How-To Tutorials

  R Graph Cookbook Detailed hands-on recipes for creating the most useful types of graphs in R – starting from the simplest versions to more advanced applications Learn to draw any type of graph or visual data representation in R Filled with practical tips and techniques for creating any type of graph you need; not just theoretical explanations All examples are accompanied with the corresponding graph images, so you know what the results look like Each recipe is independent and contains the complete explanation and code to perform the task as efficiently as possible    Choosing plotting point symbol styles and sizes In this recipe, we will see how we can adjust the styling of plotting symbols, which is useful and necessary when we plot more than one set of points representing different groups of data on the same graph. Getting ready All you need to try out this recipe is to run R and type the recipe at the command prompt. You can also choose to save the recipe as a script so that you can use it again later on. We will also use the cityrain.csv example data file. Please read the file into R as follows: rain<-read.csv("cityrain.csv") The code file can be downloaded from here. How to do it... The plotting symbol and size can be set using the pch and cex arguments: plot(rnorm(100),pch=19,cex=2)   How it works... The pch argument stands for plotting character (symbol). It can take numerical values (usually between 0 and 25) as well as single character values. Each numerical value represents a different symbol. For example, 1 represents circles, 2 represents triangles, 3 represents plus signs, and so on. If we set the value of pch to a character such as "*" or "£" in inverted commas, then the data points are drawn as that character instead of the default circles. The size of the plotting symbol is controlled by the cex argument, which takes numerical values starting at 0 giving the amount by which plotting symbols should be magnified relative to the default. Note that cex takes relative values (the default is 1). So, the absolute size may vary depending on the defaults of the graphic device in use. For example, the size of plotting symbols with the same cex value may be different for a graph saved as a PNG file versus a graph saved as a PDF. There’s more... The most common use of pch and cex is when we don’t want to use color to distinguish between different groups of data points. This is often the case in scientific journals which do not accept color images. For example, let’s plot the city rainfall data as a set of points instead of lines: plot(rain$Tokyo, ylim=c(0,250), main="Monthly Rainfall in major cities", xlab="Month of Year", ylab="Rainfall (mm)", pch=1) points(rain$NewYork,pch=2) points(rain$London,pch=3) points(rain$Berlin,pch=4) legend("top", legend=c("Tokyo","New York","London","Berlin"), ncol=4, cex=0.8, bty="n", pch=1:4) Choosing line styles and width Similar to plotting point symbols, R provides simple ways to adjust the style of lines in graphs. Getting ready All you need to try out this recipe is to run R and type the recipe at the command prompt. You can also choose to save the recipe as a script so that you can use it again later on. We will again use the cityrain.csv data file. How to do it... Line styles can be set by using the lty and lwd arguments (for line type and width respectively) in the plot(), lines(), and par() commands. Let’s take our rainfall example and apply different line styles keeping the color the same: plot(rain$Tokyo, ylim=c(0,250), main="Monthly Rainfall in major cities", xlab="Month of Year", ylab="Rainfall (mm)", type="l", lty=1, lwd=2) lines(rain$NewYork,lty=2,lwd=2) lines(rain$London,lty=3,lwd=2) lines(rain$Berlin,lty=4,lwd=2) legend("top", legend=c("Tokyo","New York","London","Berlin"), ncol=4, cex=0.8, bty="n", lty=1:4, lwd=2)   How it works... Both line type and width can be set with numerical values as shown in the previous example. Line type number values correspond to types of lines: 0: blank 1: solid (default) 2: dashed 3: dotted 4: dotdash 5: longdash 6: twodash We can also use the character strings instead of numbers, for example, lty="dashed" instead of lty=2. The line width argument lwd takes positive numerical values. The default value is 1. In the example we used a value of 2, thus making the lines thicker than default.

