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  • Add a small RAID card? Will it help overall stability and performance of my nine hard drives?

    - by Ray
    Hi, Will I get any extra genuine added performance and RAID stability if I insert a basic RAID card into a PCI-E x1 slot? I am considering the Adaptec 1220SA - 2 port SATA , pci-express (1x) , raid 0/1. Ok it only supports two SATA drives. Purpose is to help support the eight internal hard drives (1TB each), a DVD drive and an external e-SATA connected 2TB hard drive - by dealing with two of the internal hard drives. My current configuration of eight internal 1TB Barracuda (7200.12) SATA hard drives, one external 2TB SATA Western Digital Green Drive (e-SATA) and one DVD drive can already be supported by the Intel P55 & JMicron controllers on the ASUS motherboard : the Intel P55 (controls six HDD; configured as three x RAID 1), and the JMicron (controls two HDD as one RAID 1, as well as the DVD drive and the external SATA drive via the motherboard's e-SATA port (controlled by the JMicron)). Bigger picture details : I have an ASUS motherboard designed for the LGA1156 type processor and it includes the Intel P55 Express Chipset and JMicron. I am using the Intel Core i7-870 processor, and have 8GB DDR3 (1333) memory (four x 2GB Corsair DIMMs). Enough overall power. The power supply is more than sufficicient for the system. Corsair AX850. The system will never need the full 850 watts (future : second graphics card). The RAID card would provide hardware RAID 1 for two of the eight intrnal drives. It would either reduce the load on : the Intel P55 firmware RAID support, or replace the JMicron controller's RAID 1 set. I am busy installing the above configuration using Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit as the OS. The RAID card is a last minute addition to the plan. Is it worth spending the extra R700 - R900 on the Adaptec 1220SA, or equivalent RAID card? I cannot afford to spend yet another R2000 - R3000 on a RAID card that would support many SATA2 hard drives, with a better RAID, example the RAID 5. My Issue & assumption : I am trusting that the Intel P55 chipset can properly handle six drives, configured as three * RAID 1. I am assuming that the JMicron can handle, using its RED SATA ports, one RAID-1 (two HDDs). The DVD drive connects to the JMicron optical SATA port 1 (white port 1). White port 2 is not used. The e-SATA connection is from the JMicron straight to, and through the motherboard - to an on-board (rear panel) e-SATA port. Am I being a little hopeful in only using the on-board Intel P55 and the JMicron? Is it a waste of money to install a RAID card that handles two SATA2 drives? OR Is it wisdom to take the pressure a little off the Intel P55? Obviously I am interested in data security, hence RAID 1, not RAID Zero. RAID 5 would be nice. The CPU, Intel Core i7-870 will provide the clout. Context to nine drives : I am using virtualisation with Windows 7 Ultimate. Bootable VMs. The operating system gets a mirror. Loaded apps gets a mirror. The current design data is kept in another mirror and Another mirror is back-up one and / or VM territory. Then the external 2TB drive (via e-SATA) is the next layer of data security and then finally, I use off-site data security. Thanks.

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  • /usr/bin/sshd isn't linked against PAM on one of my systems. What is wrong and how can I fix it?

    - by marc.riera
    Hi, I'm using AD as my user account server with ldap. Most of the servers run with UsePam yes except this one, it has lack of pam support on sshd. root@linserv9:~# ldd /usr/sbin/sshd linux-vdso.so.1 => (0x00007fff621fe000) libutil.so.1 => /lib/libutil.so.1 (0x00007fd759d0b000) libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1 (0x00007fd759af4000) libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1 (0x00007fd7598db000) libcrypto.so.0.9.8 => /usr/lib/libcrypto.so.0.9.8 (0x00007fd75955b000) libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x00007fd759323000) libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00007fd758fc1000) libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00007fd758dbd000) /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007fd759f0e000) I have this packages installed root@linserv9:~# dpkg -l|grep -E 'pam|ssh' ii denyhosts 2.6-2.1 an utility to help sys admins thwart ssh hac ii libpam-modules 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Pluggable Authentication Modules for PAM ii libpam-runtime 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Runtime support for the PAM library ii libpam-ssh 1.91.0-9.2 enable SSO behavior for ssh and pam ii libpam0g 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Pluggable Authentication Modules library ii libpam0g-dev 0.99.7.1-5ubuntu6.1 Development files for PAM ii openssh-blacklist 0.1-1ubuntu0.8.04.1 list of blacklisted OpenSSH RSA and DSA keys ii openssh-client 1:4.7p1-8ubuntu1.2 secure shell client, an rlogin/rsh/rcp repla ii openssh-server 1:4.7p1-8ubuntu1.2 secure shell server, an rshd replacement ii quest-openssh 5.2p1_q13-1 Secure shell root@linserv9:~# What I'm doing wrong? thanks. Edit: root@linserv9:~# cat /etc/pam.d/sshd # PAM configuration for the Secure Shell service # Read environment variables from /etc/environment and # /etc/security/pam_env.conf. auth required pam_env.so # [1] # In Debian 4.0 (etch), locale-related environment variables were moved to # /etc/default/locale, so read that as well. auth required pam_env.so envfile=/etc/default/locale # Standard Un*x authentication. @include common-auth # Disallow non-root logins when /etc/nologin exists. account required pam_nologin.so # Uncomment and edit /etc/security/access.conf if you need to set complex # access limits that are hard to express in sshd_config. # account required pam_access.so # Standard Un*x authorization. @include common-account # Standard Un*x session setup and teardown. @include common-session # Print the message of the day upon successful login. session optional pam_motd.so # [1] # Print the status of the user's mailbox upon successful login. session optional pam_mail.so standard noenv # [1] # Set up user limits from /etc/security/limits.conf. session required pam_limits.so # Set up SELinux capabilities (need modified pam) # session required pam_selinux.so multiple # Standard Un*x password updating. @include common-password Edit2: UsePAM yes fails With this configuration ssh fails to start : root@linserv9:/home/admmarc# cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config |grep -vE "^[ \t]*$|^#" Port 22 Protocol 2 ListenAddress 0.0.0.0 RSAAuthentication yes PubkeyAuthentication yes AuthorizedKeysFile .ssh/authorized_keys ChallengeResponseAuthentication yes UsePAM yes Subsystem sftp /usr/lib/sftp-server root@linserv9:/home/admmarc# The error it gives is as follows root@linserv9:/home/admmarc# /etc/init.d/ssh start * Starting OpenBSD Secure Shell server sshd /etc/ssh/sshd_config: line 75: Bad configuration option: UsePAM /etc/ssh/sshd_config: terminating, 1 bad configuration options ...fail! root@linserv9:/home/admmarc#

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  • Samba doesnt require password on xbmc but does on ubuntu

    - by Chris
    I have samba setup on a fedora 13 machine, and I use it to share with my xbmc client in the family room. When I set this up there no password or anything was required I merely entered in paths such as: smb://<host>/<share> and all worked. Now on my ubuntu 10.04 machine when I try to access the same hosts, for example through smbmount though I receive an error. smbmount //media/Music ~/Music/ # media is in my /etc/hosts and resolves to # correct IP address for the machine I receive error: operation not permitted after pressing enter when it prompts for password. Here is my entry from /etc/samba/smb.conf: [global] workgroup = WORKGROUP server string = Samba Server Version %v # log files split per-machine: log file = /var/log/samba/log.%m # maximum size of 50KB per log file, then rotate: max log size = 50 security = user passdb backend = tdbsam ; security = domain ; passdb backend = tdbsam ; realm = MY_REALM ; password server = <NT-Server-Name> ; security = user ; passdb backend = tdbsam ; domain master = yes ; domain logons = yes ; logon script = %m.bat ; logon script = %u.bat ; logon path = \\%L\Profiles\%u ; logon path = ; add user script = /usr/sbin/useradd "%u" -n -g users ; add group script = /usr/sbin/groupadd "%g" ; add machine script = /usr/sbin/useradd -n -c "Workstation (%u)" -M -d /nohome -s /bin/false "%u" ; delete user script = /usr/sbin/userdel "%u" ; delete user from group script = /usr/sbin/userdel "%u" "%g" ; delete group script = /usr/sbin/groupdel "%g" ; local master = no ; os level = 33 ; preferred master = yes ; wins support = yes ; wins server = w.x.y.z ; wins proxy = yes ; dns proxy = yes load printers = yes cups options = raw ; printcap name = /etc/printcap # obtain a list of printers automatically on UNIX System V systems: ; printcap name = lpstat ; printing = cups ; map archive = no ; map hidden = no ; map read only = no ; map system = no ; store dos attributes = yes #============================ Share Definitions ============================== [homes] comment = Home Directories browseable = no writable = yes ; valid users = %S ; valid users = MYDOMAIN\%S # Un-comment the following and create the netlogon directory for Domain Logons: ; [netlogon] ; comment = Network Logon Service ; path = /var/lib/samba/netlogon ; guest ok = yes ; writable = no ; share modes = no # Un-comment the following to provide a specific roving profile share. # The default is to use the user's home directory: ; [Profiles] ; path = /var/lib/samba/profiles ; browseable = no ; guest ok = yes # A publicly accessible directory that is read only, except for users in the # "staff" group (which have write permissions): ; [public] ; comment = Public Stuff ; path = /home/samba ; public = yes ; writable = yes ; printable = no ; write list = +staff [tv] comment = TV path = /media/Isos/tv public = yes writable = yes printable = no write list = +media [music] comment = Music path = /media/Storage/music/ public = yes writable = yes printable = no write list = +media [pictures] comment = Pictures path = /media/Storage/pictures public = yes writable = yes printable = no write list = +media

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  • How can I check if PHP was compiled with the UNICODE version of the Win32 API?

