuery Globalization Plugin from Microsoft

  - by ScottGu

  Last month I blogged about how Microsoft is starting to make code contributions to jQuery, and about some of the first code contributions we were working on: jQuery Templates and Data Linking support. Today, we released a prototype of a new jQuery Globalization Plugin that enables you to add globalization support to your JavaScript applications. This plugin includes globalization information for over 350 cultures ranging from Scottish Gaelic, Frisian, Hungarian, Japanese, to Canadian English.  We will be releasing this plugin to the community as open-source. You can download our prototype for the jQuery Globalization plugin from our Github repository: http://github.com/nje/jquery-glob You can also download a set of samples that demonstrate some simple use-cases with it here. Understanding Globalization The jQuery Globalization plugin enables you to easily parse and format numbers, currencies, and dates for different cultures in JavaScript. For example, you can use the Globalization plugin to display the proper currency symbol for a culture: You also can use the Globalization plugin to format dates so that the day and month appear in the right order and the day and month names are correctly translated: Notice above how the Arabic year is displayed as 1431. This is because the year has been converted to use the Arabic calendar. Some cultural differences, such as different currency or different month names, are obvious. Other cultural differences are surprising and subtle. For example, in some cultures, the grouping of numbers is done unevenly. In the "te-IN" culture (Telugu in India), groups have 3 digits and then 2 digits. The number 1000000 (one million) is written as "10,00,000". Some cultures do not group numbers at all. All of these subtle cultural differences are handled by the jQuery Globalization plugin automatically. Getting dates right can be especially tricky. Different cultures have different calendars such as the Gregorian and UmAlQura calendars. A single culture can even have multiple calendars. For example, the Japanese culture uses both the Gregorian calendar and a Japanese calendar that has eras named after Japanese emperors. The Globalization Plugin includes methods for converting dates between all of these different calendars. Using Language Tags The jQuery Globalization plugin uses the language tags defined in the RFC 4646 and RFC 5646 standards to identity cultures (see http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5646). A language tag is composed out of one or more subtags separated by hyphens. For example: Language Tag Language Name (in English) en-AU English (Australia) en-BZ English (Belize) en-CA English (Canada) Id Indonesian zh-CHS Chinese (Simplified) Legacy Zu isiZulu Notice that a single language, such as English, can have several language tags. Speakers of English in Canada format numbers, currencies, and dates using different conventions than speakers of English in Australia or the United States. You can find the language tag for a particular culture by using the Language Subtag Lookup tool located here:  http://rishida.net/utils/subtags/ The jQuery Globalization plugin download includes a folder named globinfo that contains the information for each of the 350 cultures. Actually, this folder contains more than 700 files because the folder includes both minified and un-minified versions of each file. For example, the globinfo folder includes JavaScript files named jQuery.glob.en-AU.js for English Australia, jQuery.glob.id.js for Indonesia, and jQuery.glob.zh-CHS for Chinese (Simplified) Legacy. Example: Setting a Particular Culture Imagine that you have been asked to create a German website and want to format all of the dates, currencies, and numbers using German formatting conventions correctly in JavaScript on the client. The HTML for the page might look like this: Notice the span tags above. They mark the areas of the page that we want to format with the Globalization plugin. We want to format the product price, the date the product is available, and the units of the product in stock. To use the jQuery Globalization plugin, we’ll add three JavaScript files to the page: the jQuery library, the jQuery Globalization plugin, and the culture information for a particular language: In this case, I’ve statically added the jQuery.glob.de-DE.js JavaScript file that contains the culture information for German. The language tag “de-DE” is used for German as spoken in Germany. Now that I have all of the necessary scripts, I can use the Globalization plugin to format the product price, date available, and units in stock values using the following client-side JavaScript: The jQuery Globalization plugin extends the jQuery library with new methods - including new methods named preferCulture() and format(). The preferCulture() method enables you to set the default culture used by the jQuery Globalization plugin methods. Notice that the preferCulture() method accepts a language tag. The method will find the closest culture that matches the language tag. The $.format() method is used to actually format the currencies, dates, and numbers. The second parameter passed to the $.format() method is a format specifier. For example, passing “c” causes the value to be formatted as a currency. The ReadMe file at github details the meaning of all of the various format specifiers: http://github.com/nje/jquery-glob When we open the page in a browser, everything is formatted correctly according to German language conventions. A euro symbol is used for the currency symbol. The date is formatted using German day and month names. Finally, a period instead of a comma is used a number separator: You can see a running example of the above approach with the 3_GermanSite.htm file in this samples download. Example: Enabling a User to Dynamically Select a Culture In the previous example we explicitly said that we wanted to globalize in German (by referencing the jQuery.glob.de-DE.js file). Let’s now look at the first of a few examples that demonstrate how to dynamically set the globalization culture to use. Imagine that you want to display a dropdown list of all of the 350 cultures in a page. When someone selects a culture from the dropdown list, you want all of the dates in the page to be formatted using the selected culture. Here’s the HTML for the page: Notice that all of the dates are contained in a <span> tag with a data-date attribute (data-* attributes are a new feature of HTML 5 that conveniently also still work with older browsers). We’ll format the date represented by the data-date attribute when a user selects a culture from the dropdown list. In order to display dates for any possible culture, we’ll include the jQuery.glob.all.js file like this: The jQuery Globalization plugin includes a JavaScript file named jQuery.glob.all.js. This file contains globalization information for all of the more than 350 cultures supported by the Globalization plugin.  At 367KB minified, this file is not small. Because of the size of this file, unless you really need to use all of these cultures at the same time, we recommend that you add the individual JavaScript files for particular cultures that you intend to support instead of the combined jQuery.glob.all.js to a page. In the next sample I’ll show how to dynamically load just the language files you need. Next, we’ll populate the dropdown list with all of the available cultures. We can use the $.cultures property to get all of the loaded cultures: Finally, we’ll write jQuery code that grabs every span element with a data-date attribute and format the date: The jQuery Globalization plugin’s parseDate() method is used to convert a string representation of a date into a JavaScript date. The plugin’s format() method is used to format the date. The “D” format specifier causes the date to be formatted using the long date format. And now the content will be globalized correctly regardless of which of the 350 languages a user visiting the page selects.  You can see a running example of the above approach with the 4_SelectCulture.htm file in this samples download. Example: Loading Globalization Files Dynamically As mentioned in the previous section, you should avoid adding the jQuery.glob.all.js file to a page whenever possible because the file is so large. A better alternative is to load the globalization information that you need dynamically. For example, imagine that you have created a dropdown list that displays a list of languages: The following jQuery code executes whenever a user selects a new language from the dropdown list. The code checks whether the globalization file associated with the selected language has already been loaded. If the globalization file has not been loaded then the globalization file is loaded dynamically by taking advantage of the jQuery $.getScript() method. The globalizePage() method is called after the requested globalization file has been loaded, and contains the client-side code to perform the globalization. The advantage of this approach is that it enables you to avoid loading the entire jQuery.glob.all.js file. Instead you only need to load the files that you need and you don’t need to load the files more than once. The 5_Dynamic.htm file in this samples download demonstrates how to implement this approach. Example: Setting the User Preferred Language Automatically Many websites detect a user’s preferred language from their browser settings and automatically use it when globalizing content. A user can set a preferred language for their browser. Then, whenever the user requests a page, this language preference is included in the request in the Accept-Language header. When using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you can set your preferred language by following these steps: Select the menu option Tools, Internet Options. Select the General tab. Click the Languages button in the Appearance section. Click the Add button to add a new language to the list of languages. Move your preferred language to the top of the list. Notice that you can list multiple languages in the Language Preference dialog. All of these languages are sent in the order that you listed them in the Accept-Language header: Accept-Language: fr-FR,id-ID;q=0.7,en-US;q=0.3 Strangely, you cannot retrieve the value of the Accept-Language header from client JavaScript. Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox support a bevy of language related properties exposed by the window.navigator object, such as windows.navigator.browserLanguage and window.navigator.language, but these properties represent either the language set for the operating system or the language edition of the browser. These properties don’t enable you to retrieve the language that the user set as his or her preferred language. The only reliable way to get a user’s preferred language (the value of the Accept-Language header) is to write server code. For example, the following ASP.NET page takes advantage of the server Request.UserLanguages property to assign the user’s preferred language to a client JavaScript variable named acceptLanguage (which then allows you to access the value using client-side JavaScript): In order for this code to work, the culture information associated with the value of acceptLanguage must be included in the page. For example, if someone’s preferred culture is fr-FR (French in France) then you need to include either the jQuery.glob.fr-FR.js or the jQuery.glob.all.js JavaScript file in the page or the culture information won’t be available.  The “6_AcceptLanguages.aspx” sample in this samples download demonstrates how to implement this approach. If the culture information for the user’s preferred language is not included in the page then the $.preferCulture() method will fall back to using the neutral culture (for example, using jQuery.glob.fr.js instead of jQuery.glob.fr-FR.js). If the neutral culture information is not available then the $.preferCulture() method falls back to the default culture (English). Example: Using the Globalization Plugin with the jQuery UI DatePicker One of the goals of the Globalization plugin is to make it easier to build jQuery widgets that can be used with different cultures. We wanted to make sure that the jQuery Globalization plugin could work with existing jQuery UI plugins such as the DatePicker plugin. To that end, we created a patched version of the DatePicker plugin that can take advantage of the Globalization plugin when rendering a calendar. For example, the following figure illustrates what happens when you add the jQuery Globalization and the patched jQuery UI DatePicker plugin to a page and select Indonesian as the preferred culture: Notice that the headers for the days of the week are displayed using Indonesian day name abbreviations. Furthermore, the month names are displayed in Indonesian. You can download the patched version of the jQuery UI DatePicker from our github website. Or you can use the version included in this samples download and used by the 7_DatePicker.htm sample file. Summary I’m excited about our continuing participation in the jQuery community. This Globalization plugin is the third jQuery plugin that we’ve released. We’ve really appreciated all of the great feedback and design suggestions on the jQuery templating and data-linking prototypes that we released earlier this year.  We also want to thank the jQuery and jQuery UI teams for working with us to create these plugins. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. You can follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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• HTG Reviews the CODE Keyboard: Old School Construction Meets Modern Amenities