  Getting Started with Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 Virtualize your application infrastructure efficiently using Microsoft App-V Publish, deploy, and manage your virtual applications with App-V Understand how Microsoft App-V can fit into your company. Guidelines for planning and designing an App-V environment. Step-by-step explanations to plan and implement the virtualization of your application infrastructure Advantage of sequencing process Sequencing represents the process where the App-V Sequencer monitors and captures the files and environment changes (like registry modifications) created by an application installation. Once the capturing process is complete, the sequencing process ends by building the App-V package ready to be delivered to clients by a streaming method or just using an MSI. The sequencing process, to achieve this, creates a virtual environment which is isolated from the operating system avoiding most conflicts with other applications or components existing on the client's operating system. Application Virtualization quick facts Here are some facts about Application Virtualization: The applications are not installed on clients, they are published. With Application Virtualization we can achieve the co-existence of incompatible applications like Microsoft Office 2007 and Microsoft Office 2010. Applications are installed only once on a reference computer, where the package is captured and prepared. You can capture a set of interconnected applications into a single package. The capturing process is in most cases a transparent process; which identifies the environment that the application requires to work, like files and registry keys. Application Virtualization offers you the possibility of centralized management. There is one point where we handle virtualized applications and the distributing behavior in our environment. Even though you can create a package of almost any software, not all applications can be virtualized. There are some examples that could be quite tricky to actually pack into one bundle. Applications that require high operating system integration can generate some known issues. App-V Management Server Sizing App-V Management Server can maintain 12,000 publishing refreshes per minute. If your requirements are higher, you need to set up different Management Servers where you can manually separate the applications to be distributed (remember, multiple App-V Management Servers can use the same database) or deploy your servers with load-balancing features (hardware or software load balancing). Implementing Dynamic Suite Composition (DSC) Dynamic Suite Composition gives us the possibility to use "one-to-many" scenarios, where you have one primary application with several secondaries. But Dynamic Suite Composition is not in charge of managing and controlling the interaction between all these applications. That's why you must be careful which applications you select as secondary, as not all are suited for this category. When you discuss implementing DSC in your organization you must always remember that DSC is only in charge of sharing the virtual environment between the App-V packages. Level of dependency supported in DSC In Microsoft Application Virtualization an important thing to note while using Dynamic Suite Composition is that a primary application can have more than one secondary application but only one level of dependency is supported. You cannot define a secondary package as dependent on another secondary package. Deploying 16-bit applications to 64-bit clients Microsoft App-V 4.6 includes, among several others, improvements and changes that allow the possibility to use and virtualize 64-bit applications and 64-bit operating system clients. But there's one disclaimer—sequencing and deploying 16-bit applications to 64-bit clients is not supported. This is a restriction in 64-bit operating systems, and not only for virtual applications. Sequencing and Deploying Application in Different Operating Systems Even though Microsoft officially requires the same operating system for sequencing and deployment, you can find several examples of applications that can work normally across different operating systems. SQL database size The size of the App-V database depends principally on application launches and retained reporting information. Microsoft provides a small equation to calculate the approximate growth of the database: (560 bytes per launch and shutdown) X (number of launches per day) X (user population) = Daily database growth. For example, 10,000 users who launch and shut down one application per hour every day, translates to 125 MB per day. Streaming Servers and network bandwidth RTSP/S does not include tools to limit the use of network bandwidth. This is why it is highly recommended that you only stream applications between networks with a high speed link. Even though for Streaming Servers the process of delivering applications does not translate to high processor or memory usage, using secure communications with RTSPS or HTTPS introduces a minimum overhead you should consider. App-V Client Cache The client cache is another option you can combine with the streaming strategy selected. Having a large cache on each client will translate to lower network usage. You should also evaluate this when you start sequencing applications—the App-V packages' size will let you estimate the proper amount of cache needed. Software licenses Application Virtualization is related to a significant matter in many organization—application licensing. Application Virtualization can also maintain a central point for software licenses, allowing you to keep track of the current licensing situation of all your applications. Using named licenses on each App-V package, you can guarantee that only users who have the appropriate license can run the application. And if we are using concurrent licenses for the application, the App-V license management will only let the application run the number of times that is permitted. But you must also be cautious with the acquired licenses - not all applications support virtualization. For example, there are some applications that depend on and are attached to some hardware components, like a