    - by Wesley Murch
    This is related to this Stack Overflow post: glob() can't find file names with multibyte characters on Windows? I'm having issues with PHP and files that have multibyte characters on Windows. Here's my test case: print_r(scandir('./uploads/')); print_r(glob('./uploads/*')); Correct Output on remote UNIX server: Array ( [0] => . [1] => .. [2] => filename-äöü.jpg [3] => filename.jpg [4] => test?test.jpg [5] => ??? ?????.jpg [6] => ?????????.jpg [7] => ???.jpg ) Array ( [0] => ./uploads/filename-äöü.jpg [1] => ./uploads/filename.jpg [2] => ./uploads/test?test.jpg [3] => ./uploads/??? ?????.jpg [4] => ./uploads/?????????.jpg [5] => ./uploads/???.jpg ) Incorrect Output locally on Windows: Array ( [0] => . [1] => .. [2] => ??? ?????.jpg [3] => ???.jpg [4] => ?????????.jpg [5] => filename-äöü.jpg [6] => filename.jpg [7] => test?test.jpg ) Array ( [0] => ./uploads/filename-äöü.jpg [1] => ./uploads/filename.jpg ) Here's a relevant excerpt from the answer I chose to accept (which actually is a quote from an article that was posted online over 2 years ago): From the comments on this article: http://www.rooftopsolutions.nl/blog/filesystem-encoding-and-php The output from your PHP installation on Windows is easy to explain : you installed the wrong version of PHP, and used a version not compiled to use the Unicode version of the Win32 API. For this reason, the filesystem calls used by PHP will use the legacy "ANSI" API and so the C/C++ libraries linked with this version of PHP will first try to convert yout UTF-8-encoded PHP string into the local "ANSI" codepage selected in the running environment (see the CHCP command before starting PHP from a command line window) Your version of Windows is MOST PROBABLY NOT responsible of this weird thing. Actually, this is YOUR version of PHP which is not compiled correctly, and that uses the legacy ANSI version of the Win32 API (for compatibility with the legacy 16-bit versions of Windows 95/98 whose filesystem support in the kernel actually had no direct support for Unicode, but used an internal conversion layer to convert Unicode to the local ANSI codepage before using the actual ANSI version of the API). Recompile PHP using the compiler option to use the UNICODE version of the Win32 API (which should be the default today, and anyway always the default for PHP installed on a server that will NEVER be Windows 95 or Windows 98...) I can't confirm whether this is my problem or not. I used phpinfo() and did not find anything interesting, but I wasn't sure what to look for. I've been using XAMPP for easy installations, so I'm really not sure exactly how it was installed. I'm using Windows 7, 64 bit - so forgive my ignorance, but I'm not even sure if "Win32" is relevant here. How can I check if my current version of PHP was compiled with the configuration mentioned above? PHP Version: 5.3.8 System: Windows NT WES-PC 6.1 build 7601 (Windows 7 Home Premium Edition Service Pack 1) i586 Build Date: Aug 23 2011 11:47:20 Compiler: MSVC9 (Visual C++ 2008) Architecture: x86 Configure Command: cscript /nologo configure.js "--enable-snapshot-build" "--disable-isapi" "--enable-debug-pack" "--disable-isapi" "--without-mssql" "--without-pdo-mssql" "--without-pi3web" "--with-pdo-oci=D:\php-sdk\oracle\instantclient10\sdk,shared" "--with-oci8=D:\php-sdk\oracle\instantclient10\sdk,shared" "--with-oci8-11g=D:\php-sdk\oracle\instantclient11\sdk,shared" "--enable-object-out-dir=../obj/" "--enable-com-dotnet" "--with-mcrypt=static" "--disable-static-analyze"

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  • Tools and Utilities for the .NET Developer