  - by Jason Fitzpatrick

  There’s nothing quite as satisfying as the smooth and crisp action of a well built keyboard. If you’re tired of  mushy keys and cheap feeling keyboards, a well-constructed mechanical keyboard is a welcome respite from the $10 keyboard that came with your computer. Read on as we put the CODE mechanical keyboard through the paces. What is the CODE Keyboard? The CODE keyboard is a collaboration between manufacturer WASD Keyboards and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror (the guy behind the Stack Exchange network and Discourse forum software). Atwood’s focus was incorporating the best of traditional mechanical keyboards and the best of modern keyboard usability improvements. In his own words: The world is awash in terrible, crappy, no name how-cheap-can-we-make-it keyboards. There are a few dozen better mechanical keyboard options out there. I’ve owned and used at least six different expensive mechanical keyboards, but I wasn’t satisfied with any of them, either: they didn’t have backlighting, were ugly, had terrible design, or were missing basic functions like media keys. That’s why I originally contacted Weyman Kwong of WASD Keyboards way back in early 2012. I told him that the state of keyboards was unacceptable to me as a geek, and I proposed a partnership wherein I was willing to work with him to do whatever it takes to produce a truly great mechanical keyboard. Even the ardent skeptic who questions whether Atwood has indeed created a truly great mechanical keyboard certainly can’t argue with the position he starts from: there are so many agonizingly crappy keyboards out there. Even worse, in our opinion, is that unless you’re a typist of a certain vintage there’s a good chance you’ve never actually typed on a really nice keyboard. Those that didn’t start using computers until the mid-to-late 1990s most likely have always typed on modern mushy-key keyboards and never known the joy of typing on a really responsive and crisp mechanical keyboard. Is our preference for and love of mechanical keyboards shining through here? Good. We’re not even going to try and hide it. So where does the CODE keyboard stack up in pantheon of keyboards? Read on as we walk you through the simple setup and our experience using the CODE. Setting Up the CODE Keyboard Although the setup of the CODE keyboard is essentially plug and play, there are two distinct setup steps that you likely haven’t had to perform on a previous keyboard. Both highlight the degree of care put into the keyboard and the amount of customization available. Inside the box you’ll find the keyboard, a micro USB cable, a USB-to-PS2 adapter, and a tool which you may be unfamiliar with: a key puller. We’ll return to the key puller in a moment. Unlike the majority of keyboards on the market, the cord isn’t permanently affixed to the keyboard. What does this mean for you? Aside from the obvious need to plug it in yourself, it makes it dead simple to repair your own keyboard cord if it gets attacked by a pet, mangled in a mechanism on your desk, or otherwise damaged. It also makes it easy to take advantage of the cable routing channels in on the underside of the keyboard to  route your cable exactly where you want it. While we’re staring at the underside of the keyboard, check out those beefy rubber feet. By peripherals standards they’re huge (and there is six instead of the usual four). Once you plunk the keyboard down where you want it, it might as well be glued down the rubber feet work so well. After you’ve secured the cable and adjusted it to your liking, there is one more task  before plug the keyboard into the computer. On the bottom left-hand side of the keyboard, you’ll find a small recess in the plastic with some dip switches inside: The dip switches are there to switch hardware functions for various operating systems, keyboard layouts, and to enable/disable function keys. By toggling the dip switches you can change the keyboard from QWERTY mode to Dvorak mode and Colemak mode, the two most popular alternative keyboard configurations. You can also use the switches to enable Mac-functionality (for Command/Option keys). One of our favorite little toggles is the SW3 dip switch: you can disable the Caps Lock key; goodbye accidentally pressing Caps when you mean to press Shift. You can review the entire dip switch configuration chart here. The quick-start for Windows users is simple: double check that all the switches are in the off position (as seen in the photo above) and then simply toggle SW6 on to enable the media and backlighting function keys (this turns the menu key on the keyboard into a function key as typically found on laptop keyboards). After adjusting the dip switches to your liking, plug the keyboard into an open USB port on your computer (or into your PS/2 port using the included adapter). Design, Layout, and Backlighting The CODE keyboard comes in two flavors, a traditional 87-key layout (no number pad) and a traditional 104-key layout (number pad on the right hand side). We identify the layout as traditional because, despite some modern trapping and sneaky shortcuts, the actual form factor of the keyboard from the shape of the keys to the spacing and position is as classic as it comes. You won’t have to learn a new keyboard layout and spend weeks conditioning yourself to a smaller than normal backspace key or a PgUp/PgDn pair in an unconventional location. Just because the keyboard is very conventional in layout, however, doesn’t mean you’ll be missing modern amenities like media-control keys. The following additional functions are hidden in the F11, F12, Pause button, and the 2×6 grid formed by the Insert and Delete rows: keyboard illumination brightness, keyboard illumination on/off, mute, and then the typical play/pause, forward/backward, stop, and volume +/- in Insert and Delete rows, respectively. While we weren’t sure what we’d think of the function-key system at first (especially after retiring a Microsoft Sidewinder keyboard with a huge and easily accessible volume knob on it), it took less than a day for us to adapt to using the Fn key, located next to the right Ctrl key, to adjust our media playback on the fly. Keyboard backlighting is a largely hit-or-miss undertaking but the CODE keyboard nails it. Not only does it have pleasant and easily adjustable through-the-keys lighting but the key switches the keys themselves are attached to are mounted to a steel plate with white paint. Enough of the light reflects off the interior cavity of the keys and then diffuses across the white plate to provide nice even illumination in between the keys. Highlighting the steel plate beneath the keys brings us to the actual construction of the keyboard. It’s rock solid. The 87-key model, the one we tested, is 2.0 pounds. The 104-key is nearly a half pound heavier at 2.42 pounds. Between the steel plate, the extra-thick PCB board beneath the steel plate, and the thick ABS plastic housing, the keyboard has very solid feel to it. Combine that heft with the previously mentioned thick rubber feet and you have a tank-like keyboard that won’t budge a millimeter during normal use. Examining The Keys This is the section of the review the hardcore typists and keyboard ninjas have been waiting for. We’ve looked at the layout of the keyboard, we’ve looked at the general construction of it, but what about the actual keys? There are a wide variety of keyboard construction techniques but the vast majority of modern keyboards use a rubber-dome construction. The key is floated in a plastic frame over a rubber membrane that has a little rubber dome for each key. The press of the physical key compresses the rubber dome downwards and a little bit of conductive material on the inside of the dome’s apex connects with the circuit board. Despite the near ubiquity of the design, many people dislike it. The principal complaint is that dome keyboards require a complete compression to register a keystroke; keyboard designers and enthusiasts refer to this as “bottoming out”. In other words, the register the “b” key, you need to completely press that key down. As such it slows you down and requires additional pressure and movement that, over the course of tens of thousands of keystrokes, adds up to a whole lot of wasted time and fatigue. The CODE keyboard features key switches manufactured by Cherry, a company that has manufactured key switches since the 1960s. Specifically the CODE features Cherry MX Clear switches. These switches feature the same classic design of the other Cherry switches (such as the MX Blue and Brown switch lineups) but they are significantly quieter (yes this is a mechanical keyboard, but no, your neighbors won’t think you’re firing off a machine gun) as they lack the audible click found in most Cherry switches. This isn’t to say that they keyboard doesn’t have a nice audible key press sound when the key is fully depressed, but that the key mechanism isn’t doesn’t create a loud click sound when triggered. One of the great features of the Cherry MX clear is a tactile “bump” that indicates the key has been compressed enough to register the stroke. For touch typists the very subtle tactile feedback is a great indicator that you can move on to the next stroke and provides a welcome speed boost. Even if you’re not trying to break any word-per-minute records, that little bump when pressing the key is satisfying. The Cherry key switches, in addition to providing a much more pleasant typing experience, are also significantly more durable than dome-style key switch. Rubber dome switch membrane keyboards are typically rated for 5-10 million contacts whereas the Cherry mechanical switches are rated for 50 million contacts. You’d have to write the next War and Peace  and follow that up with A Tale of Two Cities: Zombie Edition, and then turn around and transcribe them both into a dozen different languages to even begin putting a tiny dent in the lifecycle of this keyboard. So what do the switches look like under the classicly styled keys? You can take a look yourself with the included key puller. Slide the loop between the keys and then gently beneath the key you wish to remove: Wiggle the key puller gently back and forth while exerting a gentle upward pressure to pop the key off; You can repeat the process for every key, if you ever find yourself needing to extract piles of cat hair, Cheeto dust, or other foreign objects from your keyboard. There it is, the naked switch, the source of that wonderful crisp action with the tactile bump on each keystroke. The last feature worthy of a mention is the N-key rollover functionality of the keyboard. This is a feature you simply won’t find on non-mechanical keyboards and even gaming keyboards typically only have any sort of key roller on the high-frequency keys like WASD. So what is N-key rollover and why do you care? On a typical mass-produced rubber-dome keyboard you cannot simultaneously press more than two keys as the third one doesn’t register. PS/2 keyboards allow for unlimited rollover (in other words you can’t out type the keyboard as all of your keystrokes, no matter how fast, will register); if you use the CODE keyboard with the PS/2 adapter you gain this ability. If you don’t use the PS/2 adapter and use the native USB, you still get 6-key rollover (and the CTRL, ALT, and SHIFT don’t count towards the 6) so realistically you still won’t be able to out type the computer as even the more finger twisting keyboard combos and high speed typing will still fall well within the 6-key rollover. The rollover absolutely doesn’t matter if you’re a slow hunt-and-peck typist, but if you’ve read this far into a keyboard review there’s a good chance that you’re a serious typist and that kind of quality construction and high-number key rollover is a fantastic feature.  The Good, The Bad, and the Verdict We’ve put the CODE keyboard through the paces, we’ve played games with it, typed articles with it, left lengthy comments on Reddit, and otherwise used and abused it like we would any other keyboard. The Good: The construction is rock solid. In an emergency, we’re confident we could use the keyboard as a blunt weapon (and then resume using it later in the day with no ill effect on the keyboard). The Cherry switches are an absolute pleasure to type on; the Clear variety found in the CODE keyboard offer a really nice middle-ground between the gun-shot clack of a louder mechanical switch and the quietness of a lesser-quality dome keyboard without sacrificing quality. Touch typists will love the subtle tactile bump feedback. Dip switch system makes it very easy for users on different systems and with different keyboard layout needs to switch between operating system and keyboard layouts. If you’re investing a chunk of change in a keyboard it’s nice to know you can take it with you to a different operating system or “upgrade” it to a new layout if you decide to take up Dvorak-style typing. The backlighting is perfect. You can adjust it from a barely-visible glow to a blazing light-up-the-room brightness. Whatever your intesity preference, the white-coated steel backplate does a great job diffusing the light between the keys. You can easily remove the keys for cleaning (or to rearrange the letters to support a new keyboard layout). The weight of the unit combined with the extra thick rubber feet keep it planted exactly where you place it on the desk. The Bad: While you’re getting your money’s worth, the $150 price tag is a shock when compared to the $20-60 price tags you find on lower-end keyboards. People used to large dedicated media keys independent of the traditional key layout (such as the large buttons and volume controls found on many modern keyboards) might be off put by the Fn-key style media controls on the CODE. The Verdict: The keyboard is clearly and heavily influenced by the needs of serious typists. Whether you’re a programmer, transcriptionist, or just somebody that wants to leave the lengthiest article comments the Internet has ever seen, the CODE keyboard offers a rock solid typing experience. Yes, $150 isn’t pocket change, but the quality of the CODE keyboard is so high and the typing experience is so enjoyable, you’re easily getting ten times the value you’d get out of purchasing a lesser keyboard. Even compared to other mechanical keyboards on the market, like the Das Keyboard, you’re still getting more for your money as other mechanical keyboards don’t come with the lovely-to-type-on Cherry MX Clear switches, back lighting, and hardware-based operating system keyboard layout switching. If it’s in your budget to upgrade your keyboard (especially if you’ve been slogging along with a low-end rubber-dome keyboard) there’s no good reason to not pickup a CODE keyboard. Key animation courtesy of Geekhack.org user Lethal Squirrel.       

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• Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g: Server configuration

  - by Simon Thorpe

  Quick guide to Oracle IRM 11g index Welcome to the second article in this quick quide to Oracle IRM 11g. Hopefully you've just finished the first article which takes you through deploying the software onto a Linux server. This article walks you through the configuration of this new service and contains a subset of information from the official documentation and is focused on installing the server on Oracle Enterprise Linux. If you are planning to deploy on a non-Linux platform, you will need to reference the documentation for platform specific information. Contents Introduction Create IRM WebLogic Domain Starting the Admin Server and initial configuration Introduction In the previous article the database was prepared, the WebLogic Application Server installed and the files required for an IRM server installed. But we don't actually have a configured system yet. We need to now create a WebLogic Domain in which the IRM server will run, then configure some of the settings and crypography so that we can create a context and be ready to seal some content and test it all works. This article doesn't cover the configuration of SSL communication from client to server. This is quite a big topic and a separate article has been dedicated for this area. In these articles I also use the hostname, irm.company.internal to reference the IRM server and later on use the hostname irm.company.com in reference to the public facing service. Create IRM WebLogic Domain First step is creating the WebLogic domain, in a console switch to the newly created IRM installation folder as shown below and we will run the domain configuration wizard. [oracle@irm /]$ cd /oracle/middleware/Oracle_IRM/common/bin [oracle@irm bin]$ ./config.sh First thing the wizard will ask is if you wish to create a new or extend an existing domain. This guide is creating a standalone system so you should select to create a new domain. Next step is to choose what technologies from the Oracle ECM Suite you wish this domain to host. You are only interested in selecting the option "Oracle Information Rights Management". When you select this check box you will notice that it also selects "Oracle Enterprise Manager" and "Oracle JRF" as these are dependencies of the IRM server. You then need to specify where you wish to place the domain files. I usually just change the domain name from base_domain or irm_domain and leave the others with their defaults. Now the domain will have a single user initially and by default this user is called "weblogic". I usually change this account name to "sysadmin" or "administrator", but in this guide lets just accept the default. With respects to the next dialog, again for eval or dev reasons, leave the server startup mode as development. The JDK should also be automatically detected. We now need to provide details of the database. This guide is using the Oracle 11gR2 database and the settings I used can be seen in the image to the right. There is a lot of configuration that can now be done for the admin server, any managed servers and where the deployments reside. In this guide I am leaving all of these to their defaults so do not check any of the boxes. However I will on this blog be detailing later how you can go back and setup things such as automated startup of an IRM server which require changes to these default settings. But for now, lets leave it all alone and just click next. Now we are ready to install. Note that from this dialog you can scroll the left window and see there are going to be two servers created from the defaults. The AdminServer which is where you modify settings for the WebLogic Server and also hosts the Oracle Enterprise Manager for IRM which allows to monitor the IRM service performance and also make service related settings (which we shortly do below) and the IRM_server1 which hosts the actual IRM services themselves. So go right ahead and hit create, the process is pretty quick and usually under 10 minutes. When the domain creation ends, it will give you the URL to the admin server. It's worth noting this down and the URL is usually; http://irm.company.internal:7001 Starting the Admin Server and initial configuration First thing to do is to start the WebLogic Admin server and review the initial IRM server settings. In this guide we are going to run the Admin server and IRM server in console windows, in another article I will discuss running these as background services. So for now, start a console and run the Admin server by doing the following. cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/ ./startWebLogic.sh Wait for the server to start, you are looking for the following line to be reported in the console window. <BEA-00360><Server started in RUNNING mode> First step is configuring the IRM service via Enterprise Manager. Now that the Admin server is running you can point a browser at http://irm.company.internal:7001/em. Login with the username and password you supplied when you created the domain. In Enterprise Manager the IRM service administrator is able to make server wide configuration. However finding where to access the pages with these settings can be a bit of a challenge. After logging in on the left you'll see a tree containing elements of the Enterprise Manager farm Farm_irm_domain. Open up Content Management, then Information Rights Management and finally select the IRM node. On the right then select the IRM menu item, navigate to the Administration section and now we have four options, for now, we are just going to look at General Settings. The image on the right proves that a picture is worth a thousand words (or 113 in this case). The General Settings page allows you to set the cryptographic algorithms used for protecting sealed content. Unless you have a burning need to increase the key lengths or you need to comply to a regulation or government mandate, AES192 is a good start. You can change this later on without worry. The most important setting here we need to make is the Server URL. In this blog article I go over why this URL is so important, basically every single piece of content you protect with Oracle IRM is going to have this URL embedded in it, so if it's wrong or unresolvable, then nobody can open the secured documents. Note that in our environment we have yet to do any SSL configuration of the service. If you intend to build a server without SSL, then use http as the protocol instead of https. But I would recommend using SSL and setting this up is described in the next article. I would also probably up the device count from 1 to 3. This means that any user can retrieve rights to access content onto 3 computers at any one time. The default of 1 doesn't really make sense in development, evaluation nor even production environments and my experience is that 3 is a better number. Next step is to create the keystore for the IRM server. When a classification (called a context) is created, Oracle IRM generates a unique set of symmetric keys which are used to secure the content itself. These keys are then encrypted with a set of "wrapper" asymmetric cryptography keys which are stored externally to the server either in a Java Key Store or a HSM. These keys need to be generated and the following shows my commands and the resulting output. I have greyed out the responses from the commands so you can see the input a little easier. [oracle@irmsrv ~]$ cd /oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin/ [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ ./setWLSEnv.sh CLASSPATH=/oracle/middleware/patch_wls1033/profiles/default/sys_manifest_classpath/weblogic_patch.jar:/oracle/middleware/patch_ocp353/profiles/default/sys_manifest_classpath/weblogic_patch.jar:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/lib/tools.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/weblogic_sp.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/weblogic.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/features/weblogic.server.modules_10.3.3.0.jar:/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/lib/webservices.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/lib/ant-all.jar:/oracle/middleware/modules/net.sf.antcontrib_1.1.0.0_1-0b2/lib/ant-contrib.jar: PATH=/oracle/middleware/wlserver_10.3/server/bin:/oracle/middleware/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/bin:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/jre/bin:/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_18/bin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/home/oracle/bin Your environment has been set. [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/ [oracle@irmsrv fmwconfig]$ keytool -genkeypair -alias oracle.irm.wrap -keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -keystore irm.jks Enter keystore password: Re-enter new password: What is your first and last name? [Unknown]: Simon Thorpe What is the name of your organizational unit? [Unknown]: Oracle What is the name of your organization? [Unknown]: Oracle What is the name of your City or Locality? [Unknown]: San Francisco What is the name of your State or Province? [Unknown]: CA What is the two-letter country code for this unit? [Unknown]: US Is CN=Simon Thorpe, OU=Oracle, O=Oracle, L=San Francisco, ST=CA, C=US correct? [no]: yes Enter key password for (RETURN if same as keystore password): At this point we now have an irm.jks in the directory /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig. The reason we store it here is this folder would be backed up as part of a domain backup. As with any cryptographic technology, DO NOT LOSE THESE KEYS OR THIS KEY STORE. Once you've sealed content against a context, the keys will be wrapped with these keys, lose these keys, and you can't get access to any secured content, pretty important. Now we've got the keys created, we need to go back to the IRM Enterprise Manager and set the location of the key store. Going back to the General Settings page in Enterprise Manager scroll down to Keystore Settings. Leave the type as JKS but change the location to; /oracle/Middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/config/fmwconfig/irm.jks and hit Apply. The final step with regards to the key store is we need to tell the server what the password is for the Java Key Store so that it can be opened and the keys accessed. Once more fire up a console window and run these commands (again i've greyed out the clutter to see the commands easier). You will see dummy passed into the commands, this is because the command asks for a username, but in this instance we don't use one, hence the value dummy is passed and it isn't used. [oracle@irmsrv fmwconfig]$ cd /oracle/middleware/Oracle_IRM/common/bin/ [oracle@irmsrv bin]$ ./wlst.sh ... lots of settings fly by... Welcome to WebLogic Server Administration Scripting Shell Type help() for help on available commands wls:/offline>connect('weblogic','password','t3://irmsrv.us.oracle.com:7001') Connecting to t3://irmsrv.us.oracle.com:7001 with userid weblogic ... Successfully connected to Admin Server 'AdminServer' that belongs to domain 'irm_domain'. Warning: An insecure protocol was used to connect to the server. To ensure on-the-wire security, the SSL port or Admin port should be used instead. wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig>createCred("IRM","keystore:irm.jks","dummy","password") Location changed to domainRuntime tree. This is a read-only tree with DomainMBean as the root. For more help, use help(domainRuntime)wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig>createCred("IRM","key:irm.jks:oracle.irm.wrap","dummy","password") Already in Domain Runtime Tree wls:/irm_domain/serverConfig> At last we are now ready to fire up the IRM server itself. The domain creation created a managed server called IRM_server1 and we need to start this, use the following commands in a new console window. cd /oracle/middleware/user_projects/domains/irm_domain/bin/ ./startManagedWebLogic.sh IRM_server1 This will start up the server in the console, unlike the Admin server, you need to provide the username and password for the service to start. Enter in your weblogic username and password when prompted. You can change this behavior by putting the password into a boot.properties file, read more about this in the WebLogic Server documentation. Once running, wait until you see the line; <Notice><WebLogicServer><BEA-000360><Server started in RUNNING mode> At this point we can now login to the Oracle IRM Management Website at the URL. http://irm.company.internal:1600/irm_rights/ The server is just configured for HTTP at the moment, no SSL involved. Just want to ensure we can get a working system up and running. You should now see a login like the image on the right and you can now login using your weblogic username and password. The next article in this guide goes over adding SSL and now testing your server by actually adding a few users, sealing some content and opening this content as a user.