    - by mbcrump
    Tweet this list! Add a link to my site to your bookmarks to quickly find this page again! Add me to twitter! This is a list of the tools/utilities that I use to do my job/hobby. I wanted this page to load fast and contain information that only you care about. If I have missed a tool that you like, feel free to contact me and I will add it to the list. Also, this list took a lot of time to complete. Please do not steal my work, if you like the page then please link back to my site. I will keep the links/information updated as new tools/utilities are created.  Windows/.NET Development – This is a list of tools that any Windows/.NET developer should have in his bag. I have used at some point in my career everything listed on this page and below is the tools worth keeping. Name Description License AnkhSVN Subversion support for Visual Studio. It also works with VS2010. Free Aurora XAML Designer One of the best XAML creation tools available. Has a ton of built in templates that you can copy/paste into VS2010. COST/Trial BeyondCompare Beyond Compare 3 is the ideal tool for comparing files and folders on your Windows or Linux system. Visualize changes in your code and carefully reconcile them. COST/Trial BuildIT Automated Task Tool Its main purpose is to automate tasks, whether it is the final packaging of a product, an automated daily build, maybe sending out a mailing list, even backing-up files. Free C Sharper for VB Convert VB to C#. COST CLRProfiler Analyze and improve the behavior of your .NET app. Free CodeRush Direct competitor to ReSharper, contains similar feature. This is one of those decide for yourself. COST/Trial Disk2VHD Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). Free Eazfuscator.NET Is a free obfuscator for .NET. The main purpose is to protect intellectual property of software. Free EQATEC Profiler Make your .NET app run faster. No source code changes are needed. Just point the profiler to your app, run the modified code, and get a visual report. COST Expression Studio 3/4 Comes with Web, Blend, Sketch Flow and more. You can create websites, produce beautiful XAML and more. COST/Trial Expresso The award-winning Expresso editor is equally suitable as a teaching tool for the beginning user of regular expressions or as a full-featured development environment for the experienced programmer or web designer with an extensive knowledge of regular expressions. Free Fiddler Fiddler is a web debugging proxy which logs all HTTP(s) traffic between your computer and the internet. Free Firebug Powerful Web development tool. If you build websites, you will need this. Free FxCop FxCop is an application that analyzes managed code assemblies (code that targets the .NET Framework common language runtime) and reports information about the assemblies, such as possible design, localization, performance, and security improvements. Free GAC Browser and Remover Easy way to remove multiple assemblies from the GAC. Assemblies registered by programs like Install Shield can also be removed. Free GAC Util The Global Assembly Cache tool allows you to view and manipulate the contents of the global assembly cache and download cache. Free HelpScribble Help Scribble is a full-featured, easy-to-use help authoring tool for creating help files from start to finish. You can create Win Help (.hlp) files, HTML Help (.chm) files, a printed manual and online documentation (on a web site) all from the same Help Scribble project. COST/Trial IETester IETester is a free Web Browser that allows you to have the rendering and JavaScript engines of IE9 preview, IE8, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Windows 7, Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Free iTextSharp iText# (iTextSharp) is a port of the iText open source java library for PDF generation written entirely in C# for the .NET platform. Use the iText mailing list to get support. Free Kaxaml Kaxaml is a lightweight XAML editor that gives you a "split view" so you can see both your XAML and your rendered content. Free LINQPad LinqPad lets you interactively query databases in a LINQ. Free Linquer Many programmers are familiar with SQL and will need a help in the transition to LINQ. Sometimes there are complicated queries to be written and Linqer can help by converting SQL scripts to LINQ. COST/Trial LiquidXML Liquid XML Studio 2010 is an advanced XML developers toolkit and IDE, containing all the tools needed for designing and developing XML schema and applications. COST/Trial Log4Net log4net is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. log4net is a port of the excellent log4j framework to the .NET runtime. We have kept the framework similar in spirit to the original log4j while taking advantage of new features in the .NET runtime. For more information on log4net see the features document. Free Microsoft Web Platform Installer The Microsoft Web Platform Installer 2.0 (Web PI) is a free tool that makes getting the latest components of the Microsoft Web Platform, including Internet Information Services (IIS), SQL Server Express, .NET Framework and Visual Web Developer easy. Free Mono Development Don't have Visual Studio - no problem! This is an open Source C# and .NET development environment for Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X Free Net Mass Downloader While it’s great that Microsoft has released the .NET Reference Source Code, you can only get it one file at a time while you’re debugging. If you’d like to batch download it for reading or to populate the cache, you’d have to write a program that instantiated and called each method in the Framework Class Library. Fortunately, .NET Mass Downloader comes to the rescue! Free nMap Nmap ("Network Mapper") is a free and open source (license) utility for network exploration or security auditing. Many systems and network administrators also find it useful for tasks such as network inventory, managing service upgrade schedules, and monitoring host or service uptime. Free NoScript (Firefox add-in) The NoScript Firefox extension provides extra protection for Firefox, Flock, Seamonkey and other Mozilla-based browsers: this free, open source add-on allows JavaScript, Java and Flash and other plug-ins to be executed only by trusted web sites of your choice (e.g. your online bank), and provides the most powerful Anti-XSS protection available in a browser. Free NotePad 2 Notepad2, a fast and light-weight Notepad-like text editor with syntax highlighting. This program can be run out of the box without installation, and does not touch your system's registry. Free PageSpy PageSpy is a small add-on for Internet Explorer that allows you to select any element within a webpage, select an option in the context menu, and view detailed information about both the coding behind the page and the element you selected. Free Phrase Express PhraseExpress manages your frequently used text snippets in customizable categories for quick access. Free PowerGui PowerGui is a free community for PowerGUI, a graphical user interface and script editor for Microsoft Windows PowerShell! Free Powershell Comes with Win7, but you can automate tasks by using the .NET Framework. Great for network admins. Free Process Explorer Ever wondered which program has a particular file or directory open? Now you can find out. Process Explorer shows you information about which handles and DLLs processes have opened or loaded. Also, included in the SysInterals Suite. Free Process Monitor Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity. Free Reflector Explore and analyze compiled .NET assemblies, viewing them in C#, Visual Basic, and IL. This is an Essential for any .NET developer. Free Regular Expression Library Stuck on a Regular Expression but you think someone has already figured it out? Chances are they have. Free Regulator Regulator makes Regular Expressions easy. This is a must have for a .NET Developer. Free RenameMaestro RenameMaestro is probably the easiest batch file renamer you'll find to instantly rename multiple files COST ReSharper The one program that I cannot live without. Supports VS2010 and offers simple refactoring, code analysis/assistance/cleanup/templates. One of the few applications that is worth the $$$. COST/Trial ScrewTurn Wiki ScrewTurn Wiki allows you to create, manage and share wikis. A wiki is a collaboratively-edited, information-centered website: the most famous is Wikipedia. Free SharpDevelop What is #develop? SharpDevelop is a free IDE for C# and VB.NET projects on Microsoft's .NET platform. Free Show Me The Template Show Me The Template is a tool for exploring the templates, be their data, control or items panel, that comes with the controls built into WPF for all 6 themes. Free SnippetCompiler Compiles code snippets without opening Visual Studio. It does not support .NET 4. Free SQL Prompt SQL Prompt is a plug-in that increases how fast you can work with SQL. It provides code-completion for SQL server, reformatting, db schema information and snippets. Awesome! COST/Trial SQLinForm SQLinForm is an automatic SQL code formatter for all major databases  including ORACLE, SQL Server, DB2, UDB, Sybase, Informix, PostgreSQL, Teradata, MySQL, MS Access etc. with over 70 formatting options. COST/OnlineFree SSMS Tools SSMS Tools Pack is an add-in for Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) including SSMS Express. Free Storm STORM is a free and open source tool for testing web services. Free Telerik Code Convertor Convert code from VB to C Sharp and Vice Versa. Free TurtoiseSVN TortoiseSVN is a really easy to use Revision control / version control / source control software for Windows.Since it's not an integration for a specific IDE you can use it with whatever development tools you like. Free UltraEdit UltraEdit is the ideal text, HTML and hex editor, and an advanced PHP, Perl, Java and JavaScript editor for programmers. UltraEdit is also an XML editor including a tree-style XML parser. An industry-award winner, UltraEdit supports disk-based 64-bit file handling (standard) on 32-bit Windows platforms (Windows 2000 and later). COST/Trial Virtual Windows XP Comes with some W7 version and allows you to run WinXP along side W7. Free VirtualBox Virtualization by Sun Microsystems. You can virtualize Windows, Linux and more. Free Visual Log Parser SQL queries against a variety of log files and other system data sources. Free WinMerge WinMerge is an Open Source differencing and merging tool for Windows. WinMerge can compare both folders and files, presenting differences in a visual text format that is easy to understand and handle. Free Wireshark Wireshark is one of the best network protocol analyzer's for Unix and windows. This has been used several times to get me out of a bind. Free XML Notepad 07 Old, but still one of my favorite XML viewers. Free Productivity Tools – This is the list of tools that I use to save time or quickly navigate around Windows. Name Description License AutoHotKey Automate almost anything by sending keystrokes and mouse clicks. You can write a mouse or keyboard macro by hand or use the macro recorder. Free CLCL CLCL is clipboard caching utility. Free Ditto Ditto is an extension to the standard windows clipboard. It saves each item placed on the clipboard allowing you access to any of those items at a later time. Ditto allows you to save any type of information that can be put on the clipboard, text, images, html, custom formats, ..... Free Evernote Remember everything from notes to photos. It will synch between computers/devices. Free InfoRapid Inforapid is a search tool that will display all you search results in a html like browser. If you click on a word in that browser, it will start another search to the word you clicked on. Handy if you want to trackback something to it's true origin. The word you looked for will be highlighted in red. Clicking on the red word will open the containing file in a text based viewer. Clicking on any word in the opened document will start another search on that word. Free KatMouse The prime purpose of the KatMouse utility is to enhance the functionality of mice with a scroll wheel, offering 'universal' scrolling: moving the mouse wheel will scroll the window directly beneath the mouse cursor (not the one with the keyboard focus, which is default on Windows OSes). This is a major increase in the usefulness of the mouse wheel. Free ScreenR Instant Screencast with nothing to download. Works with Mac or PC and free. Free Start++ Start++ is an enhancement for the Start Menu in Windows Vista. It also extends the Run box and the command-line with customizable commands.  For example, typing "w Windows Vista" will take you to the Windows Vista page on Wikipedia! Free Synergy Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s). Free Texter Texter lets you define text substitution hot strings that, when triggered, will replace hotstring with a larger piece of text. By entering your most commonly-typed snippets of text into Texter, you can save countless keystrokes in the course of the day. Free Total Commander File handling, FTP, Archive handling and much more. Even works with Win3.11. COST/Trial Available Wizmouse WizMouse is a mouse enhancement utility that makes your mouse wheel work on the window currently under the mouse pointer, instead of the currently focused window. This means you no longer have to click on a window before being able to scroll it with the mouse wheel. This is a far more comfortable and practical way to make use of the mouse wheel. Free Xmarks Bookmark sync and search between computers. Free General Utilities – This is a list for power user users or anyone that wants more out of Windows. I usually install a majority of these whenever I get a new system. Name Description License µTorrent µTorrent is a lightweight and efficient BitTorrent client for Windows or Mac with many features. I use this for downloading LEGAL media. Free Audacity Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. It is available for Mac OS X, Microsoft Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems. Learn more about Audacity... Also check our Wiki and Forum for more information. Free AVast Free FREE Antivirus. Free CD Burner XP Pro CDBurnerXP is a free application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs. It also includes the feature to burn and create ISOs, as well as a multilanguage interface. Free CDEX You can extract digital audio CDs into mp3/wav. Free Combofix Combofix is a freeware (a legitimate spyware remover created by sUBs), Combofix was designed to scan a computer for known malware, spyware (SurfSideKick, QooLogic, and Look2Me as well as any other combination of the mentioned spyware applications) and remove them. Free Cpu-Z Provides information about some of the main devices of your system. Free Cropper Cropper is a screen capture utility written in C#. It makes it fast and easy to grab parts of your screen. Use it to easily crop out sections of vector graphic files such as Fireworks without having to flatten the files or open in a new editor. Use it to easily capture parts of a web site, including text and images. It's also great for writing documentation that needs images of your application or web site. Free DropBox Drag and Drop files to sync between computers. Free DVD-Fab Converts/Copies DVDs/Blu-Ray to different formats. (like mp4, mkv, avi) COST/Trial Available FastStone Capture FastStone Capture is a powerful, lightweight, yet full-featured screen capture tool that allows you to easily capture and annotate anything on the screen including windows, objects, menus, full screen, rectangular/freehand regions and even scrolling windows/web pages. Free ffdshow FFDShow is a DirectShow decoding filter for decompressing DivX, XviD, H.264, FLV1, WMV, MPEG-1 and MPEG-2, MPEG-4 movies. Free Filezilla FileZilla Client is a fast and reliable cross-platform FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface. You can also download a server version. Free FireFox Web Browser, do you really need an explanation? Free FireGestures A customizable mouse gestures extension which enables you to execute various commands and user scripts with five types of gestures. Free FoxIt Reader Light weight PDF viewer. You should install this with the advanced setting or it will install a toolbar and setup some shortcuts. Free gSynchIt Synch Gmail and Outlook. Even supports Outlook 2010 32/64 bit COST/Trial Available Hulu Desktop At home or in a hotel, this has replaced my cable/satellite subscription. Free ImgBurn ImgBurn is a lightweight CD / DVD / HD DVD / Blu-ray burning application that everyone should have in their toolkit! Free Infrarecorder InfraRecorder is a free CD/DVD burning solution for Microsoft Windows. It offers a wide range of powerful features; all through an easy to use application interface and Windows Explorer integration. Free KeePass KeePass is a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way. Free LastPass Another password management, synchronize between browsers, automatic form filling and more. Free Live Essentials One download and lots of programs including Mail, Live Writer, Movie Maker and more! Free Monitores MonitorES is a small windows utility that helps you to turnoff monitor display when you lock down your machine.Also when you lock your machine, it will pause all your running media programs & set your IM status message to "Away" / Custom message(via options) and restore it back to normal when you back. Free mRemote mRemote is a full-featured, multi-tab remote connections manager. Free Open Office OpenOffice.org 3 is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose. Free Paint.NET Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface for editing photos. Free Picasa Picasa is free photo editing software from Google that makes your pictures look great. Free Pidgin Pidgin is an easy to use and free chat client used by millions. Connect to AIM, MSN, Yahoo, and more chat networks all at once. Free PING PING is a live Linux ISO, based on the excellent Linux From Scratch (LFS) documentation. It can be burnt on a CD and booted, or integrated into a PXE / RIS environment. Free Putty PuTTY is an SSH and telnet client, developed originally by Simon Tatham for the Windows platform. Free Revo Uninstaller Revo Uninstaller Pro helps you to uninstall software and remove unwanted programs installed on your computer easily! Even if you have problems uninstalling and cannot uninstall them from "Windows Add or Remove Programs" control panel applet.Revo Uninstaller is a much faster and more powerful alternative to "Windows Add or Remove Programs" applet! It has very powerful features to uninstall and remove programs. Free Security Essentials Microsoft Security Essentials is a new, free consumer anti-malware solution for your computer. Free SetupVirtualCloneDrive Virtual CloneDrive works and behaves just like a physical CD/DVD drive, however it exists only virtually. Point to the .ISO file and it appears in Windows Explorer as a Drive. Free Shark 007 Codec Pack Play just about any file format with this download. Also includes my W7 Media Playlist Generator. Free Snagit 9 Screen Capture on steroids. Add arrows, captions, etc to any screenshot. COST/Trial Available SysinternalsSuite Go ahead and download the entire sys internals suite. I have mentioned multiple programs in this suite already. Free TeraCopy TeraCopy is a compact program designed to copy and move files at the maximum possible speed, providing the user with a lot of features. Free for Home TrueCrypt Free open-source disk encryption software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X, and Linux Free TweetDeck Fully featured Twitter client. Free UltraVNC UltraVNC is a powerful, easy to use and free software that can display the screen of another computer (via internet or network) on your own screen. The program allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to control the other PC remotely. It means that you can work on a remote computer, as if you were sitting in front of it, right from your current location. Free Unlocker Unlocks locked files. Pretty simple right? Free VLC Media Player VLC media player is a highly portable multimedia player and multimedia framework capable of reading most audio and video formats Free Windows 7 Media Playlist This program is special to my heart because I wrote it. It has been mentioned on podcast and various websites. It allows you to quickly create wvx video playlist for Windows Media Center. Free WinRAR WinRAR is a powerful archive manager. It can backup your data and reduce the size of email attachments, decompress RAR, ZIP and other files downloaded from Internet and create new archives in RAR and ZIP file format. COST/Trial Available Blogging – I use the following for my blog. Name Description License Insert Code for Windows Live Writer Insert Code for Windows Live Writer will format a snippet of text in a number of programming languages such as C#, HTML, MSH, JavaScript, Visual Basic and TSQL. Free LiveWriter Included in Live Essentials, but the ultimate in Windows Blogging Free PasteAsVSCode Plug-in for Windows Live Writer that pastes clipboard content as Visual Studio code. Preserves syntax highlighting, indentation and background color. Converts RTF, outputted by Visual Studio, into HTML. Free Desktop Management – The list below represent the best in Windows Desktop Management. Name Description License 7 Stacks Allows users to have "stacks" of icons in their taskbar. Free Executor Executor is a multi purpose launcher and a more advanced and customizable version of windows run. Free Fences Fences is a program that helps you organize your desktop and can hide your icons when they are not in use. Free RocketDock Rocket Dock is a smoothly animated, alpha blended application launcher. It provides a nice clean interface to drop shortcuts on for easy access and organization. With each item completely customizable there is no end to what you can add and launch from the dock. Free WindowsTab Tabbing is an essential feature of modern web browsers. Window Tabs brings the productivity of tabbed window management to all of your desktop applications. Free

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  • Using a service registry that doesn’t suck part II: Dear registry, do you have to be a message broker?