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

  - by ScottGu

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

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• How do I get preferences to work in Android?

  - by Dan T

  I've really been struggling through this. New to Java/Android. I'm writing my first app and this is the first thing that has taken me longer than a couple days of searching to figure out. Here's the setup: It's a BAC calculator / drink counter: A formula is used to calculate the BAC. Here's the forumla: Bac = ((StandardDrinks / 2) * (GenderConstant / Weight)) - (0.017 * Hours); So as you can see, being able to modify the gender and weight will produce more accurate and personalized results. So I have them as doubles: double GenderConstant = 7.5; //9 for female double Weight = 180; To change these variables I would like the person to be able to go into the settings and choose different values. I have these things set up, but not linked to the variables shown above because I cannot for the life of me figure out how. Here they are: I press the menu button and this pops up. Great. I'll click Settings. Now the preferences pops up. Here is my preferences.xml: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <PreferenceScreen xmlns:android="http://schemas.android.com/apk/res/android"> <PreferenceCategory android:title="Personal Settings"> <ListPreference android:title="Gender" android:summary="Verify or deny the presence of a Y chromosome." android:key="genderPref" android:defaultValue="male" android:entries="@array/genderArray" android:entryValues="@array/genderValues" /> <ListPreference android:title="Weight" android:summary="How much the planet pulls on you, in pounds." android:key="weightPref" android:defaultValue="180" android:entries="@array/weightArray" android:entryValues="@array/weightValues" /> </PreferenceCategory> <PreferenceCategory android:title="Drink Settings"> <ListPreference android:title="Beer Size" android:summary="The volume of your beer, in ounces." android:key="beerPref" android:defaultValue="12" android:entries="@array/beerArray" android:entryValues="@array/beerValues" /> <ListPreference android:title="Shot Size" android:summary="The volume of your shot, in ounces." android:key="shotPref" android:defaultValue="1.5" android:entries="@array/shotArray" android:entryValues="@array/shotValues" /> <ListPreference android:title="Wine Size" android:summary="The volume of your wine, in ounces." android:key="winePref" android:defaultValue="5" android:entries="@array/wineArray" android:entryValues="@array/wineValues" /> </PreferenceCategory> </PreferenceScreen> Onward to the weight ListPreference: And that shows up. The values are stored as string-arrays in res/values/arrays.xml. Here's a sample, of just the weight ones: <string-array name="weightArray"> <item>120 lbs</item> <item>150 lbs</item> <item>180 lbs</item> <item>210 lbs</item> <item>240 lbs</item> <item>270 lbs</item> </string-array> <string-array name="weightValues"> <item>120</item> <item>150</item> <item>180</item> <item>210</item> <item>240</item> <item>270</item> </string-array> This is basically as far as I've gotten. I can click a value, sure, but it doesn't change the formula because it's not linked with the doubles I created in DrinkingBuddy.java. All of the stuff displayed in the settings are just empty shells for now, including the spinner on the main layout (the default time is just set to 1 hour) I did create a Preferences.java and have tried implementing various combinations of code found in tutorials and resources around the web, but to no avail. Here it is anyway, filled with failed attempts to make beerPref (the settings option to change how many ounces in the beer) correlate with a variable in my main class: package com.dantoth.drinkingbuddy; import android.app.Activity; import android.content.SharedPreferences; import android.os.Bundle; import android.preference.Preference; import android.preference.PreferenceActivity; import android.preference.Preference.OnPreferenceClickListener; public class Preferences extends PreferenceActivity { public static final String PREF_BEER_SIZE = "PREF_BEER_SIZE"; @Override protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) { super.onCreate(savedInstanceState); addPreferencesFromResource(R.xml.preferences); //Get the custom preference Preference beerPref = (Preference) findPreference("beerPref"); beerPref.setOnPreferenceClickListener(new OnPreferenceClickListener() { public boolean onPreferenceClick(Preference preference) { SharedPreferences customSharedPreference = getSharedPreferences("myCustomSharedPrefs", Activity.MODE_PRIVATE); SharedPreferences.Editor editor = customSharedPreference.edit(); editor.commit(); return true; }} );} } A full on tutorial and sample code would be AWESOME as I've yet to find any reliable guides out there.

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• Getting Started Building Windows 8 Store Apps with XAML/C#

  - by dwahlin

  Technology is fun isn’t it? As soon as you think you’ve figured out where things are heading a new technology comes onto the scene, changes things up, and offers new opportunities. One of the new technologies I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with lately is Windows 8 store applications. I posted my thoughts about Windows 8 during the BUILD conference in 2011 and still feel excited about the opportunity there. Time will tell how well it ends up being accepted by consumers but I’m hopeful that it’ll take off. I currently have two Windows 8 store application concepts I’m working on with one being built in XAML/C# and another in HTML/JavaScript. I really like that Microsoft supports both options since it caters to a variety of developers and makes it easy to get started regardless if you’re a desktop developer or Web developer. Here’s a quick look at how the technologies are organized in Windows 8: In this post I’ll focus on the basics of Windows 8 store XAML/C# apps by looking at features, files, and code provided by Visual Studio projects. To get started building these types of apps you’ll definitely need to have some knowledge of XAML and C#. Let’s get started by looking at the Windows 8 store project types available in Visual Studio 2012.   Windows 8 Store XAML/C# Project Types When you open Visual Studio 2012 you’ll see a new entry under C# named Windows Store. It includes 6 different project types as shown next.   The Blank App project provides initial starter code and a single page whereas the Grid App and Split App templates provide quite a bit more code as well as multiple pages for your application. The other projects available can be be used to create a class library project that runs in Windows 8 store apps, a WinRT component such as a custom control, and a unit test library project respectively. If you’re building an application that displays data in groups using the “tile” concept then the Grid App or Split App project templates are a good place to start. An example of the initial screens generated by each project is shown next: Grid App Split View App   When a user clicks a tile in a Grid App they can view details about the tile data. With a Split View app groups/categories are shown and when the user clicks on a group they can see a list of all the different items and then drill-down into them:   For the remainder of this post I’ll focus on functionality provided by the Blank App project since it provides a simple way to get started learning the fundamentals of building Windows 8 store apps.   Blank App Project Walkthrough The Blank App project is a great place to start since it’s simple and lets you focus on the basics. In this post I’ll focus on what it provides you out of the box and cover additional details in future posts. Once you have the basics down you can move to the other project types if you need the functionality they provide. The Blank App project template does exactly what it says – you get an empty project with a few starter files added to help get you going. This is a good option if you’ll be building an app that doesn’t fit into the grid layout view that you see a lot of Windows 8 store apps following (such as on the Windows 8 start screen). I ended up starting with the Blank App project template for the app I’m currently working on since I’m not displaying data/image tiles (something the Grid App project does well) or drilling down into lists of data (functionality that the Split App project provides). The Blank App project provides images for the tiles and splash screen (you’ll definitely want to change these), a StandardStyles.xaml resource dictionary that includes a lot of helpful styles such as buttons for the AppBar (a special type of menu in Windows 8 store apps), an App.xaml file, and the app’s main page which is named MainPage.xaml. It also adds a Package.appxmanifest that is used to define functionality that your app requires, app information used in the store, plus more. The App.xaml, App.xaml.cs and StandardStyles.xaml Files The App.xaml file handles loading a resource dictionary named StandardStyles.xaml which has several key styles used throughout the application: <Application x:Class="BlankApp.App" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:local="using:BlankApp"> <Application.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <!-- Styles that define common aspects of the platform look and feel Required by Visual Studio project and item templates --> <ResourceDictionary Source="Common/StandardStyles.xaml"/> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application>   StandardStyles.xaml has style definitions for different text styles and AppBar buttons. If you scroll down toward the middle of the file you’ll see that many AppBar button styles are included such as one for an edit icon. Button styles like this can be used to quickly and easily add icons/buttons into your application without having to be an expert in design. <Style x:Key="EditAppBarButtonStyle" TargetType="ButtonBase" BasedOn="{StaticResource AppBarButtonStyle}"> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.AutomationId" Value="EditAppBarButton"/> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.Name" Value="Edit"/> <Setter Property="Content" Value="&#xE104;"/> </Style> Switching over to App.xaml.cs, it includes some code to help get you started. An OnLaunched() method is added to handle creating a Frame that child pages such as MainPage.xaml can be loaded into. The Frame has the same overall purpose as the one found in WPF and Silverlight applications - it’s used to navigate between pages in an application. /// <summary> /// Invoked when the application is launched normally by the end user. Other entry points /// will be used when the application is launched to open a specific file, to display /// search results, and so forth. /// </summary> /// <param name="args">Details about the launch request and process.</param> protected override void OnLaunched(LaunchActivatedEventArgs args) { Frame rootFrame = Window.Current.Content as Frame; // Do not repeat app initialization when the Window already has content, // just ensure that the window is active if (rootFrame == null) { // Create a Frame to act as the navigation context and navigate to the first page rootFrame = new Frame(); if (args.PreviousExecutionState == ApplicationExecutionState.Terminated) { //TODO: Load state from previously suspended application } // Place the frame in the current Window Window.Current.Content = rootFrame; } if (rootFrame.Content == null) { // When the navigation stack isn't restored navigate to the first page, // configuring the new page by passing required information as a navigation // parameter if (!rootFrame.Navigate(typeof(MainPage), args.Arguments)) { throw new Exception("Failed to create initial page"); } } // Ensure the current window is active Window.Current.Activate(); }   Notice that in addition to creating a Frame the code also checks to see if the app was previously terminated so that you can load any state/data that the user may need when the app is launched again. If you’re new to the lifecycle of Windows 8 store apps the following image shows how an app can be running, suspended, and terminated.   If the user switches from an app they’re running the app will be suspended in memory. The app may stay suspended or may be terminated depending on how much memory the OS thinks it needs so it’s important to save state in case the application is ultimately terminated and has to be started fresh. Although I won’t cover saving application state here, additional information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh465099.aspx. Another method in App.xaml.cs named OnSuspending() is also included in App.xaml.cs that can be used to store state as the user switches to another application:   /// <summary> /// Invoked when application execution is being suspended. Application state is saved /// without knowing whether the application will be terminated or resumed with the contents /// of memory still intact. /// </summary> /// <param name="sender">The source of the suspend request.</param> /// <param name="e">Details about the suspend request.</param> private void OnSuspending(object sender, SuspendingEventArgs e) { var deferral = e.SuspendingOperation.GetDeferral(); //TODO: Save application state and stop any background activity deferral.Complete(); } The MainPage.xaml and MainPage.xaml.cs Files The Blank App project adds a file named MainPage.xaml that acts as the initial screen for the application. It doesn’t include anything aside from an empty <Grid> XAML element in it. The code-behind class named MainPage.xaml.cs includes a constructor as well as a method named OnNavigatedTo() that is called once the page is displayed in the frame.   /// <summary> /// An empty page that can be used on its own or navigated to within a Frame. /// </summary> public sealed partial class MainPage : Page { public MainPage() { this.InitializeComponent(); } /// <summary> /// Invoked when this page is about to be displayed in a Frame. /// </summary> /// <param name="e">Event data that describes how this page was reached. The Parameter /// property is typically used to configure the page.</param> protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e) { } }   If you’re experienced with XAML you can switch to Design mode and start dragging and dropping XAML controls from the ToolBox in Visual Studio. If you prefer to type XAML you can do that as well in the XAML editor or while in split mode. Many of the controls available in WPF and Silverlight are included such as Canvas, Grid, StackPanel, and Border for layout. Standard input controls are also included such as TextBox, CheckBox, PasswordBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, ListBox, and more. MediaElement is available for rendering video or playing audio files. Some of the “common” XAML controls included out of the box are shown next:   Although XAML/C# Windows 8 store apps don’t include all of the functionality available in Silverlight 5, the core functionality required to build store apps is there with additional functionality available in open source projects such as Callisto (started by Microsoft’s Tim Heuer), Q42.WinRT, and others. Standard XAML data binding can be used to bind C# objects to controls, converters can be used to manipulate data during the data binding process, and custom styles and templates can be applied to controls to modify them. Although Visual Studio 2012 doesn’t support visually creating styles or templates, Expression Blend 5 handles that very well. To get started building the initial screen of a Windows 8 app you can start adding controls as mentioned earlier. Simply place them inside of the <Grid> element that’s included. You can arrange controls in a stacked manner using the StackPanel control, add a border around controls using the Border control, arrange controls in columns and rows using the Grid control, or absolutely position controls using the Canvas control. One of the controls that may be new to you is the AppBar. It can be used to add menu/toolbar functionality into a store app and keep the app clean and focused. You can place an AppBar at the top or bottom of the screen. A user on a touch device can swipe up to display the bottom AppBar or right-click when using a mouse. An example of defining an AppBar that contains an Edit button is shown next. The EditAppBarButtonStyle is available in the StandardStyles.xaml file mentioned earlier. <Page.BottomAppBar> <AppBar x:Name="ApplicationAppBar" Padding="10,0,10,0" AutomationProperties.Name="Bottom App Bar"> <Grid> <StackPanel x:Name="RightPanel" Orientation="Horizontal" Grid.Column="1" HorizontalAlignment="Right"> <Button x:Name="Edit" Style="{StaticResource EditAppBarButtonStyle}" Tag="Edit" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> </AppBar> </Page.BottomAppBar> Like standard XAML controls, the <Button> control in the AppBar can be wired to an event handler method in the MainPage.Xaml.cs file or even bound to a ViewModel object using “commanding” if your app follows the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern (check out the MVVM Light package available through NuGet if you’re using MVVM with Windows 8 store apps). The AppBar can be used to navigate to different screens, show and hide controls, display dialogs, show settings screens, and more.   The Package.appxmanifest File The Package.appxmanifest file contains configuration details about your Windows 8 store app. By double-clicking it in Visual Studio you can define the splash screen image, small and wide logo images used for tiles on the start screen, orientation information, and more. You can also define what capabilities the app has such as if it uses the Internet, supports geolocation functionality, requires a microphone or webcam, etc. App declarations such as background processes, file picker functionality, and sharing can also be defined Finally, information about how the app is packaged for deployment to the store can also be defined. Summary If you already have some experience working with XAML technologies you’ll find that getting started building Windows 8 applications is pretty straightforward. Many of the controls available in Silverlight and WPF are available making it easy to get started without having to relearn a lot of new technologies. In the next post in this series I’ll discuss additional features that can be used in your Windows 8 store apps.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 01, 2012

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

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• Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 Released

  - by ScottGu

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

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• Adding Client Validation To DataAnnotations DataType Attribute

  - by srkirkland

  The System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace contains a validation attribute called DataTypeAttribute, which takes an enum specifying what data type the given property conforms to.  Here are a few quick examples: public class DataTypeEntity { [DataType(DataType.Date)] public DateTime DateTime { get; set; }   [DataType(DataType.EmailAddress)] public string EmailAddress { get; set; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } This attribute comes in handy when using ASP.NET MVC, because the type you specify will determine what “template” MVC uses.  Thus, for the DateTime property if you create a partial in Views/[loc]/EditorTemplates/Date.ascx (or cshtml for razor), that view will be used to render the property when using any of the Html.EditorFor() methods. One thing that the DataType() validation attribute does not do is any actual validation.  To see this, let’s take a look at the EmailAddress property above.  It turns out that regardless of the value you provide, the entity will be considered valid: //valid new DataTypeEntity {EmailAddress = "Foo"}; .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Hmmm.  Since DataType() doesn’t validate, that leaves us with two options: (1) Create our own attributes for each datatype to validate, like [Date], or (2) add validation into the DataType attribute directly.  In this post, I will show you how to hookup client-side validation to the existing DataType() attribute for a desired type.  From there adding server-side validation would be a breeze and even writing a custom validation attribute would be simple (more on that in future posts). Validation All The Way Down Our goal will be to leave our DataTypeEntity class (from above) untouched, requiring no reference to System.Web.Mvc.  Then we will make an ASP.NET MVC project that allows us to create a new DataTypeEntity and hookup automatic client-side date validation using the suggested “out-of-the-box” jquery.validate bits that are included with ASP.NET MVC 3.  For simplicity I’m going to focus on the only DateTime field, but the concept is generally the same for any other DataType. Building a DataTypeAttribute Adapter To start we will need to build a new validation adapter that we can register using ASP.NET MVC’s DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider.RegisterAdapter() method.  This method takes two Type parameters; The first is the attribute we are looking to validate with and the second is an adapter that should subclass System.Web.Mvc.ModelValidator. Since we are extending DataAnnotations we can use the subclass of ModelValidator called DataAnnotationsModelValidator<>.  This takes a generic argument of type DataAnnotations.ValidationAttribute, which lucky for us means the DataTypeAttribute will fit in nicely. So starting from there and implementing the required constructor, we get: public class DataTypeAttributeAdapter : DataAnnotationsModelValidator<DataTypeAttribute> { public DataTypeAttributeAdapter(ModelMetadata metadata, ControllerContext context, DataTypeAttribute attribute) : base(metadata, context, attribute) { } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now you have a full-fledged validation adapter, although it doesn’t do anything yet.  There are two methods you can override to add functionality, IEnumerable<ModelValidationResult> Validate(object container) and IEnumerable<ModelClientValidationRule> GetClientValidationRules().  Adding logic to the server-side Validate() method is pretty straightforward, and for this post I’m going to focus on GetClientValidationRules(). Adding a Client Validation Rule Adding client validation is now incredibly easy because jquery.validate is very powerful and already comes with a ton of validators (including date and regular expressions for our email example).  Teamed with the new unobtrusive validation javascript support we can make short work of our ModelClientValidationDateRule: public class ModelClientValidationDateRule : ModelClientValidationRule { public ModelClientValidationDateRule(string errorMessage) { ErrorMessage = errorMessage; ValidationType = "date"; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If your validation has additional parameters you can the ValidationParameters IDictionary<string,object> to include them.  There is a little bit of conventions magic going on here, but the distilled version is that we are defining a “date” validation type, which will be included as html5 data-* attributes (specifically data-val-date).  Then jquery.validate.unobtrusive takes this attribute and basically passes it along to jquery.validate, which knows how to handle date validation. Finishing our DataTypeAttribute Adapter Now that we have a model client validation rule, we can return it in the GetClientValidationRules() method of our DataTypeAttributeAdapter created above.  Basically I want to say if DataType.Date was provided, then return the date rule with a given error message (using ValidationAttribute.FormatErrorMessage()).  The entire adapter is below: public class DataTypeAttributeAdapter : DataAnnotationsModelValidator<DataTypeAttribute> { public DataTypeAttributeAdapter(ModelMetadata metadata, ControllerContext context, DataTypeAttribute attribute) : base(metadata, context, attribute) { }   public override System.Collections.Generic.IEnumerable<ModelClientValidationRule> GetClientValidationRules() { if (Attribute.DataType == DataType.Date) { return new[] { new ModelClientValidationDateRule(Attribute.FormatErrorMessage(Metadata.GetDisplayName())) }; }   return base.GetClientValidationRules(); } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Putting it all together Now that we have an adapter for the DataTypeAttribute, we just need to tell ASP.NET MVC to use it.  The easiest way to do this is to use the built in DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider by calling RegisterAdapter() in your global.asax startup method. DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider.RegisterAdapter(typeof(DataTypeAttribute), typeof(DataTypeAttributeAdapter)); .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Show and Tell Let’s see this in action using a clean ASP.NET MVC 3 project.  First make sure to reference the jquery, jquery.vaidate and jquery.validate.unobtrusive scripts that you will need for client validation. Next, let’s make a model class (note we are using the same built-in DataType() attribute that comes with System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations). public class DataTypeEntity { [DataType(DataType.Date, ErrorMessage = "Please enter a valid date (ex: 2/14/2011)")] public DateTime DateTime { get; set; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Then we make a create page with a strongly-typed DataTypeEntity model, the form section is shown below (notice we are just using EditorForModel): @using (Html.BeginForm()) { @Html.ValidationSummary(true) <fieldset> <legend>Fields</legend>   @Html.EditorForModel()   <p> <input type="submit" value="Create" /> </p> </fieldset> } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The final step is to register the adapter in our global.asax file: DataAnnotationsModelValidatorProvider.RegisterAdapter(typeof(DataTypeAttribute), typeof(DataTypeAttributeAdapter)); Now we are ready to run the page: Looking at the datetime field’s html, we see that our adapter added some data-* validation attributes: <input type="text" value="1/1/0001" name="DateTime" id="DateTime" data-val-required="The DateTime field is required." data-val-date="Please enter a valid date (ex: 2/14/2011)" data-val="true" class="text-box single-line valid"> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Here data-val-required was added automatically because DateTime is non-nullable, and data-val-date was added by our validation adapter.  Now if we try to add an invalid date: Our custom error message is displayed via client-side validation as soon as we tab out of the box.  If we didn’t include a custom validation message, the default DataTypeAttribute “The field {0} is invalid” would have been shown (of course we can change the default as well).  Note we did not specify server-side validation, but in this case we don’t have to because an invalid date will cause a server-side error during model binding. Conclusion I really like how easy it is to register new data annotations model validators, whether they are your own or, as in this post, supplements to existing validation attributes.  I’m still debating about whether adding the validation directly in the DataType attribute is the correct place to put it versus creating a dedicated “Date” validation attribute, but it’s nice to know either option is available and, as we’ve seen, simple to implement. I’m also working through the nascent stages of an open source project that will create validation attribute extensions to the existing data annotations providers using similar techniques as seen above (examples: Email, Url, EqualTo, Min, Max, CreditCard, etc).  Keep an eye on this blog and subscribe to my twitter feed (@srkirkland) if you are interested for announcements.

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• How to avoid the Portlet Skin mismatch

  - by Martin Deh

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

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• Jolicloud is a Nifty New OS for Your Netbook

  - by Matthew Guay

  Want to breathe new life into your netbook?  Here’s a quick look at Jolicloud, a unique new Linux based OS that lets you use your netbook in a whole new way. Netbooks have been an interesting category of computers.  When they were first released, most netbooks came with a stripped down Linux based operating system designed to let you easily access the internet first and foremost.  Consumers wanted more from their netbooks, so full OSes such as Windows XP and Ubuntu became the standard on netbooks.  Microsoft worked hard to get Windows 7 working great on netbooks, and today most netbooks run Windows 7 great.  But the Linux community hasn’t stood still either, and Jolicloud is proof of that.  Jolicloud is a unique OS designed to bring the best of both webapps and standard programs to your netbook.   Keep reading to see if this is the perfect netbook OS for you. Getting Started Installing Jolicloud on your netbook is easy thanks to a the Jolicloud Express installer for Windows.  Since many netbooks run Windows by default, this makes it easy to install Jolicloud.  Plus, your Windows install is left untouched, so you can still easily access all your Windows files and programs. Download and run the roughly 700Mb installer (link below) just as a normal installer in Windows. This will first extract the needed files. Click Get started to install Jolicloud on your netbook. Enter a username, password, and nickname for your computer.  Please note that the username must be all lowercase, and the nickname should not contain spaces or special characters.   Now you can review the default installation settings.  By default it will take up 39Gb and install on your C:\ drive in English.  If you wish to change this, click Change. We chose to install it on the D: drive on this netbook, as its harddrive was already partitioned into two parts.  Click Save when your settings are all correct, and then click Next in the previous window. Jolicloud will prepare for the installation.  This took about 5 minutes in our test.  Click Next when this is finished. Click Restart now to install and run Jolicloud. When your netbook reboots, it will initialize the Jolicloud setup. It will then automatically finish the installation.  Just sit back and wait; there’s nothing for you to do right now.  The installation took about 20 minutes in our test. Jolicloud will automatically reboot when the setup is finished. Once it’s rebooted, you’re ready to go!  Enter the username, then the password, that you chose earlier when you were installing Jolicloud from Windows. Welcome to your Jolicloud desktop! Hardware Support We installed Jolicloud on a Samsung N150 netbook with an Atom N450 processor, 1Gb Ram, 250Gb harddrive, and WiFi b/g/n with Bluetooth.  Amazingly, once Jolicloud was installed, everything was ready to use.  No drivers to install, no settings to hassle with, it was all installed and set up perfectly.  Power settings worked great, and closing the netbook put it to sleep just like in Windows. WiFi drivers have typically been difficult to find and install on Linux, but Jolicloud had our netbook’s wifi working immediately.  To get online, simply click the Wireless icon on the top right, and select the wireless network you want to connect to. Jolicloud will let you know when it is signed on. Wired Lan networking was also seamless; simply connect your cable and you’re ready to go.  The webcam and touchpad also worked perfectly directly.  The only thing missing was multitouch; this touchpad has two finger scroll, pinch zoom, and other nice multitouch features in Windows, but in Julicloud it only functioned as a standard touchpad.  It did have tap to click activated by default, as well as right-side scrolling, which is nice. Jolicloud also supported our video card without any extra work.  The native resolution was already selected, and the only problem we had with the screen was that there was no apparent way to change the brightness.  This is not a major problem, but would be nice to have.  The Samsung N150 has Intel GMA3150 integrated graphics, and Jolicloud promises 1080p HD video on it.  It did playback 720p H.264 video flawlessly without installing anything extra, but it stuttered on full 1080p HD (which is the exact same as this netbook’s video playback in Windows 7 – 720p works great, but it stutters on 1080p).  We would be excited to see full HD on this netbook, but 720p is definitely fine for most stuff.   Jolicloud supports a wide range of netbooks, and based on our experience we would expect it to work as good on any supported hardware.  Check out the list of supported netbooks to see if your netbook is supported; if not, it still may work but you may have to install special drivers. Jolicloud’s performance was very similar to Windows 7 on our netbook.  It boots in about 30 seconds, and apps load fairly quickly.  In general, we couldn’t tell much difference in performance between Jolicloud and Windows 7, though this isn’t a problem since Windows 7 runs great on the current generation of netbooks. Using Jolicloud Ready to start putting Jolicloud to use?  Your fresh Jolicloud install you can run several built-in apps, such as Firefox, a calculator, and the chat client Pidgin.  It also has a media player and file viewer installed, so you can play MP3s or MPG videos, or read PDF ebooks without installing anything extra.  It also has Flash player installed so you can watch videos online easily. You can also directly access all of your files from the right side of your home screen.  You can even access your Windows files; in our test, the 116.9 GB Media was C: from Windows.  Select it to browse and open any file you had saved in Windows. You may need to enter your password to access it. Once you’re authenticated it, you’ll see all of your Windows files and folders.  Your User files (Documents, Music, Videos, etc.) will be in the Users folder. And, you can easily add files from removable media such as USB flash drives and memory cards.  Jolicloud recognized a flash drive we tested with no trouble at all. Add new apps But, the best part about Jolicloud is that it makes it very easy to install new apps.  Click the Get Started button on your homescreen. You’ll first need to create an account.  You can then use this same account on another netbook if you wish, and your settings will automatically be synced between the two. You can either signup using your Facebook account, …or you can sign up the traditional way with your email address, name, and password.  If you sign up this way, you will need to confirm your email address before your account will be finished. Now, choose your netbook model from the list, and enter a name for your computer. And that’s it!  You’ll now see the Jolicloud dashboard, which will show you updates and notifications from friends who also use Jolicloud. Click the App directory to find new apps for your netbook.  Here you will find a variety of webapps, such as Gmail, along with native applications, such as Skype, that you can install on your netbook.  Simply click the Install button on the right to add the app to your netbook. You will be prompted to enter your system password, and then the app will install without any further input.   Once an app is installed, a check mark will appear beside its name.  You can remove it by clicking the Remove button, and it will uninstall seamlessly. Webapps, such as Gmail, actually run in in a Chrome-powered window that lets the webapp run full screen.  This gives the webapps a native feel, but actually they’re just running the same as they would in a standard web browser.   The Jolicloud Interface Most apps run maximized, and there is no way to run them smaller.  This in general works good, since with small screens most apps need to run full-screen anyhow. Smaller apps, such as a calculator or the Pidgin chat client, run in a window just like they do on other operating systems. You can switch to another app that’s running by selecting it’s icon on the top left, or you can go back to the home screen by clicking the home screen.  If you’re finished with an program, simply click the red X button on the top right of the window when you’re running it. Or, you can switch between programs using standard keyboard shortcuts such as Alt-tab. The default page on the home screen is the favorites page, and all of your other programs are orginized in their own sections on the left hand side.  But, if you want to add one of these to your favorites page, simply right-click on it and select Add to Favorites. When you’re done for the day, you can simply close your netbook to put it to sleep.  Or, if you want to shut down, just press the Quit button on the bottom right of the home screen and then select Shut Down. Booting Jolicloud When you install Jolicloud, it will set itself as the default operating system.  Now, when you boot your netbook, it will show you a list of installed operating systems.  You can select either Windows or Jolicloud, but if you don’t make a selection it will boot into Jolicloud after waiting 10 seconds. If you’d perfer to boot into Windows by default, you can easily change this.  First, boot your netbook in to Windows.  Open the start menu, right-click on the Computer button, and select Properties.   Click the “Advanced system settings” link on the left side. Click the Settings button in the Startup and Recovery section. Now, select Windows as the default operating system, and click Ok.  Your netbook will now boot into Windows by default, but will give you 10 seconds to choose to boot into Jolicloud when you start your computer. Or, if you decided you don’t want Jolicloud, you can easily uninstall it from within Windows. Please note that this will also remove any files you may have saved in Jolicloud, so be sure to copy them to your Windows drive before uninstalling. To uninstall Jolicloud from within Windows, open Control Panel, and select Uninstall a Program. Scroll down to select Jolicloud, and click Uninstall/Change. Click Yes to confirm that you want to uninstall Jolicloud. After a few moments, it will let you know that Jolicloud has been uninstalled.  You’re netbook is now back the same as it was before you installed Jolicloud, with only Windows installed. Closing Whether you’re wanting to replace your current OS on your netbook or would simply like to try out a fresh new Linux version on your netbook, Jolicloud is a great option for you.  We were very impressed by it’s solid hardware support and the ease of installing new apps in Jolicloud.  Rather than simply giving us a standard OS, Jolicloud offers a unique way to use your netbook with native programs and webapps.  And whether you’re an IT pro or are a new computer user, Jolicloud was easy enough to use that anyone can do it.  Give it a try, and let us know what your favorite netbook OS is! Link Download Jolicloud for your netbook Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips How To Change XSplash Themes in Ubuntu 9.10Verify the Integrity of Windows Vista System FilesMonitor Multiple Logs in a Single Shell with MultiTail for LinuxHide Some or All of the GUI Bars in FirefoxAsk the Readers: Do You Use a Laptop, Desktop, or Both? TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Stop In The Name Of Love (Firefox addon) Chitika iPad Labs Gives Live iPad Sale Stats Heaven & Hell Finder Icon Using TrueCrypt to Secure Your Data Quickly Schedule Meetings With NeedtoMeet Share Flickr Photos On Facebook Automatically

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• Working with PivotTables in Excel