    - by gsusx
    Continuing our series of posts about service registry patterns that suck, we decided to address one of the most common techniques that Service Oriented (SOA) governance tools use to enforce policies. Scenario Service registries and repositories serve typically as a mechanism for storing service policies that model behaviors such as security, trust, reliable messaging, SLAs, etc. This makes perfect sense given that SOA governance registries were conceived as a mechanism to store and manage the policies...(read more)

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  • Windows Azure: Backup Services Release, Hyper-V Recovery Manager, VM Enhancements, Enhanced Enterprise Management Support

    - by ScottGu
    This morning we released a huge set of updates to Windows Azure.  These new capabilities include: Backup Services: General Availability of Windows Azure Backup Services Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Public preview of Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Configuration Active Directory: Securely manage hundreds of SaaS applications Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure SDK 2.2: A massive update of our SDK + Visual Studio tooling support All of these improvements are now available to use immediately.  Below are more details about them. Backup Service: General Availability Release of Windows Azure Backup Today we are releasing Windows Azure Backup Service as a general availability service.  This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. Windows Azure Backup is a cloud based backup solution for Windows Server which allows files and folders to be backed up and recovered from the cloud, and provides off-site protection against data loss. The service provides IT administrators and developers with the option to back up and protect critical data in an easily recoverable way from any location with no upfront hardware cost. Windows Azure Backup is built on the Windows Azure platform and uses Windows Azure blob storage for storing customer data. Windows Server uses the downloadable Windows Azure Backup Agent to transfer file and folder data securely and efficiently to the Windows Azure Backup Service. Along with providing cloud backup for Windows Server, Windows Azure Backup Service also provides capability to backup data from System Center Data Protection Manager and Windows Server Essentials, to the cloud. All data is encrypted onsite before it is sent to the cloud, and customers retain and manage the encryption key (meaning the data is stored entirely secured and can’t be decrypted by anyone but yourself). Getting Started To get started with the Windows Azure Backup Service, create a new Backup Vault within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Click New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Backup Vault to do this: Once the backup vault is created you’ll be presented with a simple tutorial that will help guide you on how to register your Windows Servers with it: Once the servers you want to backup are registered, you can use the appropriate local management interface (such as the Microsoft Management Console snap-in, System Center Data Protection Manager Console, or Windows Server Essentials Dashboard) to configure the scheduled backups and to optionally initiate recoveries. You can follow these tutorials to learn more about how to do this: Tutorial: Schedule Backups Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with setting up a backup schedule for your registered Windows Servers. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to set up a custom backup schedule. Tutorial: Recover Files and Folders Using the Windows Azure Backup Agent This tutorial helps you with recovering data from a backup. Additionally, it also explains how to use Windows PowerShell cmdlets to do the same tasks. Below are some of the key benefits the Windows Azure Backup Service provides: Simple configuration and management. Windows Azure Backup Service integrates with the familiar Windows Server Backup utility in Windows Server, the Data Protection Manager component in System Center and Windows Server Essentials, in order to provide a seamless backup and recovery experience to a local disk, or to the cloud. Block level incremental backups. The Windows Azure Backup Agent performs incremental backups by tracking file and block level changes and only transferring the changed blocks, hence reducing the storage and bandwidth utilization. Different point-in-time versions of the backups use storage efficiently by only storing the changes blocks between these versions. Data compression, encryption and throttling. The Windows Azure Backup Agent ensures that data is compressed and encrypted on the server before being sent to the Windows Azure Backup Service over the network. As a result, the Windows Azure Backup Service only stores encrypted data in the cloud storage. The encryption key is not available to the Windows Azure Backup Service, and as a result the data is never decrypted in the service. Also, users can setup throttling and configure how the Windows Azure Backup service utilizes the network bandwidth when backing up or restoring information. Data integrity is verified in the cloud. In addition to the secure backups, the backed up data is also automatically checked for integrity once the backup is done. As a result, any corruptions which may arise due to data transfer can be easily identified and are fixed automatically. Configurable retention policies for storing data in the cloud. The Windows Azure Backup Service accepts and implements retention policies to recycle backups that exceed the desired retention range, thereby meeting business policies and managing backup costs. Hyper-V Recovery Manager: Now Available in Public Preview I’m excited to also announce the public preview of a new Windows Azure Service – the Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager (HRM). Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager helps protect your business critical services by coordinating the replication and recovery of System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 SP1 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2012 R2 private clouds at a secondary location. With automated protection, asynchronous ongoing replication, and orderly recovery, the Hyper-V Recovery Manager service can help you implement Disaster Recovery and restore important services accurately, consistently, and with minimal downtime. Application data in an Hyper-V Recovery Manager scenarios always travels on your on-premise replication channel. Only metadata (such as names of logical clouds, virtual machines, networks etc.) that is needed for orchestration is sent to Azure. All traffic sent to/from Azure is encrypted. You can begin using Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery today by clicking New->Data Services->Recovery Services->Hyper-V Recovery Manager within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  You can read more about Windows Azure Hyper-V Recovery Manager in Brad Anderson’s 9-part series, Transform the datacenter. To learn more about setting up Hyper-V Recovery Manager follow our detailed step-by-step guide. Virtual Machines: Delete Attached Disks, Availability Set Warnings, SQL AlwaysOn Today’s Windows Azure release includes a number of nice updates to Windows Azure Virtual Machines.  These improvements include: Ability to Delete both VM Instances + Attached Disks in One Operation Prior to today’s release, when you deleted VMs within Windows Azure we would delete the VM instance – but not delete the drives attached to the VM.  You had to manually delete these yourself from the storage account.  With today’s update we’ve added a convenience option that now allows you to either retain or delete the attached disks when you delete the VM:   We’ve also added the ability to delete a cloud service, its deployments, and its role instances with a single action. This can either be a cloud service that has production and staging deployments with web and worker roles, or a cloud service that contains virtual machines.  To do this, simply select the Cloud Service within the Windows Azure Management Portal and click the “Delete” button: Warnings on Availability Sets with Only One Virtual Machine In Them One of the nice features that Windows Azure Virtual Machines supports is the concept of “Availability Sets”.  An “availability set” allows you to define a tier/role (e.g. webfrontends, databaseservers, etc) that you can map Virtual Machines into – and when you do this Windows Azure separates them across fault domains and ensures that at least one of them is always available during servicing operations.  This enables you to deploy applications in a high availability way. One issue we’ve seen some customers run into is where they define an availability set, but then forget to map more than one VM into it (which defeats the purpose of having an availability set).  With today’s release we now display a warning in the Windows Azure Management Portal if you have only one virtual machine deployed in an availability set to help highlight this: You can learn more about configuring the availability of your virtual machines here. Configuring SQL Server Always On SQL Server Always On is a great feature that you can use with Windows Azure to enable high availability and DR scenarios with SQL Server. Today’s Windows Azure release makes it even easier to configure SQL Server Always On by enabling “Direct Server Return” endpoints to be configured and managed within the Windows Azure Management Portal.  Previously, setting this up required using PowerShell to complete the endpoint configuration.  Starting today you can enable this simply by checking the “Direct Server Return” checkbox: You can learn more about how to use direct server return for SQL Server AlwaysOn availability groups here. Active Directory: Application Access Enhancements This summer we released our initial preview of our Application Access Enhancements for Windows Azure Active Directory.  This service enables you to securely implement single-sign-on (SSO) support against SaaS applications (including Office 365, SalesForce, Workday, Box, Google Apps, GitHub, etc) as well as LOB based applications (including ones built with the new Windows Azure AD support we shipped last week with ASP.NET and VS 2013). Since the initial preview we’ve enhanced our SAML federation capabilities, integrated our new password vaulting system, and shipped multi-factor authentication support. We've also turned on our outbound identity provisioning system and have it working with hundreds of additional SaaS Applications: Earlier this month we published an update on dates and pricing for when the service will be released in general availability form.  In this blog post we announced our intention to release the service in general availability form by the end of the year.  We also announced that the below features would be available in a free tier with it: SSO to every SaaS app we integrate with – Users can Single Sign On to any app we are integrated with at no charge. This includes all the top SAAS Apps and every app in our application gallery whether they use federation or password vaulting. Application access assignment and removal – IT Admins can assign access privileges to web applications to the users in their active directory assuring that every employee has access to the SAAS Apps they need. And when a user leaves the company or changes jobs, the admin can just as easily remove their access privileges assuring data security and minimizing IP loss User provisioning (and de-provisioning) – IT admins will be able to automatically provision users in 3rd party SaaS applications like Box, Salesforce.com, GoToMeeting, DropBox and others. We are working with key partners in the ecosystem to establish these connections, meaning you no longer have to continually update user records in multiple systems. Security and auditing reports – Security is a key priority for us. With the free version of these enhancements you'll get access to our standard set of access reports giving you visibility into which users are using which applications, when they were using them and where they are using them from. In addition, we'll alert you to un-usual usage patterns for instance when a user logs in from multiple locations at the same time. Our Application Access Panel – Users are logging in from every type of devices including Windows, iOS, & Android. Not all of these devices handle authentication in the same manner but the user doesn't care. They need to access their apps from the devices they love. Our Application Access Panel will support the ability for users to access access and launch their apps from any device and anywhere. You can learn more about our plans for application management with Windows Azure Active Directory here.  Try out the preview and start using it today. Enterprise Management: Use Active Directory to Better Manage Windows Azure Windows Azure Active Directory provides the ability to manage your organization in a directory which is hosted entirely in the cloud, or alternatively kept in sync with an on-premises Windows Server Active Directory solution (allowing you to seamlessly integrate with the directory you already have).  With today’s Windows Azure release we are integrating Windows Azure Active Directory even more within the core Windows Azure management experience, and enabling an even richer enterprise security offering.  Specifically: 1) All Windows Azure accounts now have a default Windows Azure Active Directory created for them.  You can create and map any users you want into this directory, and grant administrative rights to manage resources in Windows Azure to these users. 2) You can keep this directory entirely hosted in the cloud – or optionally sync it with your on-premises Windows Server Active Directory.  Both options are free.  The later approach is ideal for companies that wish to use their corporate user identities to sign-in and manage Windows Azure resources.  It also ensures that if an employee leaves an organization, his or her access control rights to the company’s Windows Azure resources are immediately revoked. 3) The Windows Azure Service Management APIs have been updated to support using Windows Azure Active Directory credentials to sign-in and perform management operations.  Prior to today’s release customers had to download and use management certificates (which were not scoped to individual users) to perform management operations.  We still support this management certificate approach (don’t worry – nothing will stop working).  But we think the new Windows Azure Active Directory authentication support enables an even easier and more secure way for customers to manage resources going forward.  4) The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release (which is also shipping today) includes built-in support for the new Service Management APIs that authenticate with Windows Azure Active Directory, and now allow you to create and manage Windows Azure applications and resources directly within Visual Studio using your Active Directory credentials.  This, combined with updated PowerShell scripts that also support Active Directory, enables an end-to-end enterprise authentication story with Windows Azure. Below are some details on how all of this works: Subscriptions within a Directory As part of today’s update, we have associated all existing Window Azure accounts with a Windows Azure Active Directory (and created one for you if you don’t already have one). When you login to the Windows Azure Management Portal you’ll now see the directory name in the URI of the browser.  For example, in the screen-shot below you can see that I have a “scottgu” directory that my subscriptions are hosted within: Note that you can continue to use Microsoft Accounts (formerly known as Microsoft Live IDs) to sign-into Windows Azure.  These map just fine to a Windows Azure Active Directory – so there is no need to create new usernames that are specific to a directory if you don’t want to.  In the scenario above I’m actually logged in using my @hotmail.com based Microsoft ID which is now mapped to a “scottgu” active directory that was created for me.  By default everything will continue to work just like you used to before. Manage your Directory You can manage an Active Directory (including the one we now create for you by default) by clicking the “Active Directory” tab in the left-hand side of the portal.  This will list all of the directories in your account.  Clicking one the first time will display a getting started page that provides documentation and links to perform common tasks with it: You can use the built-in directory management support within the Windows Azure Management Portal to add/remove/manage users within the directory, enable multi-factor authentication, associate a custom domain (e.g. mycompanyname.com) with the directory, and/or rename the directory to whatever friendly name you want (just click the configure tab to do this).  You can also setup the directory to automatically sync with an on-premises Active Directory using the “Directory Integration” tab. Note that users within a directory by default do not have admin rights to login or manage Windows Azure based resources.  You still need to explicitly grant them co-admin permissions on a subscription for them to login or manage resources in Windows Azure.  You can do this by clicking the Settings tab on the left-hand side of the portal and then by clicking the administrators tab within it. Sign-In Integration within Visual Studio If you install the new Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release, you can now connect to Windows Azure from directly inside Visual Studio without having to download any management certificates.  You can now just right-click on the “Windows Azure” icon within the Server Explorer and choose the “Connect to Windows Azure” context menu option to do so: Doing this will prompt you to enter the email address of the username you wish to sign-in with (make sure this account is a user in your directory with co-admin rights on a subscription): You can use either a Microsoft Account (e.g. Windows Live ID) or an Active Directory based Organizational account as the email.  The dialog will update with an appropriate login prompt depending on which type of email address you enter: Once you sign-in you’ll see the Windows Azure resources that you have permissions to manage show up automatically within the Visual Studio server explorer and be available to start using: No downloading of management certificates required.  All of the authentication was handled using your Windows Azure Active Directory! Manage Subscriptions across Multiple Directories If you have already have multiple directories and multiple subscriptions within your Windows Azure account, we have done our best to create a good default mapping of your subscriptions->directories as part of today’s update.  If you don’t like the default subscription-to-directory mapping we have done you can click the Settings tab in the left-hand navigation of the Windows Azure Management Portal and browse to the Subscriptions tab within it: If you want to map a subscription under a different directory in your account, simply select the subscription from the list, and then click the “Edit Directory” button to choose which directory to map it to.  Mapping a subscription to a different directory takes only seconds and will not cause any of the resources within the subscription to recycle or stop working.  We’ve made the directory->subscription mapping process self-service so that you always have complete control and can map things however you want. Filtering By Directory and Subscription Within the Windows Azure Management Portal you can filter resources in the portal by subscription (allowing you to show/hide different subscriptions).  If you have subscriptions mapped to multiple directory tenants, we also now have a filter drop-down that allows you to filter the subscription list by directory tenant.  This filter is only available if you have multiple subscriptions mapped to multiple directories within your Windows Azure Account:   Windows Azure SDK 2.2 Today we are also releasing a major update of our Windows Azure SDK.  The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 release adds some great new features including: Visual Studio 2013 Support Integrated Windows Azure Sign-In support within Visual Studio Remote Debugging Cloud Services with Visual Studio Firewall Management support within Visual Studio for SQL Databases Visual Studio 2013 RTM VM Images for MSDN Subscribers Windows Azure Management Libraries for .NET Updated Windows Azure PowerShell Cmdlets and ScriptCenter I’ll post a follow-up blog shortly with more details about all of the above. Additional Updates In addition to the above enhancements, today’s release also includes a number of additional improvements: AutoScale: Richer time and date based scheduling support (set different rules on different dates) AutoScale: Ability to Scale to Zero Virtual Machines (very useful for Dev/Test scenarios) AutoScale: Support for time-based scheduling of Mobile Service AutoScale rules Operation Logs: Auditing support for Service Bus management operations Today we also shipped a major update to the Windows Azure SDK – Windows Azure SDK 2.2.  It has so much goodness in it that I have a whole second blog post coming shortly on it! :-) Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a bunch of great new scenarios, and enables a much richer enterprise authentication offering. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today.  Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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  • Cloud MBaaS : The Next Big Thing in Enterprise Mobility