  - by Mark Virtue

  PivotTables are one of the most powerful features of Microsoft Excel.  They allow large amounts of data to be analyzed and summarized in just a few mouse clicks. In this article, we explore PivotTables, understand what they are, and learn how to create and customize them. Note:  This article is written using Excel 2010 (Beta).  The concept of a PivotTable has changed little over the years, but the method of creating one has changed in nearly every iteration of Excel.  If you are using a version of Excel that is not 2010, expect different screens from the ones you see in this article. A Little History In the early days of spreadsheet programs, Lotus 1-2-3 ruled the roost.  Its dominance was so complete that people thought it was a waste of time for Microsoft to bother developing their own spreadsheet software (Excel) to compete with Lotus.  Flash-forward to 2010, and Excel’s dominance of the spreadsheet market is greater than Lotus’s ever was, while the number of users still running Lotus 1-2-3 is approaching zero.  How did this happen?  What caused such a dramatic reversal of fortunes? Industry analysts put it down to two factors:  Firstly, Lotus decided that this fancy new GUI platform called “Windows” was a passing fad that would never take off.  They declined to create a Windows version of Lotus 1-2-3 (for a few years, anyway), predicting that their DOS version of the software was all anyone would ever need.  Microsoft, naturally, developed Excel exclusively for Windows.  Secondly, Microsoft developed a feature for Excel that Lotus didn’t provide in 1-2-3, namely PivotTables.  The PivotTables feature, exclusive to Excel, was deemed so staggeringly useful that people were willing to learn an entire new software package (Excel) rather than stick with a program (1-2-3) that didn’t have it.  This one feature, along with the misjudgment of the success of Windows, was the death-knell for Lotus 1-2-3, and the beginning of the success of Microsoft Excel. Understanding PivotTables So what is a PivotTable, exactly? Put simply, a PivotTable is a summary of some data, created to allow easy analysis of said data.  But unlike a manually created summary, Excel PivotTables are interactive.  Once you have created one, you can easily change it if it doesn’t offer the exact insights into your data that you were hoping for.  In a couple of clicks the summary can be “pivoted” – rotated in such a way that the column headings become row headings, and vice versa.  There’s a lot more that can be done, too.  Rather than try to describe all the features of PivotTables, we’ll simply demonstrate them… The data that you analyze using a PivotTable can’t be just any data – it has to be raw data, previously unprocessed (unsummarized) – typically a list of some sort.  An example of this might be the list of sales transactions in a company for the past six months. Examine the data shown below: Notice that this is not raw data.  In fact, it is already a summary of some sort.  In cell B3 we can see $30,000, which apparently is the total of James Cook’s sales for the month of January.  So where is the raw data?  How did we arrive at the figure of $30,000?  Where is the original list of sales transactions that this figure was generated from?  It’s clear that somewhere, someone must have gone to the trouble of collating all of the sales transactions for the past six months into the summary we see above.  How long do you suppose this took?  An hour?  Ten?  Probably. If we were to track down the original list of sales transactions, it might look something like this: You may be surprised to learn that, using the PivotTable feature of Excel, we can create a monthly sales summary similar to the one above in a few seconds, with only a few mouse clicks.  We can do this – and a lot more too! How to Create a PivotTable First, ensure that you have some raw data in a worksheet in Excel.  A list of financial transactions is typical, but it can be a list of just about anything:  Employee contact details, your CD collection, or fuel consumption figures for your company’s fleet of cars. So we start Excel… …and we load such a list… Once we have the list open in Excel, we’re ready to start creating the PivotTable. Click on any one single cell within the list: Then, from the Insert tab, click the PivotTable icon: The Create PivotTable box appears, asking you two questions:  What data should your new PivotTable be based on, and where should it be created?  Because we already clicked on a cell within the list (in the step above), the entire list surrounding that cell is already selected for us ($A$1:$G$88 on the Payments sheet, in this example).  Note that we could select a list in any other region of any other worksheet, or even some external data source, such as an Access database table, or even a MS-SQL Server database table.  We also need to select whether we want our new PivotTable to be created on a new worksheet, or on an existing one.  In this example we will select a new one: The new worksheet is created for us, and a blank PivotTable is created on that worksheet: Another box also appears:  The PivotTable Field List.  This field list will be shown whenever we click on any cell within the PivotTable (above): The list of fields in the top part of the box is actually the collection of column headings from the original raw data worksheet.  The four blank boxes in the lower part of the screen allow us to choose the way we would like our PivotTable to summarize the raw data.  So far, there is nothing in those boxes, so the PivotTable is blank.  All we need to do is drag fields down from the list above and drop them in the lower boxes.  A PivotTable is then automatically created to match our instructions.  If we get it wrong, we only need to drag the fields back to where they came from and/or drag new fields down to replace them. The Values box is arguably the most important of the four.  The field that is dragged into this box represents the data that needs to be summarized in some way (by summing, averaging, finding the maximum, minimum, etc).  It is almost always numerical data.  A perfect candidate for this box in our sample data is the “Amount” field/column.  Let’s drag that field into the Values box: Notice that (a) the “Amount” field in the list of fields is now ticked, and “Sum of Amount” has been added to the Values box, indicating that the amount column has been summed. If we examine the PivotTable itself, we indeed find the sum of all the “Amount” values from the raw data worksheet: We’ve created our first PivotTable!  Handy, but not particularly impressive.  It’s likely that we need a little more insight into our data than that. Referring to our sample data, we need to identify one or more column headings that we could conceivably use to split this total.  For example, we may decide that we would like to see a summary of our data where we have a row heading for each of the different salespersons in our company, and a total for each.  To achieve this, all we need to do is to drag the “Salesperson” field into the Row Labels box: Now, finally, things start to get interesting!  Our PivotTable starts to take shape….   With a couple of clicks we have created a table that would have taken a long time to do manually. So what else can we do?  Well, in one sense our PivotTable is complete.  We’ve created a useful summary of our source data.  The important stuff is already learned!  For the rest of the article, we will examine some ways that more complex PivotTables can be created, and ways that those PivotTables can be customized. First, we can create a two-dimensional table.  Let’s do that by using “Payment Method” as a column heading.  Simply drag the “Payment Method” heading to the Column Labels box: Which looks like this: Starting to get very cool! Let’s make it a three-dimensional table.  What could such a table possibly look like?  Well, let’s see… Drag the “Package” column/heading to the Report Filter box: Notice where it ends up…. This allows us to filter our report based on which “holiday package” was being purchased.  For example, we can see the breakdown of salesperson vs payment method for all packages, or, with a couple of clicks, change it to show the same breakdown for the “Sunseekers” package: And so, if you think about it the right way, our PivotTable is now three-dimensional.  Let’s keep customizing… If it turns out, say, that we only want to see cheque and credit card transactions (i.e. no cash transactions), then we can deselect the “Cash” item from the column headings.  Click the drop-down arrow next to Column Labels, and untick “Cash”: Let’s see what that looks like…As you can see, “Cash” is gone. Formatting This is obviously a very powerful system, but so far the results look very plain and boring.  For a start, the numbers that we’re summing do not look like dollar amounts – just plain old numbers.  Let’s rectify that. A temptation might be to do what we’re used to doing in such circumstances and simply select the whole table (or the whole worksheet) and use the standard number formatting buttons on the toolbar to complete the formatting.  The problem with that approach is that if you ever change the structure of the PivotTable in the future (which is 99% likely), then those number formats will be lost.  We need a way that will make them (semi-)permanent. First, we locate the “Sum of Amount” entry in the Values box, and click on it.  A menu appears.  We select Value Field Settings… from the menu: The Value Field Settings box appears. Click the Number Format button, and the standard Format Cells box appears: From the Category list, select (say) Accounting, and drop the number of decimal places to 0.  Click OK a few times to get back to the PivotTable… As you can see, the numbers have been correctly formatted as dollar amounts. While we’re on the subject of formatting, let’s format the entire PivotTable.  There are a few ways to do this.  Let’s use a simple one… Click the PivotTable Tools/Design tab: Then drop down the arrow in the bottom-right of the PivotTable Styles list to see a vast collection of built-in styles: Choose any one that appeals, and look at the result in your PivotTable:   Other Options We can work with dates as well.  Now usually, there are many, many dates in a transaction list such as the one we started with.  But Excel provides the option to group data items together by day, week, month, year, etc.  Let’s see how this is done. First, let’s remove the “Payment Method” column from the Column Labels box (simply drag it back up to the field list), and replace it with the “Date Booked” column: As you can see, this makes our PivotTable instantly useless, giving us one column for each date that a transaction occurred on – a very wide table! To fix this, right-click on any date and select Group… from the context-menu: The grouping box appears.  We select Months and click OK: Voila!  A much more useful table: (Incidentally, this table is virtually identical to the one shown at the beginning of this article – the original sales summary that was created manually.) Another cool thing to be aware of is that you can have more than one set of row headings (or column headings): …which looks like this…. You can do a similar thing with column headings (or even report filters). Keeping things simple again, let’s see how to plot averaged values, rather than summed values. First, click on “Sum of Amount”, and select Value Field Settings… from the context-menu that appears: In the Summarize value field by list in the Value Field Settings box, select Average: While we’re here, let’s change the Custom Name, from “Average of Amount” to something a little more concise.  Type in something like “Avg”: Click OK, and see what it looks like.  Notice that all the values change from summed totals to averages, and the table title (top-left cell) has changed to “Avg”: If we like, we can even have sums, averages and counts (counts = how many sales there were) all on the same PivotTable! Here are the steps to get something like that in place (starting from a blank PivotTable): Drag “Salesperson” into the Column Labels Drag “Amount” field down into the Values box three times For the first “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Total” and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the second “Amount” field, change its custom name to “Average”, its function to Average and it’s number format to Accounting (0 decimal places) For the third “Amount” field, change its name to “Count” and its function to Count Drag the automatically created field from Column Labels to Row Labels Here’s what we end up with: Total, average and count on the same PivotTable! Conclusion There are many, many more features and options for PivotTables created by Microsoft Excel – far too many to list in an article like this.  To fully cover the potential of PivotTables, a small book (or a large website) would be required.  Brave and/or geeky readers can explore PivotTables further quite easily:  Simply right-click on just about everything, and see what options become available to you.  There are also the two ribbon-tabs: PivotTable Tools/Options and Design.  It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake – it’s easy to delete the PivotTable and start again – a possibility old DOS users of Lotus 1-2-3 never had. We’ve included an Excel that should work with most versions of Excel, so you can download to practice your PivotTable skills. Download Our Practice Excel File Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Magnify Selected Cells In Excel 2007Share Access Data with Excel in Office 2010Make Excel 2007 Print Gridlines In Workbook FileMake Excel 2007 Always Save in Excel 2003 FormatConvert Older Excel Documents to Excel 2007 Format TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Ben & Jerry’s Free Cone Day, 3/23/10 New Stinger from McAfee Helps Remove ‘FakeAlert’ Threats Google Apps Marketplace: Tools & Services For Google Apps Users Get News Quick and Precise With Newser Scan for Viruses in Ubuntu using ClamAV Replace Your Windows Task Manager With System Explorer

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• Passing multiple POST parameters to Web API Controller Methods