    - by shiju
    In this blog post, I will take a look at Cloud Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) and how we can leverage Cloud based Mobile Backend as a Service for building enterprise mobile apps. Today, mobile apps are incredibly significant in both consumer and enterprise space and the demand for the mobile apps is unbelievably increasing in day to day business. An enterprise can’t survive in business without a proper mobility strategy. A better mobility strategy and faster delivery of your mobile apps will give you an extra mileage for your business and IT strategy. So organizations and mobile developers are looking for different strategy for meeting this demand and adopting different development strategy for their mobile apps. Some developers are adopting hybrid mobile app development platforms, for delivering their products for multiple platforms, for fast time-to-market. Others are adopting a Mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) such as Kony for their enterprise mobile apps for fast time-to-market and better business integration. The Challenges of Enterprise Mobility The real challenge of enterprise mobile apps, is not about creating the front-end environment or developing front-end for multiple platforms. The most important thing of enterprise mobile apps is to expose your enterprise data to mobile devices where the real pain is your business data might be residing in lot of different systems including legacy systems, ERP systems etc., and these systems will be deployed with lot of security restrictions. Exposing your data from the on-premises servers, is not a easy thing for most of the business organizations. Many organizations are spending too much time for their front-end development strategy, but they are really lacking for building a strategy on their back-end for exposing the business data to mobile apps. So building a REST services layer and mobile back-end services, on the top of legacy systems and existing middleware systems, is the key part of most of the enterprise mobile apps, where multiple mobile platforms can easily consume these REST services and other mobile back-end services for building mobile apps. For some mobile apps, we can’t predict its user base, especially for products where customers can gradually increase at any time. And for today’s mobile apps, faster time-to-market is very critical so that spending too much time for mobile app’s scalability, will not be worth. The real power of Cloud is the agility and on-demand scalability, where we can scale-up and scale-down our applications very easily. It would be great if we could use the power of Cloud to mobile apps. So using Cloud for mobile apps is a natural fit, where we can use Cloud as the storage for mobile apps and hosting mechanism for mobile back-end services, where we can enjoy the full power of Cloud with greater level of on-demand scalability and operational agility. So Cloud based Mobile Backend as a Service is great choice for building enterprise mobile apps, where enterprises can enjoy the massive scalability power of their mobile apps, provided by public cloud vendors such as Microsoft Windows Azure. Mobile Backend as a Service (MBaaS) We have discussed the key challenges of enterprise mobile apps and how we can leverage Cloud for hosting mobile backend services. MBaaS is a set of cloud-based, server-side mobile services for multiple mobile platforms and HTML5 platform, which can be used as a backend for your mobile apps with the scalability power of Cloud. The information below provides the key features of a typical MBaaS platform: Cloud based storage for your application data. Automatic REST API services on the application data, for CRUD operations. Native push notification services with massive scalability power. User management services for authenticate users. User authentication via Social accounts such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter. Scheduler services for periodically sending data to mobile devices. Native SDKs for multiple mobile platforms such as Windows Phone and Windows Store, Android, Apple iOS, and HTML5, for easily accessing the mobile services from mobile apps, with better security.  Typically, a MBaaS platform will provide native SDKs for multiple mobile platforms so that we can easily consume the server-side mobile services. MBaaS based REST APIs can use for integrating to enterprise backend systems. We can use the same mobile services for multiple platform so hat we can reuse the application logic to multiple mobile platforms. Public cloud vendors are building the mobile services on the top of their PaaS offerings. Windows Azure Mobile Services is a great platform for a MBaaS offering that is leveraging Windows Azure Cloud platform’s PaaS capabilities. Hybrid mobile development platform Titanium provides their own MBaaS services. LoopBack is a new MBaaS service provided by Node.js consulting firm StrongLoop, which can be hosted on multiple cloud platforms and also for on-premises servers. The Challenges of MBaaS Solutions If you are building your mobile apps with a new data storage, it will be very easy, since there is not any integration challenges you have to face. But most of the use cases, you have to extract your application data in which stored in on-premises servers which might be under VPNs and firewalls. So exposing these data to your MBaaS solution with a proper security would be a big challenge. The capability of your MBaaS vendor is very important as you have to interact with your legacy systems for many enterprise mobile apps. So you should be very careful about choosing for MBaaS vendor. At the same time, you should have a proper strategy for mobilizing your application data which stored in on-premises legacy systems, where your solution architecture and strategy is more important than platforms and tools.  Windows Azure Mobile Services Windows Azure Mobile Services is an MBaaS offerings from Windows Azure cloud platform. IMHO, Microsoft Windows Azure is the best PaaS platform in the Cloud space. Windows Azure Mobile Services extends the PaaS capabilities of Windows Azure, to mobile devices, which can be used as a cloud backend for your mobile apps, which will provide global availability and reach for your mobile apps. Windows Azure Mobile Services provides storage services, user management with social network integration, push notification services and scheduler services and provides native SDKs for all major mobile platforms and HTML5. In Windows Azure Mobile Services, you can write server-side scripts in Node.js where you can enjoy the full power of Node.js including the use of NPM modules for your server-side scripts. In the previous section, we had discussed some challenges of MBaaS solutions. You can leverage Windows Azure Cloud platform for solving many challenges regarding with enterprise mobility. The entire Windows Azure platform can play a key role for working as the backend for your mobile apps where you can leverage the entire Windows Azure platform for your mobile apps. With Windows Azure, you can easily connect to your on-premises systems which is a key thing for mobile backend solutions. Another key point is that Windows Azure provides better integration with services like Active Directory, which makes Windows Azure as the de facto platform for enterprise mobility, for enterprises, who have been leveraging Microsoft ecosystem for their application and IT infrastructure. Windows Azure Mobile Services  is going to next evolution where you can expect some exciting features in near future. One area, where Windows Azure Mobile Services should definitely need an improvement, is about the default storage mechanism in which currently it is depends on SQL Server. IMHO, developers should be able to choose multiple default storage option when creating a new mobile service instance. Let’s say, there should be a different storage providers such as SQL Server storage provider and Table storage provider where developers should be able to choose their choice of storage provider when creating a new mobile services project. I have been used Windows Azure and Windows Azure Mobile Services as the backend for production apps for mobile, where it performed very well. MBaaS Over MEAP Recently, many larger enterprises has been adopted Mobile enterprise application platform (MEAP) for their mobile apps. I haven’t worked on any production MEAP solution, but I heard that developers are really struggling with MEAP in different way. The learning curve for a proprietary MEAP platform is very high. I am completely against for using larger proprietary ecosystem for mobile apps. For enterprise mobile apps, I highly recommend to use native iOS/Android/Windows Phone or HTML5  for front-end with a cloud hosted MBaaS solution as the middleware. A MBaaS service can be consumed from multiple mobile apps where REST APIs are using to integrating with enterprise backend systems. Enterprise mobility should start with exposing REST APIs on the enterprise backend systems and these REST APIs can host on Cloud where we can enjoy the power of Cloud for our services. If you are having REST APIs for your enterprise data, then you can easily build mobile frontends for multiple platforms.   You can follow me on Twitter @shijucv

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  • SharePoint 2010 Hosting :: Error – HTTP Error 401.1 when Accessing Your SharePoint 2010 Site

    - by mbridge
    When attempting to view a MOSS (SharePoint) 2007 or SharePoint 2010 site locally from a Web Front End (WFE) you get an error stating: “HTTP Error 401.1 – Unauthorized: Access is denied due to invalid credentials.” I have noticed that this happens on Windows 2003/2008 Server SP1/SP2/R2 when using Host Headers and Alternate Access Mappings on a web application in MOSS 2007. If you can access the site from remote machines and cannot access the site from the server itself, then this might be your issue. For all my newer farm installs this includes SharePoint 2007 (MOSS) and SharePoint 2010. I use method number 2 on all SharePoint and SQL Servers in the farm. If you cannot access the web site locally or remotely from other machines then there is an issue with security on the site and/or possibly a Kerberos related security issue I implemented fix #2 listed in the following Microsoft KB Article. I implemented this fix on all servers in the MOSS 2007 Farm (WFE’s and Indexing/Search Server). If using method 1, you would add all Host Headers and Alternate Access Mappings for all web applications to the BackConnectionHostNames value, then you will be able to access the sites locally from the WFE’s. Microsoft KB Link: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/896861 Method 1: Specify Host Names Please follow this steps: 1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK. 2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa\MSV1_0 3. Right-click MSV1_0, point to New, and then click Multi-String Value. 4. Type BackConnectionHostNames, and then press ENTER. 5. Right-click BackConnectionHostNames, and then click Modify. 6. In the Value data box, type the host name or the host names for the sites that are on the local computer, and then click OK. 7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart the IISAdmin service. Method 2: Disable the Loopback Check  Please follow this steps: 1. Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then click OK 2. In Registry Editor, locate and then click the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa 3. Right-click Lsa, point to New, and then click DWORD Value. 4. Type DisableLoopbackCheck, and then press ENTER. 5. Right-click DisableLoopbackCheck, and then click Modify. 6. In the Value data box, type 1, and then click OK. 7. Quit Registry Editor, and then restart your computer. Give it try and good luck.

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  • Some thoughts on interviewing….

    - by Jonathan Kehayias
    At the beginning of the year I changed jobs, leaving a very stable position where I had the opportunity to learn under an amazing mentor (who happened to be a Oracle DBA and not a SQL DBA), to take on a job that I felt was much more challenging and had better potential for personal as well as professional growth.  I wasn’t necessarily looking for another job at the time, but one that interested me was mentioned at our local user group meeting and I decided to check it out and see if it was something...(read more)

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  • Force.com presents Database.com SQL Azure/Amazon RDS unfazed

    - by Sarang
    At the DreamForce 2010 event in San Francisco Force.com unveiled their next big thing in the Fat SaaS portfolio "Database.com".  I am still wondering how would they would've shelled out for that domain name. Now why would a already established SaaS player foray into a key building block like Database? Potentially allowing enterprises to build apps that do not utilize the Force.com stack! One key reason is being seen as the Fat SaaS player with evey trick in the SaaS space under his belt. You want CRM come hither, want a custom development PaaS like solution welcome home (VMForce), want all your apps to talk to a cloud DB and minimize latency by having it reside closer to you cloud apps? You've come to the right place sire! Other is potentially killing foray of smaller DB players like Oracle (Not surprisingly, the Database.com offering is a highly customized and scalable Oracle database) from entering the lucrative SaaS db marketplace. The feature set promised looks great out of the box for someone who likes to visualize cool new architectures. The ground realities are certainly going to be a lot different considering the SOAP/REST style access patterns in lieu of the comfortable old shoe of SQL. Microsoft suffered heavily with SDS (SQL Data Services) offering in early 2009 and had to pull the plug on the product only to reintroduce as a simple SQL Server in the cloud, SQL Windows Azure. Though MSFT is playing cool by providing OData semantics to work with SQL Windows Azure satisfying atleast some needs of the Web-Style to a DB. The other features like Social data models including Profiles, Status updates, feeds seem interesting as well. (Although I beleive social is just one of the aspects of large scale collaborative computing). All these features start "Free" for devs its a good news but the good news stops here. The overall pricing model of $ per Users per Transactions / Month is highly disproportionate compared to Amazon RDS (Based on MySQL) or SQL Windows Azure (Based on MSSQL). Roger Jennigs of Oakleaf did an interesting comparo based on 3, 10, 100, 500 users and it turns out that Database.com going by current understanding is way too expensive for the services on offer. The offering may not impact the decision for DotNet shops mulling their cloud stategy or even some Java/MySQL shops thinking about Amazon RDS, however for enterprises having already invested in other force.com offerings this could be a very important piece in the cloud strategy jigsaw. One which would address a key cloud DB issue of "Latency" for them at least it will help having the DB in the neighborhood. The tooling and "SQL like" access provider drivers (Think ODBC/JDBC) will be available later this year. Progress Software has already announced their JDBC driver stack for Database.com. It remains to be seen how effective the overall solutions proves to be in the longer run but for starts its a important decision towards consolidating Force.com's already strong positioning in the SaaS space. As always contrasting views are welcome! :)

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  • How To Disconnect Non-Mapped UNC Path “Drives” in Windows

    - by The Geek
    Have you ever browsed over to another PC on your network using “network neighborhood”, and then connected to one of the file shares? Without a drive letter, how do you disconnect yourself once you’ve done so? Really confused as to what I’m talking about? Let’s walk through the process. First, imagine that you browse through and connect to a share, entering your username and password to gain access. The problem is that you stay connected, and there’s no visible way to disconnect yourself. If you try and shut down the other PC, you’ll receive a message that users are still connected. So let’s disconnect! Open up a command prompt, and then type in the following: net use This will give you a list of the connected drives, including the ones that aren’t actually mapped to a drive letter. To disconnect one of the connections, you can use the following command: net use /delete \\server\sharename For example, in this instance we’d disconnect like so: net use /delete \\192.168.1.205\root$ Now when you run the “net use” command again, you’ll see that you’ve been properly disconnected. If you wanted to actually connect to a share without mapping a drive letter, you can do the following: net use /user:Username \\server\sharename Password You could then just pop \\server\sharename into a Windows Explorer window and browse the files that way. Note that this technique should work exactly the same in any version of windows. Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Remove "Map Network Drive" Menu Item from Windows Vista or XPDisable the Annoying "This page has an unspecified potential security risk" When Using Files on a Network ShareCopy Path of a File to the Clipboard in Windows 7 or VistaMap a Network Drive from XP to Windows 7Defrag Multiple Hard Drives At Once In Windows 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 Enable DreamScene in Windows 7 Microsoft’s “How Do I ?” Videos Home Networks – How do they look like & the problems they cause Check Your IMAP Mail Offline In Thunderbird Follow Finder Finds You Twitter Users To Follow Combine MP3 Files Easily