  - by Rick Strahl

  ASP.NET Web API introduces a new API for creating REST APIs and making AJAX callbacks to the server. This new API provides a host of new great functionality that unifies many of the features of many of the various AJAX/REST APIs that Microsoft created before it - ASP.NET AJAX, WCF REST specifically - and combines them into a whole more consistent API. Web API addresses many of the concerns that developers had with these older APIs, namely that it was very difficult to build consistent REST style resource APIs easily. While Web API provides many new features and makes many scenarios much easier, a lot of the focus has been on making it easier to build REST compliant APIs that are focused on resource based solutions and HTTP verbs. But  RPC style calls that are common with AJAX callbacks in Web applications, have gotten a lot less focus and there are a few scenarios that are not that obvious, especially if you're expecting Web API to provide functionality similar to ASP.NET AJAX style AJAX callbacks. RPC vs. 'Proper' REST RPC style HTTP calls mimic calling a method with parameters and returning a result. Rather than mapping explicit server side resources or 'nouns' RPC calls tend simply map a server side operation, passing in parameters and receiving a typed result where parameters and result values are marshaled over HTTP. Typically RPC calls - like SOAP calls - tend to always be POST operations rather than following HTTP conventions and using the GET/POST/PUT/DELETE etc. verbs to implicitly determine what operation needs to be fired. RPC might not be considered 'cool' anymore, but for typical private AJAX backend operations of a Web site I'd wager that a large percentage of use cases of Web API will fall towards RPC style calls rather than 'proper' REST style APIs. Web applications that have needs for things like live validation against data, filling data based on user inputs, handling small UI updates often don't lend themselves very well to limited HTTP verb usage. It might not be what the cool kids do, but I don't see RPC calls getting replaced by proper REST APIs any time soon.  Proper REST has its place - for 'real' API scenarios that manage and publish/share resources, but for more transactional operations RPC seems a better choice and much easier to implement than trying to shoehorn a boatload of endpoint methods into a few HTTP verbs. In any case Web API does a good job of providing both RPC abstraction as well as the HTTP Verb/REST abstraction. RPC works well out of the box, but there are some differences especially if you're coming from ASP.NET AJAX service or WCF Rest when it comes to multiple parameters. Action Routing for RPC Style Calls If you've looked at Web API demos you've probably seen a bunch of examples of how to create HTTP Verb based routing endpoints. Verb based routing essentially maps a controller and then uses HTTP verbs to map the methods that are called in response to HTTP requests. This works great for resource APIs but doesn't work so well when you have many operational methods in a single controller. HTTP Verb routing is limited to the few HTTP verbs available (plus separate method signatures) and - worse than that - you can't easily extend the controller with custom routes or action routing beyond that. Thankfully Web API also supports Action based routing which allows you create RPC style endpoints fairly easily:RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute( name: "AlbumRpcApiAction", routeTemplate: "albums/{action}/{title}", defaults: new { title = RouteParameter.Optional, controller = "AlbumApi", action = "GetAblums" } ); This uses traditional MVC style {action} method routing which is different from the HTTP verb based routing you might have read a bunch about in conjunction with Web API. Action based routing like above lets you specify an end point method in a Web API controller either via the {action} parameter in the route string or via a default value for custom routes. Using routing you can pass multiple parameters either on the route itself or pass parameters on the query string, via ModelBinding or content value binding. For most common scenarios this actually works very well. As long as you are passing either a single complex type via a POST operation, or multiple simple types via query string or POST buffer, there's no issue. But if you need to pass multiple parameters as was easily done with WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX things are not so obvious. Web API has no issue allowing for single parameter like this:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album) { return String.Format("{0} {1:d}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered); } There are actually two ways to call this endpoint: albums/PostAlbum Using the Model Binder with plain POST values In this mechanism you're sending plain urlencoded POST values to the server which the ModelBinder then maps the parameter. Each property value is matched to each matching POST value. This works similar to the way that MVC's  ModelBinder works. Here's how you can POST using the ModelBinder and jQuery:$.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", data: { AlbumName: "Dirty Deeds", Entered: "5/1/2012" }, success: function (result) { alert(result); }, error: function (xhr, status, p3, p4) { var err = "Error " + " " + status + " " + p3; if (xhr.responseText && xhr.responseText[0] == "{") err = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText).message; alert(err); } }); Here's what the POST data looks like for this request: The model binder and it's straight form based POST mechanism is great for posting data directly from HTML pages to model objects. It avoids having to do manual conversions for many operations and is a great boon for AJAX callback requests. Using Web API JSON Formatter The other option is to post data using a JSON string. The process for this is similar except that you create a JavaScript object and serialize it to JSON first.album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: new Date(1977,0,1) } $.ajax( { url: "albums/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify(album), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Here the data is sent using a JSON object rather than form data and the data is JSON encoded over the wire. The trace reveals that the data is sent using plain JSON (Source above), which is a little more efficient since there's no UrlEncoding that occurs. BTW, notice that WebAPI automatically deals with the date. I provided the date as a plain string, rather than a JavaScript date value and the Formatter and ModelBinder both automatically map the date propertly to the Entered DateTime property of the Album object. Passing multiple Parameters to a Web API Controller Single parameters work fine in either of these RPC scenarios and that's to be expected. ModelBinding always works against a single object because it maps a model. But what happens when you want to pass multiple parameters? Consider an API Controller method that has a signature like the following:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(Album album, string userToken) Here I'm asking to pass two objects to an RPC method. Is that possible? This used to be fairly straight forward either with WCF REST and ASP.NET AJAX ASMX services, but as far as I can tell this is not directly possible using a POST operation with WebAPI. There a few workarounds that you can use to make this work: Use both POST *and* QueryString Parameters in Conjunction If you have both complex and simple parameters, you can pass simple parameters on the query string. The above would actually work with: /album/PostAlbum?userToken=sekkritt but that's not always possible. In this example it might not be a good idea to pass a user token on the query string though. It also won't work if you need to pass multiple complex objects, since query string values do not support complex type mapping. They only work with simple types. Use a single Object that wraps the two Parameters If you go by service based architecture guidelines every service method should always pass and return a single value only. The input should wrap potentially multiple input parameters and the output should convey status as well as provide the result value. You typically have a xxxRequest and a xxxResponse class that wraps the inputs and outputs. Here's what this method might look like:public PostAlbumResponse PostAlbum(PostAlbumRequest request) { var album = request.Album; var userToken = request.UserToken; return new PostAlbumResponse() { IsSuccess = true, Result = String.Format("{0} {1:d} {2}", album.AlbumName, album.Entered,userToken) }; } with these support types:public class PostAlbumRequest { public Album Album { get; set; } public User User { get; set; } public string UserToken { get; set; } } public class PostAlbumResponse { public string Result { get; set; } public bool IsSuccess { get; set; } public string ErrorMessage { get; set; } }   To call this method you now have to assemble these objects on the client and send it up as JSON:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result.Result); } }); I assemble the individual types first and then combine them in the data: property of the $.ajax() call into the actual object passed to the server, that mimics the structure of PostAlbumRequest server class that has Album, User and UserToken properties. This works well enough but it gets tedious if you have to create Request and Response types for each method signature. If you have common parameters that are always passed (like you always pass an album or usertoken) you might be able to abstract this to use a single object that gets reused for all methods, but this gets confusing too: Overload a single 'parameter' too much and it becomes a nightmare to decipher what your method actual can use. Use JObject to parse multiple Property Values out of an Object If you recall, ASP.NET AJAX and WCF REST used a 'wrapper' object to make default AJAX calls. Rather than directly calling a service you always passed an object which contained properties for each parameter: { parm1: Value, parm2: Value2 } WCF REST/ASP.NET AJAX would then parse this top level property values and map them to the parameters of the endpoint method. This automatic type wrapping functionality is no longer available directly in Web API, but since Web API now uses JSON.NET for it's JSON serializer you can actually simulate that behavior with a little extra code. You can use the JObject class to receive a dynamic JSON result and then using the dynamic cast of JObject to walk through the child objects and even parse them into strongly typed objects. Here's how to do this on the API Controller end:[HttpPost] public string PostAlbum(JObject jsonData) { dynamic json = jsonData; JObject jalbum = json.Album; JObject juser = json.User; string token = json.UserToken; var album = jalbum.ToObject<Album>(); var user = juser.ToObject<User>(); return String.Format("{0} {1} {2}", album.AlbumName, user.Name, token); } This is clearly not as nice as having the parameters passed directly, but it works to allow you to pass multiple parameters and access them using Web API. JObject is JSON.NET's generic object container which sports a nice dynamic interface that allows you to walk through the object's properties using standard 'dot' object syntax. All you have to do is cast the object to dynamic to get access to the property interface of the JSON type. Additionally JObject also allows you to parse JObject instances into strongly typed objects, which enables us here to retrieve the two objects passed as parameters from this jquery code:var album = { AlbumName: "PowerAge", Entered: "1/1/1977" } var user = { Name: "Rick" } var userToken = "sekkritt"; $.ajax( { url: "samples/PostAlbum", type: "POST", contentType: "application/json", data: JSON.stringify({ Album: album, User: user, UserToken: userToken }), success: function (result) { alert(result); } }); Summary ASP.NET Web API brings many new features and many advantages over the older Microsoft AJAX and REST APIs, but realize that some things like passing multiple strongly typed object parameters will work a bit differently. It's not insurmountable, but just knowing what options are available to simulate this behavior is good to know. Now let me say here that it's probably not a good practice to pass a bunch of parameters to an API call. Ideally APIs should be closely factored to accept single parameters or a single content parameter at least along with some identifier parameters that can be passed on the querystring. But saying that doesn't mean that occasionally you don't run into a situation where you have the need to pass several objects to the server and all three of the options I mentioned might have merit in different situations. For now I'm sure the question of how to pass multiple parameters will come up quite a bit from people migrating WCF REST or ASP.NET AJAX code to Web API. At least there are options available to make it work.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2012Posted in Web Api   Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• Simple MSBuild Configuration: Updating Assemblies With A Version Number

  - by srkirkland

  When distributing a library you often run up against versioning problems, once facet of which is simply determining which version of that library your client is running.  Of course, each project in your solution has an AssemblyInfo.cs file which provides, among other things, the ability to set the Assembly name and version number.  Unfortunately, setting the assembly version here would require not only changing the version manually for each build (depending on your schedule), but keeping it in sync across all projects.  There are many ways to solve this versioning problem, and in this blog post I’m going to try to explain what I think is the easiest and most flexible solution.  I will walk you through using MSBuild to create a simple build script, and I’ll even show how to (optionally) integrate with a Team City build server.  All of the code from this post can be found at https://github.com/srkirkland/BuildVersion. Create CommonAssemblyInfo.cs The first step is to create a common location for the repeated assembly info that is spread across all of your projects.  Create a new solution-level file (I usually create a Build/ folder in the solution root, but anywhere reachable by all your projects will do) called CommonAssemblyInfo.cs.  In here you can put any information common to all your assemblies, including the version number.  An example CommonAssemblyInfo.cs is as follows: using System.Reflection; using System.Resources; using System.Runtime.InteropServices;   [assembly: AssemblyCompany("University of California, Davis")] [assembly: AssemblyProduct("BuildVersionTest")] [assembly: AssemblyCopyright("Scott Kirkland & UC Regents")] [assembly: AssemblyConfiguration("")] [assembly: AssemblyTrademark("")]   [assembly: ComVisible(false)]   [assembly: AssemblyVersion("1.2.3.4")] //Will be replaced   [assembly: NeutralResourcesLanguage("en-US")] .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; }   Cleanup AssemblyInfo.cs & Link CommonAssemblyInfo.cs For each of your projects, you’ll want to clean up your assembly info to contain only information that is unique to that assembly – everything else will go in the CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file.  For most of my projects, that just means setting the AssemblyTitle, though you may feel AssemblyDescription is warranted.  An example AssemblyInfo.cs file is as follows: using System.Reflection;   [assembly: AssemblyTitle("BuildVersionTest")] .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Next, you need to “link” the CommonAssemblyinfo.cs file into your projects right beside your newly lean AssemblyInfo.cs file.  To do this, right click on your project and choose Add | Existing Item from the context menu.  Navigate to your CommonAssemblyinfo.cs file but instead of clicking Add, click the little down-arrow next to add and choose “Add as Link.”  You should see a little link graphic similar to this: We’ve actually reduced complexity a lot already, because if you build all of your assemblies will have the same common info, including the product name and our static (fake) assembly version.  Let’s take this one step further and introduce a build script. Create an MSBuild file What we want from the build script (for now) is basically just to have the common assembly version number changed via a parameter (eventually to be passed in by the build server) and then for the project to build.  Also we’d like to have a flexibility to define what build configuration to use (debug, release, etc). In order to find/replace the version number, we are going to use a Regular Expression to find and replace the text within your CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file.  There are many other ways to do this using community build task add-ins, but since we want to keep it simple let’s just define the Regular Expression task manually in a new file, Build.tasks (this example taken from the NuGet build.tasks file). <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Project ToolsVersion="4.0" DefaultTargets="Go" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <UsingTask TaskName="RegexTransform" TaskFactory="CodeTaskFactory" AssemblyFile="$(MSBuildToolsPath)\Microsoft.Build.Tasks.v4.0.dll"> <ParameterGroup> <Items ParameterType="Microsoft.Build.Framework.ITaskItem[]" /> </ParameterGroup> <Task> <Using Namespace="System.IO" /> <Using Namespace="System.Text.RegularExpressions" /> <Using Namespace="Microsoft.Build.Framework" /> <Code Type="Fragment" Language="cs"> <![CDATA[ foreach(ITaskItem item in Items) { string fileName = item.GetMetadata("FullPath"); string find = item.GetMetadata("Find"); string replaceWith = item.GetMetadata("ReplaceWith"); if(!File.Exists(fileName)) { Log.LogError(null, null, null, null, 0, 0, 0, 0, String.Format("Could not find version file: {0}", fileName), new object[0]); } string content = File.ReadAllText(fileName); File.WriteAllText( fileName, Regex.Replace( content, find, replaceWith ) ); } ]]> </Code> </Task> </UsingTask> </Project> .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } If you glance at the code, you’ll see it’s really just going a Regex.Replace() on a given file, which is exactly what we need. Now we are ready to write our build file, called (by convention) Build.proj. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Project ToolsVersion="4.0" DefaultTargets="Go" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/developer/msbuild/2003"> <Import Project="$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)\Build.tasks" /> <PropertyGroup> <Configuration Condition="'$(Configuration)' == ''">Debug</Configuration> <SolutionRoot>$(MSBuildProjectDirectory)</SolutionRoot> </PropertyGroup>   <ItemGroup> <RegexTransform Include="$(SolutionRoot)\CommonAssemblyInfo.cs"> <Find>(?&lt;major&gt;\d+)\.(?&lt;minor&gt;\d+)\.\d+\.(?&lt;revision&gt;\d+)</Find> <ReplaceWith>$(BUILD_NUMBER)</ReplaceWith> </RegexTransform> </ItemGroup>   <Target Name="Go" DependsOnTargets="UpdateAssemblyVersion; Build"> </Target>   <Target Name="UpdateAssemblyVersion" Condition="'$(BUILD_NUMBER)' != ''"> <RegexTransform Items="@(RegexTransform)" /> </Target>   <Target Name="Build"> <MSBuild Projects="$(SolutionRoot)\BuildVersionTest.sln" Targets="Build" /> </Target>   </Project> Reviewing this MSBuild file, we see that by default the “Go” target will be called, which in turn depends on “UpdateAssemblyVersion” and then “Build.”  We go ahead and import the Bulid.tasks file and then setup some handy properties for setting the build configuration and solution root (in this case, my build files are in the solution root, but we might want to create a Build/ directory later).  The rest of the file flows logically, we setup the RegexTransform to match version numbers such as <major>.<minor>.1.<revision> (1.2.3.4 in our example) and replace it with a $(BUILD_NUMBER) parameter which will be supplied externally.  The first target, “UpdateAssemblyVersion” just runs the RegexTransform, and the second target, “Build” just runs the default MSBuild on our solution. Testing the MSBuild file locally Now we have a build file which can replace assembly version numbers and build, so let’s setup a quick batch file to be able to build locally.  To do this you simply create a file called Build.cmd and have it call MSBuild on your Build.proj file.  I’ve added a bit more flexibility so you can specify build configuration and version number, which makes your Build.cmd look as follows: set config=%1 if "%config%" == "" ( set config=debug ) set version=%2 if "%version%" == "" ( set version=2.3.4.5 ) %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\msbuild Build.proj /p:Configuration="%config%" /p:build_number="%version%" .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } Now if you click on the Build.cmd file, you will get a default debug build using the version 2.3.4.5.  Let’s run it in a command window with the parameters set for a release build version 2.0.1.453.   Excellent!  We can now run one simple command and govern the build configuration and version number of our entire solution.  Each DLL produced will have the same version number, making determining which version of a library you are running very simple and accurate. Configure the build server (TeamCity) Of course you are not really going to want to run a build command manually every time, and typing in incrementing version numbers will also not be ideal.  A good solution is to have a computer (or set of computers) act as a build server and build your code for you, providing you a consistent environment, excellent reporting, and much more.  One of the most popular Build Servers is JetBrains’ TeamCity, and this last section will show you the few configuration parameters to use when setting up a build using your MSBuild file created earlier.  If you are using a different build server, the same principals should apply. First, when setting up the project you want to specify the “Build Number Format,” often given in the form <major>.<minor>.<revision>.<build>.  In this case you will set major/minor manually, and optionally revision (or you can use your VCS revision number with %build.vcs.number%), and then build using the {0} wildcard.  Thus your build number format might look like this: 2.0.1.{0}.  During each build, this value will be created and passed into the $BUILD_NUMBER variable of our Build.proj file, which then uses it to decorate your assemblies with the proper version. After setting up the build number, you must choose MSBuild as the Build Runner, then provide a path to your build file (Build.proj).  After specifying your MSBuild Version (equivalent to your .NET Framework Version), you have the option to specify targets (the default being “Go”) and additional MSBuild parameters.  The one parameter that is often useful is manually setting the configuration property (/p:Configuration="Release") if you want something other than the default (which is Debug in our example).  Your resulting configuration will look something like this: [Under General Settings] [Build Runner Settings]   Now every time your build is run, a newly incremented build version number will be generated and passed to MSBuild, which will then version your assemblies and build your solution.   A Quick Review Our goal was to version our output assemblies in an automated way, and we accomplished it by performing a few quick steps: Move the common assembly information, including version, into a linked CommonAssemblyInfo.cs file Create a simple MSBuild script to replace the common assembly version number and build your solution Direct your build server to use the created MSBuild script That’s really all there is to it.  You can find all of the code from this post at https://github.com/srkirkland/BuildVersion. Enjoy!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 18, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, March 18, 2010New ProjectsBordecal tools for FxCop: Bordecal tools for FxCop provides an extended framework for FxCop rule development. It allows rule developers to avoid using embedded XML resource...DotNetNuke® Skin City: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by allsnnskins. We integrate orange color and black colour in this ...DotNetNuke® Skin Dawn: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by allsnnskins. This design reflects the theme of daylight. U...DotNetNuke® Skin Dream: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by WhNuke. Uses the DNNJDMenu skin object.DotNetNuke® Skin Expression: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. This is a pure CSS skin with ...DotNetNuke® Skin ModernBiz: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by allsnnskins. This simple and unaffected company skin uses...DotNetNuke® Skin Profound: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by WhNuke Technology. This skin is simple and clean and the ...DotNetNuke® Skin Technology: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Standards" category by allsnnskins. It's compatible with common browsers such ...DotNetNuke® Skin Unravel: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. This is a pure CSS skin wit...E! - ECMAScript Runtime Environment: E! (pronounced E-Bang) is a lightweight runtime environment for editing basic ECMAScript scripts with access to .NET Framework class libraries.Easy ArcGIS Library: Easy ArcGIS Library is a set of C# .net classes that wrap the common functionality of ArcObjects, that help ArcGIS developers do a lot of common fu...File Categorizer: The File Categorizer will help people tag the files on their system for easy searching. Instead of keyword searches, you can find files based on v...GMFS Cosmos: This is a file system for Cosmos a OS that was built with C# and we will be implementing this for windows and linuxIFilter Core Implementation (interface and structures): IFilter C# implementation for you to embed when writing Windows Search capabilities into your application.Image Wall Control for Silverlight: A control for Silverlight that emulates the wall of images in the Zune. imenik_za _dev4fun: imenik is a very simple program and easy to use where you can save and organise your contacts.LegoPhysX: LegoPhysX is an atomic based physics enginePersonal Accounting: Personal system for managing financial accounts, which supports multiple accounts in different currencies. It has movement imputation and basic que...Pipes & Filters Engine: The Pipes & Filters Engine allows you to process a sequence of separate operations (filters) asynchronously in a multi-threaded manner. Filters wil...Prerequisites Checker: Check preqrequisites for software. Example: Software S1 is delivered. S1 has prerequisites PR1, PR2... PRN You may load the config file for S...Puzzle Lib: A library for creating grid-and-tile puzzles. Includes two separate UIs for the Tetriminoes puzzle as examples.QuotesPlugin for Windows Live Writer: The QuotesPlugin for Windows Live Writer lists quotes from web sites such as quotes4all.net. It's very easy for you to select your favourite ones a...RobiJ2se: Robi j2se Learning!SkinEngine: This is a Skin Framework for C# Winform, It use easy.and Create Skin GreatSQL Azure .NET Connection: This is a demo application that shows how to connect with SQL AzureSupermarket Soft: WPF Application that helps you manage your supermarket shoppings.Tally Marks for Windows Phone 7 Series: Tally Marks is a counting application. It can count almost anything you'd like to count, and it does it with tally marks! Count the number of peo...TwitCast: TwitCast is a simple notifier for Twitter using the [url:http://linqtotwitter.codeplex.com/] LINQ 2 Twitter library.WodnySwiat: Projekt grupowy wodny światWSS Task Manager Activity: A custom task creation activity that can be used in a sequential or state machine workflow. The activity was specifically developed to handle task ...New ReleasesAddress Book: Address Book: Address BookAutoAudit: AutoAudit 1.10c: Veresion 1.10 includes most of the bug fix requests. adds createdby and modifiedby columns to the audited base tables. If the user name is set by...blog for umbraco 4: Blog 4 Umbraco 2.0.26: Fixes: -Regex bug in base -Directory urls and rss link bug -Open reader bug -Rss bugDotNetNuke® Skin City: City Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by allsnnskins. We integrate orange color and black colour in this ...DotNetNuke® Skin Dawn: Dawn Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by allsnnskins. This design reflects the theme of daylight. U...DotNetNuke® Skin Dream: Dream Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Personal" category by WhNuke. Uses the DNNJDMenu skin object.DotNetNuke® Skin Expression: Expression Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Out of the box" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. This is a pure CSS skin with ...DotNetNuke® Skin ModernBiz: ModernBiz Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by allsnnskins. This simple and unaffected company skin uses...DotNetNuke® Skin Profound: Profound Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by WhNuke Technology. This skin is simple and clean and the ...DotNetNuke® Skin Technology: Technology Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Standards" category by allsnnskins. It's compatible with common browsers such a...DotNetNuke® Skin Unravel: Unravel Package 1.0.0: A DotNetNuke Design Challenge skin package submitted to the "Modern Business" category by Salar Golestanian of SalarO. This is a pure CSS skin with...E! - ECMAScript Runtime Environment: E! beta 1: This is really meant as a learning project for playing with dynamically compiled code, so you'd be better off getting the source code.Easy ArcGIS Library: EAGL Binaries: Easy ArcGIS Library Last Build (Version 1.1.2.4139)Easy ArcGIS Library: EAGL Binaries And Documentation: EAGL Latest Build With DocumentationEasy ArcGIS Library: EAGL Documentation: EAGL 1.1.2.4139 DocumentationEnterprise Library Extensions: Release 1.1: This is a service release for version 1.0 The installation process now works as intended. The assemblies are now visible in the Visual Studio As...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.2.1.0: Version 1.2.1.0 Fixed GB radio button not working renamed UK Added fixes for UK regions/shires/counties where country is missing Add country reco...Family Tree Analyzer: Version 1.3.0.0: Version 1.3.0.0 Added IGI Search results viewer Tweaked filenames of IGI search so that results window has more informative displayFile Archive: File Archive: If your computer is only word processing machine or document merge machine, this program is really fit for you. It's so...o useful! This program ar...GameStore League Manager: League Manager 1.0.4: Fixes bug 7434. Changed version number to the standard format of Major.Minor.ReleaseIFilter Core Implementation (interface and structures): Stable release: First release of interface implementation.IFilter Core Implementation (interface and structures): System.Search.Core: Ifilter interface for implementation in your own Search Providers.imenik_za _dev4fun: imenik_aplikacija: imenik aplikacija is an application easy to use where you can save and organise your contacts.KDRE - kernel debugger regular expression extension: KDRE 0.0.2: KDRE - Windbg regexp extension Changes: - amd64 build addedMapWindow6: MapWindow 6.0 msi (March 17): This release introduces some minor tweaks to the source code exposing more buffering functionality. This also fixes a problem with selecting point...MockingBird: MockingBird_2.0_RC: This is the V2.0 RC release. The documentation includes notes about the WCF components. Check this blog post for more details about the release. ...MPF for Projects - Visual Studio 2010: Visual Studio 2010 - Final Release: This contains the source code for the release of MPF for Projects corresponding to Visual Studio 2010. For Beta 2, you will need the Beta 2 release...Physics Helper for Silverlight, WPF, Blend, and Farseer: PhysicsHelper 3.0.0.4 ALPHA: This is an initial release that supports Windows Phone 7 Series Development, along with the Silverlight 3 and WPF support. It requires Visual Studi...Pocket GPW: Pocket GPW 1.2: Modyfikacje wg. change set-a 56678. Poprzednia baza danych (z wersji 1.1) jest zgodna z aktualną. Przed instalacją skopiuj poprzednią bazę danych ...Prerequisites Checker: Prerequisites Checker: Check your software prerequisitesPuzzle Lib: Puzzle Lib examples: Tetriminoes examples using a common Puzzle LIB and common Puzzle Implementation library, demonstrating a basic MVC architecture for game developmentRoTwee: RoTwee (8.0.7.0): Now you can rotate tweets by your hand !SharePoint Icon Integration: SharePoint Icon Integration PDF: This is the first stable release of the SPIconIntegration. To install the PDF Icon integration just start the setup.exe file that you will find in ...SkinEngine: SkinEngine-Src-2010-03-17: this is a release on 2010-03-17Spell Corrector: Spell Corrector 0.2 Binary: Fixed a bug in the word indexing in the database.Spell Corrector: Spell Corrector 0.2 Code: Fixed a bug in the indexing of the words in the database. Now insertion of new words in the database is faster.SQL Azure .NET Connection: LittleBlackBook.NET Release 1.0: This was a demo project for a SQL Azure Presentation at ConfooSQL Server Extended Properties Quick Editor: New release 1.5.5: Whats new: Move preferences to application settings and add a form to edit preferences. Support to add, modify and delete operations could be made ...SuperModel - A Dynamic View-Model Generator: 1.0.0.1 - Tyra+: Resolving a couple of bugs; models generated using INotifyPropertyChanged were not being created correctly. Property resolution on proxied types w...Survey - web survey & form engine: Survey 1.2.0: The Survey 1.2.0 release is based on the original sources of the Nsurvey 1.9 application. Compared to the Survey 1.1.0 version many new features ...T.S.T. the T-SQL Test Tool: Version 1.5: Version 1.5 changes: Bug fix. In V1.4 and earlier table comparison failed if the tables compared had columns with spaces in them.TwitCast: TwitCast 1.0.0.0: First release of TwitCast. Be warned that this is just a development release and there are a lot of things that remain to be done.unbinder: Unbound.dll: from change set ef6f2303dd32VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30317.0: Automatic drop of latest buildWatchersNET.TagCloud: WatchersNET.TagCloud 01.02.00: Whats New Show only Tags from Pages the Current User has View Acess (As Option) A Url can be specified for a Custom tag Added Module Package fo...WSS Task Manager Activity: 1.0: Download either the source for Moss Task Manager Activity, Workflow sample if you are interested to see how to use the activity in the workflow or ...XML pretty print for python (xmlpp): version 0.92b: Fixes issues when element name contains :Xpress - ASP.NET MVC 个人博客程序: xpress2.1.1.0317.beta: 最新beta版 更改内容： 模板与系统所需配置文件移动到App_Data中 Service对象注入到Controller中 Controller对象放入IOC容器中 邮件发送BUG修正Most Popular ProjectsMetaSharpRawrWBFS ManagerSilverlight ToolkitASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseAJAX Control ToolkitLiveUpload to FacebookWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMost Active ProjectsLINQ to TwitterRawrOData SDK for PHPDirectQOpen Data App Framework (ODAF)patterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesMapWindow6NB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog Module