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  • First time using Java Web Start in Ubuntu - Fatal Launch Exception

    - by MountainX
    I've been using Ubuntu for a while and Java Web Start applications have never "just worked" in the current or any prior version, so I ignored them until now. However, now I have a need to get them working in Firefox. When I am on a page like this: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/demos-nojavascript-137100.html I want to be able to click on the demos as suggested and have them run. I'm running Ubuntu 11.10 with Gnome 3 and/or Linux Mint 12 (64 bit) with OpenJDK 6, OpenJDK 7 and Sun Java 6. My default is currently: /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/java $ whereis javaws javaws: /usr/bin/javaws /etc/alternatives/javaws - /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-openjdk/jre/bin/javaws Here's the error I get when I try to run a Java Web Start application: net.sourceforge.jnlp.LaunchException: Fatal: Initialization Error: Could not initialize application. at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher.createApplication(Launcher.java:776) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher.launchApplication(Launcher.java:552) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher$TgThread.run(Launcher.java:887) Caused by: net.sourceforge.jnlp.LaunchException: Fatal: Initialization Error: A fatal error occurred while trying to verify jars. at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.JNLPClassLoader.initializeResources(JNLPClassLoader.java:448) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.JNLPClassLoader.<init>(JNLPClassLoader.java:176) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.JNLPClassLoader.getInstance(JNLPClassLoader.java:295) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher.createApplication(Launcher.java:767) ... 2 more Caused by: net.sourceforge.jnlp.LaunchException: Fatal: Initialization Error: A fatal error occurred while trying to verify jars. at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.JNLPClassLoader.initializeResources(JNLPClassLoader.java:448) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.JNLPClassLoader.<init>(JNLPClassLoader.java:176) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.JNLPClassLoader.getInstance(JNLPClassLoader.java:295) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher.createApplication(Launcher.java:767) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher.launchApplication(Launcher.java:552) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher$TgThread.run(Launcher.java:887) Here's another example: http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/uiswing/events/keylistener.html net.sourceforge.jnlp.LaunchException: Fatal: Read Error: Could not read or parse the JNLP file. at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher.fromUrl(Launcher.java:491) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher.launch(Launcher.java:283) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.Boot.run(Boot.java:199) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.Boot.run(Boot.java:51) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.Boot.main(Boot.java:165) Caused by: java.io.IOException: port out of range:-2147483648 at net.sourceforge.jnlp.JNLPFile.openURL(JNLPFile.java:255) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.JNLPFile.<init>(JNLPFile.java:185) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.JNLPFile.<init>(JNLPFile.java:162) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.JNLPFile.<init>(JNLPFile.java:148) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher.fromUrl(Launcher.java:477) ... 5 more Caused by: java.io.IOException: port out of range:-2147483648 at net.sourceforge.jnlp.JNLPFile.openURL(JNLPFile.java:255) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.JNLPFile.<init>(JNLPFile.java:185) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.JNLPFile.<init>(JNLPFile.java:162) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.JNLPFile.<init>(JNLPFile.java:148) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher.fromUrl(Launcher.java:477) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.Launcher.launch(Launcher.java:283) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.Boot.run(Boot.java:199) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.Boot.run(Boot.java:51) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at net.sourceforge.jnlp.runtime.Boot.main(Boot.java:165)

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  • Some thoughts on interviewing….

    - by Jonathan Kehayias
    At the beginning of the year I changed jobs, leaving a very stable position where I had the opportunity to learn under an amazing mentor (who happened to be a Oracle DBA and not a SQL DBA), to take on a job that I felt was much more challenging and had better potential for personal as well as professional growth.  I wasn’t necessarily looking for another job at the time, but one that interested me was mentioned at our local user group meeting and I decided to check it out and see if it was something...(read more)

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  • Speaking at Microsoft's Duth DevDays

    - by gsusx
    Last week I had the pleasure of presenting two sessions at Microsoft's Dutch DevDays at Den Hague. On Tuesday I presented a sessions about how to implement real world RESTFul services patterns using WCF, WCF Data Services and ASP.NET MVC2. During that session I showed a total of 15 small demos that highlighted how to implement key aspects of RESTful solutions such as Security, LowREST clients, URI modeling, Validation, Error Handling, etc. As part of those demos I used the OAuth implementation created...(read more)

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  • Setting up an SSL Certificate in Apache

    When the HTTP protocol was designed, it was assumed that data transmission would be secure. Times have changed and network security has become much more important to us, especially for certain tasks. Sukrit Dhandhania shows you how to set up Secure Sockets Layer.

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  • This Isn’t Hard: Allow Spouses to Attend Conferences

    - by andyleonard
    There was a bit of a hubbub at Tech Ed 2013 North America . It began with generalized disorganization, escalated when site security escorted Greg Young’s ( blog | @gregyoung ) wife from the building, and ended with him cancelling his presentations at both the North American and European conferences. Greg’s post has generated some responses, but – according to him – nothing from Microsoft. That’s disappointing. Greg and his wife deserve an apology. Why Not? The best conferences I’ve attended (I’m...(read more)

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  • How to get SQL Railroad Diagrams from MSDN BNF syntax notation.

    - by Phil Factor
    pre {margin-bottom:.0001pt; font-size:8.0pt; font-family:"Courier New"; margin-left: 0cm; margin-right: 0cm; margin-top: 0cm; } On SQL Server Books-On-Line, in the Transact-SQL Reference (database Engine), every SQL Statement has its syntax represented in  ‘Backus–Naur Form’ notation (BNF)  syntax. For a programmer in a hurry, this should be ideal because It is the only quick way to understand and appreciate all the permutations of the syntax. It is a great feature once you get your eye in. It isn’t the only way to get the information;  You can, of course, reverse-engineer an understanding of the syntax from the examples, but your understanding won’t be complete, and you’ll have wasted time doing it. BNF is a good start in representing the syntax:  Oracle and SQLite go one step further, and have proper railroad diagrams for their syntax, which is a far more accessible way of doing it. There are three problems with the BNF on MSDN. Firstly, it is isn’t a standard version of  BNF, but an ancient fork from EBNF, inherited from Sybase. Secondly, it is excruciatingly difficult to understand, and thirdly it has a number of syntactic and semantic errors. The page describing DML triggers, for example, currently has the absurd BNF error that makes it state that all statements in the body of the trigger must be separated by commas.  There are a few other detail problems too. Here is the offending syntax for a DML trigger, pasted from MSDN. Trigger on an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement to a table or view (DML Trigger) CREATE TRIGGER [ schema_name . ]trigger_name ON { table | view } [ WITH <dml_trigger_option> [ ,...n ] ] { FOR | AFTER | INSTEAD OF } { [ INSERT ] [ , ] [ UPDATE ] [ , ] [ DELETE ] } [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ] AS { sql_statement [ ; ] [ ,...n ] | EXTERNAL NAME <method specifier [ ; ] > }   <dml_trigger_option> ::=     [ ENCRYPTION ]     [ EXECUTE AS Clause ]   <method_specifier> ::=  This should, of course, be /* Trigger on an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement to a table or view (DML Trigger) */ CREATE TRIGGER [ schema_name . ]trigger_name ON { table | view } [ WITH <dml_trigger_option> [ ,...n ] ] { FOR | AFTER | INSTEAD OF } { [ INSERT ] [ , ] [ UPDATE ] [ , ] [ DELETE ] } [ NOT FOR REPLICATION ] AS { {sql_statement [ ; ]} [ ...n ] | EXTERNAL NAME <method_specifier> [ ; ] }   <dml_trigger_option> ::=     [ ENCRYPTION ]     [ EXECUTE AS CLAUSE ]   <method_specifier> ::=     assembly_name.class_name.method_name I’d love to tell Microsoft when I spot errors like this so they can correct them but I can’t. Obviously, there is a mechanism on MSDN to get errors corrected by using comments, but that doesn’t work for me (*Error occurred while saving your data.”), and when I report that the comment system doesn’t work to MSDN, I get no reply. I’ve been trying to create railroad diagrams for all the important SQL Server SQL statements, as good as you’d find for Oracle, and have so far published the CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE railroad diagrams based on the BNF. Although I’ve been aware of them, I’ve never realised until recently how many errors there are. Then, Colin Daley created a translator for the SQL Server dialect of  BNF which outputs standard EBNF notation used by the W3C. The example MSDN BNF for the trigger would be rendered as … /* Trigger on an INSERT, UPDATE, or DELETE statement to a table or view (DML Trigger) */ create_trigger ::= 'CREATE TRIGGER' ( schema_name '.' ) ? trigger_name 'ON' ( table | view ) ( 'WITH' dml_trigger_option ( ',' dml_trigger_option ) * ) ? ( 'FOR' | 'AFTER' | 'INSTEAD OF' ) ( ( 'INSERT' ) ? ( ',' ) ? ( 'UPDATE' ) ? ( ',' ) ? ( 'DELETE' ) ? ) ( 'NOT FOR REPLICATION' ) ? 'AS' ( ( sql_statement ( ';' ) ? ) + | 'EXTERNAL NAME' method_specifier ( ';' ) ? )   dml_trigger_option ::= ( 'ENCRYPTION' ) ? ( 'EXECUTE AS CLAUSE' ) ?   method_specifier ::= assembly_name '.' class_name '.' method_name Colin’s intention was to allow anyone to paste SQL Server’s BNF notation into his website-based parser, and from this generate classic railroad diagrams via Gunther Rademacher's Railroad Diagram Generator.  Colin's application does this for you: you're not aware that you are moving to a different site.  Because Colin's 'translator' it is a parser, it will pick up syntax errors. Once you’ve fixed the syntax errors, you will get the syntax in the form of a human-readable railroad diagram and, in this form, the semantic mistakes become flamingly obvious. Gunter’s Railroad Diagram Generator is brilliant. To be able, after correcting the MSDN dialect of BNF, to generate a standard EBNF, and from thence to create railroad diagrams for SQL Server’s syntax that are as good as Oracle’s, is a great boon, and many thanks to Colin for the idea. Here is the result of the W3C EBNF from Colin’s application then being run through the Railroad diagram generator. create_trigger: dml_trigger_option: method_specifier:   Now that’s much better, you’ll agree. This is pretty easy to understand, and at this point any error is immediately obvious. This should be seriously useful, and it is to me. However  there is that snag. The BNF is generally incorrect, and you can’t expect the average visitor to mess about with it. The answer is, of course, to correct the BNF on MSDN and maybe even add railroad diagrams for the syntax. Stop giggling! I agree it won’t happen. In the meantime, we need to collaboratively store and publish these corrected syntaxes ourselves as we do them. How? GitHub?  SQL Server Central?  Simple-Talk? What should those of us who use the system  do with our corrected EBNF so that anyone can use them without hassle?