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• Ajax, Lizard Brain Web Design, JSF, Struts, JavaScript, Mobile Web, Flash, jQuery, GWT, Harmony at I

  - by Kim Won

  Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 – India's Biggest Polyglot Conference and Workshops for IT Software Professionals Bangalore, April 9, 2010: The GIDS.Web Conference and Workshops has announced the complete program of over 30 sessions on how browser and rich web technologies such as AJAX, DHTML, Mashups, Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0 technologies, and Rich UI technologies are making money and gaining market-share for some of the leading businesses in the world. The GIDS.Web track at Great Indian Developer Summit takes place 21 and 23 April 2010, at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. As one of the longest running independent developer conferences in India, GIDS.Web at the Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 is uniquely positioned to provide a blend of practical, pragmatic and immediately applicable knowledge and a glimpse of the future of technology. During 21 and 23 April 2010, GIDS.Web offers a multi-track conference, workshops, expo show floor, and networking opportunities. The first keynote at GIDS.Web is led by the leading Java EE and Ajax developer, speaker, and author Marty Hall. The best of India's Java and RIA programmers have learnt the subject from Marty's seminal books Core Servlets and JavaServer Pages (first and second editions), More Servlets and JavaServer Pages, and Core Web Programming (first and second editions) from Prentice Hall and Sun Microsystems Press. Marty's keynote address is a comparison of approaches to building rich Internet applications with Ajax. Marty says Ajax development is difficult, and there are several fundamentally different strategies to building Ajaxified Web applications. The keynote address will survey the three most important of these approaches: using an Ajax-enabled JavaScript library such as jQuery, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Dojo, or Ext/JS; using a Web framework such as JSF 2.0 or Struts 2 that has integrated Ajax support; using the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to build "pure Java" Ajax applications. The talk will compare and contrast these three approaches, discussing the types of applications that fit best for each option. Over the course of the summit Marty will conduct several more sessions on "Choosing an Ajax/JavaScript Toolkit: A Comparison of the Most Popular JavaScript Libraries", "Pure Java Ajax: An Overview of GWT 2.0", "Integrated Ajax Support in JSF 2.0" and "Ajax Support in the Prototype JavaScript Library". The second keynote by the head of Adobe's Flash initiative in India, Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan, explores the state of art in web application development and identify trends that could transform the way we create and use web applications. The talk explains how the Adobe Flash Platform has fuelled this revolution with an integrated set of technologies for delivering the most compelling applications, content and video to the widest possible audience. The Director of Forum Nokia will explain how cloud computing coupled with mobile applications enable consumers to have access to powerful services and improved user experiences never before thought possible. IEEE's 2010 President-Elect Sorel Reisman's afternoon address steps to improve the IT profession in India. Featured talks at GID.Web also include: Web 2.0 Checklist - Deconstructing Modern Websites, Scott Davis Choosing an Ajax/JavaScript Toolkit: Comparison of Popular JavaScript Libraries, Marty Hall Lizard Brain Web Design, Scott Davis Effective Design Processes and Resources for Mobile Web Development, Arabella David NoSQL: The Shift to a Non-relational World, Nosh Petigara Open Source Web Debugging Tools, Matthew McCullough Building Line of Business Applications with Silverlight 4.0, Stephen Forte Hadoop - Divide and Conquer, Matthew McCullough Adobe Flash Catalyst for Agile Interaction Design, Harish Sivaramakrishnan Using jQuery and AJAX to Build Front-ends for ASP.NET and ASP.NET MVC, Pandurang Nayak First Steps to IT Heaven Through the Cloud. Part II: .WEB, Simone Brunozzi Building Rich Internet Applications with SL RIA Web Services, Pandurang Nayak Enriching Cloud Applications with Adobe Flash Platform, Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan Payments for the Web.future, Khurram Khan and Praveen Alavilli Longevity of Scalable Systems, Nishad Kamat Transform yourself into a Mobile App Developer Using Web Run Time, Balagopal K S Developing Multi Screen Applications on Adobe Flash Platform, Hemanth Sharma Why Harmony and For Whom?, Himanshu Goyal IIS Hosting Solution for ASP.net and PHP Web Sites, Nahas Mohammed Building Pluggable Web applications using Django, Lakshman Prasad Workshop: The 180-min AJAX and JSON Spike Class, Scott Davis Workshop: Essence of Functional Programming, Venkat Subramaniam Workshop: Agile Development, Tools, and Teams and Scrum Certification, Stephen Forte Workshop: PHP + Adobe Flex = Killer RIA, Shyamprasad P Workshop: Cloud Computing Boot Camp on the Google App Engine, Matthew McCullough Workshop: Building Data Centric Applications using Adobe Flex and Java, Prashant Singh Workshop: Building Your First Amazon App, Simone Brunozzi Workshop: Windows Azure Deep Dive, Ramaprasanna Chellamuthu Workshop: Monetizing your Apps with PayPal X Payments Platform, Khurram Khan, Praveen Alavilli Workshop: User Expereince Evaluation Model Walkthrough, Sanna Häiväläinen Sponsors of Great Indian Developer Summit 2010 include: Platinum sponsors Microsoft, Oracle Forum Nokia and Adobe; Gold sponsors Intel and SAP; Silver sponsors Quest Software, PayPal, Telerik and AMT. About Great Indian Developer Summit Great Indian Developer Summit is the gold standard for India's software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms, languages, software and standards. Packed with premium knowledge, action plans and advise from been-there-done-it veterans, creators, and visionaries, the 2010 edition of Great Indian Developer Summit features focused sessions, case studies, workshops and power panels that will transform you into a force to reckon with. Featuring 3 co-located conferences: GIDS.NET, GIDS.Web, GIDS.Java and an exclusive day of in-depth tutorials - GIDS.Workshops, from 20 April to 24 April at the IISc campus in Bangalore. At GIDS you'll participate in hundreds of sessions encompassing the full range of Microsoft computing, Java, Agile, RIA, Rich Web, open source/standards, languages, frameworks and platforms, practical tutorials that deep dive into technical skill and best practices, inspirational keynote presentations, an Expo Hall featuring dozens of the latest projects and products activities, engaging networking events, and the interact with the best and brightest of speakers from around the world. For further information on GIDS 2010, please visit the summit on the web http://www.developersummit.com/ A Saltmarch Media Press Release E: [email protected] Ph: +91 80 4005 1000

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• 12.04 upgrade broke grub? (not wubi related)

  - by kaare

  I just updated from 11.10 to 12.04, with no major problems (it took a while to get past a request to restart ssh, mysql and some other services, but I did no fiddling by myself, everything was done by the installer). However, after restarting, grub can't do anything. Picking the new linux installation (first entry), I just get error: no such partition error: no such partition error: no such partition and picking the recovery-version just gives 5 lines instead of 3. I have windows 7 installed on a different drive, and can run it by booting from that drive instead. Picking it from the grub menu gives the same error as above (can't remember how many lines, though). I'll be honest and say that I don't remember if win 7 could be booted from grub before the update, though. In short, nothing on the grub menu works. any solutions? The grub menu changed appearance - before it was on a purple background, small letters, now it's white-on-black, big letters, looking very basic. The original installation was from a usb-drive, and I hadn't heard about wubi until I started googling this problem, so I doubt there's any connection. I really hope there are some grub-savvy people out there :) EDIT: ok. so, I made a bootable usb, and am running from that right now. when I ran the bootinfoscript, it warned me that "gawk" could not be found, using "busybox awk" instead. This may lead to unreliable results. just so you know. The contents of RESULTS.txt are: Boot Info Script 0.61 [1 April 2012] ============================= Boot Info Summary: =============================== => Windows is installed in the MBR of /dev/sda. => Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdb and looks at sector 1 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos3)/boot/grub on this drive. => Syslinux MBR (4.04 and higher) is installed in the MBR of /dev/sdc. sda1: __________________________________________ File system: vfat Boot sector type: Dell Utility: FAT16 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: /DELLBIO.BIN /DELLRMK.BIN /COMMAND.COM sda2: __________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: sda3: __________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows Vista/7: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows 7 Boot files: /bootmgr /Boot/BCD /Windows/System32/winload.exe sda4: __________________________________________ File system: Extended Partition Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: sda5: __________________________________________ File system: vfat Boot sector type: Windows 7: FAT32 Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Windows XP Boot files: /boot.ini /bootmgr /ntldr /NTDETECT.COM sdb1: __________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: Windows XP: NTFS Boot sector info: No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: sdb2: __________________________________________ File system: swap Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: sdb3: __________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: Grub2 (v1.99) Boot sector info: Grub2 (v1.99) is installed in the boot sector of sdb3 and looks at sector 375893584 of the same hard drive for core.img. core.img is at this location and looks for (,msdos3)/boot/grub on this drive. Operating System: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Boot files: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /etc/fstab /boot/grub/core.img sdb4: __________________________________________ File system: ext4 Boot sector type: - Boot sector info: Operating System: Boot files: sdc1: __________________________________________ File system: ntfs Boot sector type: SYSLINUX 4.06 4.06-pre1 Boot sector info: Syslinux looks at sector 4649656 of /dev/sdc1 for its second stage. SYSLINUX is installed in the directory. The integrity check of the ADV area failed. No errors found in the Boot Parameter Block. Operating System: Boot files: /boot/grub/grub.cfg /syslinux/syslinux.cfg /ldlinux.sys ============================ Drive/Partition Info: ============================= Drive: sda _______________________________________ Disk /dev/sda: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sda1 63 240,974 240,912 de Dell Utility /dev/sda2 241,664 21,213,183 20,971,520 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda3 * 21,213,184 483,151,863 461,938,680 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sda4 483,151,872 488,394,751 5,242,880 f W95 Extended (LBA) /dev/sda5 483,153,920 488,394,751 5,240,832 dd Dell Media Direct Drive: sdb _______________________________________ Disk /dev/sdb: 250.1 GB, 250059350016 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sdb1 63 345,886,749 345,886,687 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS /dev/sdb2 345,888,768 361,510,911 15,622,144 82 Linux swap / Solaris /dev/sdb3 * 361,510,912 390,807,786 29,296,875 83 Linux /dev/sdb4 390,809,600 488,394,751 97,585,152 83 Linux Drive: sdc _______________________________________ Disk /dev/sdc: 8015 MB, 8015282176 bytes 255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 974 cylinders, total 15654848 sectors Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes Partition Boot Start Sector End Sector # of Sectors Id System /dev/sdc1 * 2,048 15,652,863 15,650,816 7 NTFS / exFAT / HPFS "blkid" output: ____________________________________ Device UUID TYPE LABEL /dev/loop0 squashfs /dev/sda1 07D8-0411 vfat DellUtility /dev/sda2 E2765BBC765B9061 ntfs RECOVERY /dev/sda3 98DC5E54DC5E2D2E ntfs OS /dev/sda5 7061-9DF5 vfat MEDIADIRECT /dev/sdb1 01CBBB4C3374C3B0 ntfs Data1 /dev/sdb2 1ca45f3f-f888-43d1-8137-02699597189a swap /dev/sdb3 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e ext4 /dev/sdb4 58e2b257-8608-4b11-b20b-dc162bb80b62 ext4 /dev/sdc1 0C02B64402B63316 ntfs PENDRIVE ================================ Mount points: ================================= Device Mount_Point Type Options /dev/loop0 /rofs squashfs (ro,noatime) /dev/sdb4 /media/58e2b257-8608-4b11-b20b-dc162bb80b62 ext4 (rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=udisks) /dev/sdc1 /cdrom fuseblk (rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,user_id=0,group_id=0,allow_other,blksize=4096) ================================ sda5/boot.ini: ================================ [boot loader] timeout=0 default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS [operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Embedded" /fastdetect /KERNEL=NTOSBOOT.EXE /maxmem=1024 =========================== sdb3/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- # # DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE # # It is automatically generated by grub-mkconfig using templates # from /etc/grub.d and settings from /etc/default/grub # ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/00_header ### if [ -s $prefix/grubenv ]; then set have_grubenv=true load_env fi set default="0" if [ "${prev_saved_entry}" ]; then set saved_entry="${prev_saved_entry}" save_env saved_entry set prev_saved_entry= save_env prev_saved_entry set boot_once=true fi function savedefault { if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then saved_entry="${chosen}" save_env saved_entry fi } function recordfail { set recordfail=1 if [ -n "${have_grubenv}" ]; then if [ -z "${boot_once}" ]; then save_env recordfail; fi; fi } function load_video { insmod vbe insmod vga insmod video_bochs insmod video_cirrus } insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e if loadfont /usr/share/grub/unicode.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=auto load_video insmod gfxterm insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e set locale_dir=($root)/boot/grub/locale set lang=en_US insmod gettext fi terminal_output gfxterm if [ "${recordfail}" = 1 ]; then set timeout=-1 else set timeout=10 fi ### END /etc/grub.d/00_header ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray if background_color 44,0,30; then clear fi ### END /etc/grub.d/05_debian_theme ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### function gfxmode { set gfxpayload="$1" if [ "$1" = "keep" ]; then set vt_handoff=vt.handoff=7 else set vt_handoff= fi } if [ ${recordfail} != 1 ]; then if [ -e ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt ]; then if hwmatch ${prefix}/gfxblacklist.txt 3; then if [ ${match} = 0 ]; then set linux_gfx_mode=keep else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi else set linux_gfx_mode=keep fi else set linux_gfx_mode=text fi export linux_gfx_mode if [ "$linux_gfx_mode" != "text" ]; then load_video; fi menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-24-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-24-generic root=UUID=6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e ro quiet splash $vt_handoff initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-24-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.2.0-24-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e echo 'Loading Linux 3.2.0-24-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-24-generic root=UUID=6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e ro recovery nomodeset echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-24-generic } submenu "Previous Linux versions" { menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-19-generic' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail gfxmode $linux_gfx_mode insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-19-generic root=UUID=6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e ro quiet splash $vt_handoff initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-19-generic } menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux 3.0.0-19-generic (recovery mode)' --class ubuntu --class gnu-linux --class gnu --class os { recordfail insmod gzio insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e echo 'Loading Linux 3.0.0-19-generic ...' linux /boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-19-generic root=UUID=6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e ro recovery nomodeset echo 'Loading initial ramdisk ...' initrd /boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-19-generic } } ### END /etc/grub.d/10_linux ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### END /etc/grub.d/20_linux_xen ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin } menuentry "Memory test (memtest86+, serial console 115200)" { insmod part_msdos insmod ext2 set root='(hd1,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e linux16 /boot/memtest86+.bin console=ttyS0,115200n8 } ### END /etc/grub.d/20_memtest86+ ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### menuentry "Windows 7 (loader) (on /dev/sda3)" --class windows --class os { insmod part_msdos insmod ntfs set root='(hd0,msdos3)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 98DC5E54DC5E2D2E chainloader +1 } menuentry "Microsoft Windows XP Embedded (on /dev/sda5)" --class windows --class os { insmod part_msdos insmod fat set root='(hd0,msdos5)' search --no-floppy --fs-uuid --set=root 7061-9DF5 drivemap -s (hd0) ${root} chainloader +1 } ### END /etc/grub.d/30_os-prober ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### # This file provides an easy way to add custom menu entries. Simply type the # menu entries you want to add after this comment. Be careful not to change # the 'exec tail' line above. ### END /etc/grub.d/40_custom ### ### BEGIN /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### if [ -f $prefix/custom.cfg ]; then source $prefix/custom.cfg; fi ### END /etc/grub.d/41_custom ### =============================== sdb3/etc/fstab: ================================ # /etc/fstab: static file system information. # # Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a # device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices # that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5). # # <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass> proc /proc proc nodev,noexec,nosuid 0 0 # / was on /dev/sdb3 during installation UUID=6bc1b599-ad4b-403c-a155-a5bc81211f5e / ext4 errors=remount-ro 0 1 # /home was on /dev/sdb4 during installation UUID=58e2b257-8608-4b11-b20b-dc162bb80b62 /home ext4 defaults,user_xattr 0 2 # swap was on /dev/sdb2 during installation UUID=1ca45f3f-f888-43d1-8137-02699597189a none swap sw 0 0 =================== sdb3: Location of files loaded by Grub: ==================== GiB - GB File Fragment(s) = boot/grub/core.img 1 = boot/grub/grub.cfg 1 = boot/initrd.img-3.0.0-19-generic 2 = boot/initrd.img-3.2.0-24-generic 2 = boot/vmlinuz-3.0.0-19-generic 2 = boot/vmlinuz-3.2.0-24-generic 1 = vmlinuz 1 = vmlinuz.old 2 =========================== sdc1/boot/grub/grub.cfg: =========================== if loadfont /boot/grub/font.pf2 ; then set gfxmode=auto insmod efi_gop insmod efi_uga insmod gfxterm terminal_output gfxterm fi set menu_color_normal=white/black set menu_color_highlight=black/light-gray menuentry "Try Ubuntu without installing" { set gfxpayload=keep linux /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper quiet splash -- initrd /casper/initrd.lz } menuentry "Install Ubuntu" { set gfxpayload=keep linux /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper only-ubiquity quiet splash -- initrd /casper/initrd.lz } menuentry "Check disc for defects" { set gfxpayload=keep linux /casper/vmlinuz boot=casper integrity-check quiet splash -- initrd /casper/initrd.lz } ========================= sdc1/syslinux/syslinux.cfg: ========================== # D-I config version 2.0 include menu.cfg default vesamenu.c32 prompt 0 timeout 50 # If you would like to use the new menu and be presented with the option to install or run from USB at startup, remove # from the following line. This line was commented out (by request of many) to allow the old menu to be presented and to enable booting straight into the Live Environment! # ui gfxboot bootlogo =================== sdc1: Location of files loaded by Grub: ==================== GiB - GB File Fragment(s) ?? = ?? boot/grub/grub.cfg 0 ================= sdc1: Location of files loaded by Syslinux: ================== GiB - GB File Fragment(s) ?? = ?? ldlinux.sys 1 ?? = ?? syslinux/chain.c32 1 ?? = ?? syslinux/gfxboot.c32 1 ?? = ?? syslinux/syslinux.cfg 0 ?? = ?? syslinux/vesamenu.c32 1 ============== sdc1: Version of COM32(R) files used by Syslinux: =============== syslinux/chain.c32 : COM32R module (v4.xx) syslinux/gfxboot.c32 : COM32R module (v4.xx) syslinux/vesamenu.c32 : COM32R module (v4.xx) =============================== StdErr Messages: =============================== xz: (stdin): Compressed data is corrupt xz: (stdin): Compressed data is corrupt awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in awk: cmd. line:36: Math support is not compiled in ./bootinfoscript: line 1646: [: 2.73495e+09: integer expression expected

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• Using Image Source with big images in WPF

  - by xyzzer

  I am working on an application that allows users to manipulate multiple images by using ItemsControl. I started running some tests and found that the app has problems displaying some big images - ie. it did not work with the high resolution (21600x10800), 20MB images from http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BlueMarble/BlueMarble_monthlies.php, though it displays the 6200x6200, 60MB Hubble telescope image from http://zebu.uoregon.edu/hudf/hudf.jpg just fine. The original solution just specified an Image control with a Source property pointing at a file on a disk (through a binding). With the Blue Marble file - the image would just not show up. Now this could be just a bug hidden somewhere deep in the funky MVVM + XAML implementation - the visual tree displayed by Snoop goes like: Window/Border/AdornerDecorator/ContentPresenter/Grid/Canvas/UserControl/Border/ContentPresenter/Grid/Grid/Grid/Grid/Border/Grid/ContentPresenter/UserControl/UserControl/Border/ContentPresenter/Grid/Grid/Grid/Grid/Viewbox/ContainerVisual/UserControl/Border/ContentPresenter/Grid/Grid/ItemsControl/Border/ItemsPresenter/Canvas/ContentPresenter/Grid/Grid/ContentPresenter/Image... Now debug this! WPF can be crazy like that... Anyway, it turned out that if I create a simple WPF application - the images load just fine. I tried finding out the root cause, but I don't want to spend weeks on it. I figured the right thing to do might be to use a converter to scale the images down - this is what I have done: ImagePath = @"F:\Astronomical\world.200402.3x21600x10800.jpg"; TargetWidth = 2800; TargetHeight = 1866; and <Image> <Image.Source> <MultiBinding Converter="{StaticResource imageResizingConverter}"> <MultiBinding.Bindings> <Binding Path="ImagePath"/> <Binding RelativeSource="{RelativeSource Self}" /> <Binding Path="TargetWidth"/> <Binding Path="TargetHeight"/> </MultiBinding.Bindings> </MultiBinding> </Image.Source> </Image> and public class ImageResizingConverter : MarkupExtension, IMultiValueConverter { public Image TargetImage { get; set; } public string SourcePath { get; set; } public int DecodeWidth { get; set; } public int DecodeHeight { get; set; } public object Convert(object[] values, Type targetType, object parameter, CultureInfo culture) { this.SourcePath = values[0].ToString(); this.TargetImage = (Image)values[1]; this.DecodeWidth = (int)values[2]; this.DecodeHeight = (int)values[3]; return DecodeImage(); } private BitmapImage DecodeImage() { BitmapImage bi = new BitmapImage(); bi.BeginInit(); bi.DecodePixelWidth = (int)DecodeWidth; bi.DecodePixelHeight = (int)DecodeHeight; bi.UriSource = new Uri(SourcePath); bi.EndInit(); return bi; } public object[] ConvertBack(object value, Type[] targetTypes, object parameter, CultureInfo culture) { throw new Exception("The method or operation is not implemented."); } public override object ProvideValue(IServiceProvider serviceProvider) { return this; } } Now this works fine, except for one "little" problem. When you just specify a file path in Image.Source - the application actually uses less memory and works faster than if you use BitmapImage.DecodePixelWidth. Plus with Image.Source if you have multiple Image controls that point to the same image - they only use as much memory as if only one image was loaded. With the BitmapImage.DecodePixelWidth solution - each additional Image control uses more memory and each of them uses more than when just specifying Image.Source. Perhaps WPF somehow caches these images in compressed form while if you specify the decoded dimensions - it feels like you get an uncompressed image in memory, plus it takes 6 times the time (perhaps without it the scaling is done on the GPU?), plus it feels like the original high resolution image also gets loaded and takes up space. If I just scale the image down, save it to a temporary file and then use Image.Source to point at the file - it will probably work, but it will be pretty slow and it will require handling cleanup of the temporary file. If I could detect an image that does not get loaded properly - maybe I could only scale it down if I need to, but Image.ImageFailed never gets triggered. Maybe it has something to do with the video memory and this app just using more of it with the deep visual tree, opacity masks etc. Actual question: How can I load big images as quickly as Image.Source option does it, without using more memory for additional copies and additional memory for the scaled down image if I only need them at a certain resolution lower than original? Also, I don't want to keep them in memory if no Image control is using them anymore.

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