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  • Google Chrome Extensions: Launch Event (part 4)

    Google Chrome Extensions: Launch Event (part 4) Video Footage from the Google Chrome Extensions launch event on 12/09/09. Aaron Boodman and Erik Kay, technical leads for the Google Chrome extensions team discuss the UI surfaces of Google Chrome extensions and the team's content not chrome philosophy. They also highlight the smooth, frictionless install and uninstall process for Google Chrome's extensions system and present the team's initiatives in the space of security and performance. From: GoogleDevelopers Views: 2963 12 ratings Time: 15:44 More in Science & Technology

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  • LLBLGen Pro v3.1 released!

    - by FransBouma
    Yesterday we released LLBLGen Pro v3.1! Version 3.1 comes with new features and enhancements, which I'll describe briefly below. v3.1 is a free upgrade for v3.x licensees. What's new / changed? Designer Extensible Import system. An extensible import system has been added to the designer to import project data from external sources. Importers are plug-ins which import project meta-data (like entity definitions, mappings and relational model data) from an external source into the loaded project. In v3.1, an importer plug-in for importing project elements from existing LLBLGen Pro v3.x project files has been included. You can use this importer to create source projects from which you import parts of models to build your actual project with. Model-only relationships. In v3.1, relationships of the type 1:1, m:1 and 1:n can be marked as model-only. A model-only relationship isn't required to have a backing foreign key constraint in the relational model data. They're ideal for projects which have to work with relational databases where changes can't always be made or some relationships can't be added to (e.g. the ones which are important for the entity model, but are not allowed to be added to the relational model for some reason). Custom field ordering. Although fields in an entity definition don't really have an ordering, it can be important for some situations to have the entity fields in a given order, e.g. when you use compound primary keys. Field ordering can be defined using a pop-up dialog which can be opened through various ways, e.g. inside the project explorer, model view and entity editor. It can also be set automatically during refreshes based on new settings. Command line relational model data refresher tool, CliRefresher.exe. The command line refresh tool shipped with v2.6 is now available for v3.1 as well Navigation enhancements in various designer elements. It's now easier to find elements like entities, typed views etc. in the project explorer from editors, to navigate to related entities in the project explorer by right clicking a relationship, navigate to the super-type in the project explorer when right-clicking an entity and navigate to the sub-type in the project explorer when right-clicking a sub-type node in the project explorer. Minor visual enhancements / tweaks LLBLGen Pro Runtime Framework Entity creation is now up to 30% faster and takes 5% less memory. Creating an entity object has been optimized further by tweaks inside the framework to make instantiating an entity object up to 30% faster. It now also takes up to 5% less memory than in v3.0 Prefetch Path node merging is now up to 20-25% faster. Setting entity references required the creation of a new relationship object. As this relationship object is always used internally it could be cached (as it's used for syncing only). This increases performance by 20-25% in the merging functionality. Entity fetches are now up to 20% faster. A large number of tweaks have been applied to make entity fetches up to 20% faster than in v3.0. Full WCF RIA support. It's now possible to use your LLBLGen Pro runtime framework powered domain layer in a WCF RIA application using the VS.NET tools for WCF RIA services. WCF RIA services is a Microsoft technology for .NET 4 and typically used within silverlight applications. SQL Server DQE compatibility level is now per instance. (Usable in Adapter). It's now possible to set the compatibility level of the SQL Server Dynamic Query Engine (DQE) per instance of the DQE instead of the global setting it was before. The global setting is still available and is used as the default value for the compatibility level per-instance. You can use this to switch between CE Desktop and normal SQL Server compatibility per DataAccessAdapter instance. Support for COUNT_BIG aggregate function (SQL Server specific). The aggregate function COUNT_BIG has been added to the list of available aggregate functions to be used in the framework. Minor changes / tweaks I'm especially pleased with the import system, as that makes working with entity models a lot easier. The import system lets you import from another LLBLGen Pro v3 project any entity definition, mapping and / or meta-data like table definitions. This way you can build repository projects where you store model fragments, e.g. the building blocks for a customer-order system, a user credential model etc., any model you can think of. In most projects, you'll recognize that some parts of your new model look familiar. In these cases it would have been easier if you would have been able to import these parts from projects you had pre-created. With LLBLGen Pro v3.1 you can. For example, say you have an Oracle schema called CRM which contains the bread 'n' butter customer-order-product kind of model. You create an entity model from that schema and save it in a project file. Now you start working on another project for another customer and you have to use SQL Server. You also start using model-first development, so develop the entity model from scratch as there's no existing database. As this customer also requires some CRM like entity model, you import the entities from your saved Oracle project into this new SQL Server targeting project. Because you don't work with Oracle this time, you don't import the relational meta-data, just the entities, their relationships and possibly their inheritance hierarchies, if any. As they're now entities in your project you can change them a bit to match the new customer's requirements. This can save you a lot of time, because you can re-use pre-fab model fragments for new projects. In the example above there are no tables yet (as you work model first) so using the forward mapping capabilities of LLBLGen Pro v3 creates the tables, PK constraints, Unique Constraints and FK constraints for you. This way you can build a nice repository of model fragments which you can re-use in new projects.

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  • HTG Explains: Why You Shouldn’t Log Into Your Linux System As Root

    - by Chris Hoffman
    On Linux, the Root user is equivalent to the Administrator user on Windows. However, while Windows has long had a culture of average users logging in as Administrator, you shouldn’t log in as root on Linux. Microsoft tried to improve Windows security practices with UAC – you shouldn’t log in as root on Linux for the same reason you shouldn’t disable UAC on Windows. How To Create a Customized Windows 7 Installation Disc With Integrated Updates How to Get Pro Features in Windows Home Versions with Third Party Tools HTG Explains: Is ReadyBoost Worth Using?

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  • What’s new in Silverlight 4 RC?

    - by pluginbaby
    I am here in Las Vegas for MIX10 where Scott Guthrie announced today the release of Silverlight 4 RC and the Visual Studio 2010 tools. You can now install VS2010 RC!!! As always, downloads links are here: www.silverlight.net He also said that the final version of Silverlight 4 will come next month (so april)! 4 months ago, I wrote a blog post on the new features of Silverlight 4 beta, so… what’s new in the RC ?   Rich Text · RichTextArea renamed to RichTextBox · Text position and selection APIs · “Xaml” property for serializing text content · XAML clipboard format · FlowDirection support on Runs tag · “Format then type” support when dragging controls to the designer · Thai/Vietnamese/Indic support · UI Automation Text pattern   Networking · UploadProgress support (Client stack) · Caching support (Client stack) · Sockets security restrictions removal (Elevated Trust) · Sockets policy file retrieval via HTTP · Accept-Language header   Out of Browser (Elevated Trust) · XAP signing · Silent install and emulation mode · Custom window chrome · Better support for COM Automation · Cancellable shutdown event · Updated security dialogs   Media · Pinned full-screen mode on secondary display · Webcam/Mic configuration preview · More descriptive MediaSourceStream errors · Content & Output protection updates · Updates to H.264 content protection (ClearNAL) · Digital Constraint Token · CGMS-A · Multicast · Graphics card driver validation & revocation   Graphics and Printing · HW accelerated Perspective Transforms · Ability to query page size and printable area · Memory usage and perf improvements   Data · Entity-level validation support of INotifyDataErrorInfo for DataGrid · XPath support for XML   Parser · New architecture enables future innovation · Performance and stability improvements · XmlnsPrefix & XmlnsDefinition attributes · Support setting order-dependent properties   Globalization & Localization · Support for 31 new languages · Arabic, Hebrew and Thai input on Mac · Indic support   More … · Update to DeepZoom code base with HW acceleration · Support for Private mode browsing · Google Chrome support (Windows) · FrameworkElement.Unloaded event · HTML Hosting accessibility · IsoStore perf improvements · Native hosting perf improvements (e.g., Bing Toolbar) · Consistency with Silverlight for Mobile APIs and Tooling · SDK   - System.Numerics.dll   - Dynamic XAP support (MEF)   - Frame/Navigation refresh support   That’s a lot!   You will find more details on the following links: http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/03/15/whats-new-in-silverlight-4-rc-mix10.aspx http://www.davidpoll.com/2010/03/15/new-in-the-silverlight-4-rc-xaml-features/   Technorati Tags: Silverlight

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  • Webcam surveillance software recommendation

    - by Cedric H.
    I'm looking for a simple "surveillance" or "security" software for Ubuntu. The main goal is to monitor my pets, so the features should be quite simple, in addition I'll use a few (2 at the beginning) basic (old) webcams. I would like it to detect motion and to save the pictures/recording on the local disk, in addition to sending email (+ ideally: posting on facebook). The easier to use/configure the better.

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