MAC address. Virtualization support by the application vendor Not all applications are suitable for virtualization. Each App-V package generates their own virtual environment, but some applications require a high degree of integration with the operating system, making the virtualized application unstable or incapable of working. A good example is antivirus software. Installing the App-V Management Console on a different machine Installing the App-V Management Console on a different machine is possible but not simple. The App-V Team created a configuration guide to achieve this, which you can access at the official Microsoft App-V blog: http://blogs.technet.com/b/appv/archive/2009/04/21/app-v-4-5-remote-consoleconfiguration-guide.aspx. An online assessment tool to achieve Dynamic IT Once we run this wizard-like tool, we receive a complete report on how to optimize our infrastructure in areas like Identity and Access, Desktop, Device and Server Management, Security and Networking, Data Protection, and IT Process. Access the online tool at: http://www.microsoft.com/infrastructure/about/assessment-start.aspx. IT Compliance Management Series Guidelines oriented to IT governance, risk, and compliance requirements. Download the series from the Microsoft Download Center at http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/default.aspx. Windows Optimized Desktop Scenarios Solution Accelerator This is a guideline to achieving a proper plan and designing applications and operating systems in your organization. This accelerator will be useful when we start thinking in App-V. More information is available at http://www.microsoft.com/infrastructure/resources/desktop-accelerators.aspx. Infrastructure Planning and Design Guides for Virtualization Complete references for designing a virtualization strategy; you will find specialist guides for App-V, Remote Desktop Services (formerly known as Terminal Services), System Center Virtual Machine Manager, Windows Server Virtualization, Desktop Virtualization, and so on. More information is available at http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/ee395429.aspx.

Alfresco 3 Records Management Comply with regulations and secure your organization’s records with Alfresco Records Management. Successfully implement your records program using Alfresco Records Management, fully certified for DoD-5015.2 compliance The first and only book to focus exclusively on Alfresco Records Management Step-by-step instructions describe how to identify records, organize records, and manage records to comply with regulatory requirements Learn in detail about the software internals to get a jump-start on performing customizations Records Details Much of the description in this article focuses on record features that are found on the Records Details page. An abbreviated set of metadata and available actions for the record is shown on the row for the record in the File Plan. The Details page for a record is a composite screen that contains a complete listing of all information for a record, including the links to all possible actions and operations that can be performed on a record. We can get to the Details page for a record by clicking on the link to it from the File Plan page: The Record Details page provides a summary of all available information known about a record and has links to all possible actions that can be taken on it. This is the central screen from which a record can be managed. The Details screen is divided into three main columns. The first column on the screen provides a preview of the content for the record. The middle column lists the record Metadata, and the right-most column shows a list of Actions that can be taken on the record. There are other areas lower down on the page with additional functionality that include a way for the user to manually trigger events in the steps of the disposition, to get URL links to fi le content for the record, and to create relationship links to other records in the File Plan: Alfresco Flash previewer The web preview component in the left column of the Record Details page defines a region in which the content of the record can be visually previewed. It is a bit of an exaggeration to call the preview component a Universal Viewer, but it does come close to that. The viewer is capable of viewing a number of different common file formats and it can be extended to support the viewing of additional file formats. Natively, the viewer is capable of viewing both Flash SWF files and image formats like JPEG, PNG, or GIF. Microsoft Office, OpenOffice, and PDF files are also configured out-of-the-box to be previewed with the viewer by first converting the files to PDF and then to Flash. The use of an embedded viewer in Share means that client machines don't have to have a viewing application installed to be able to view the file contents of a record. For example, a client machine running an older version of Microsoft Word may not have the capability to open a record saved in the newer Word DOCX format, but within Share, using the viewer, that client would be able to preview and read the contents of the DOCX file. The top of the viewer has a header area that displays the icon of a record alongside the name of the record being viewed. Below that, there is a toolbar with controls for the viewing of the file: At the left of the toolbar, there are controls to change the zoom level. Small increments for zoom in and zoom out are controlled by clicking on the "+" and "-" buttons. The zoom setting can also be controlled by the slider or by specifying a zoom percentage or display factor like Fit Width from the drop-down menu. For multi-page documents, there are controls to go to the next or previous pages and to jump to a specific page. The Fullscreen button enlarges the view and displays it using the entire screen. Maximize enlarges the view to display it within the browser window. Image panning and positioning within the viewer can be done by using the scrollbar or by left-clicking and dragging the image with the mouse. A print option is available from an item on the right-mouse click menu. Record Metadata The centre column of the Record Details displays the metadata for the record. There are a lot of metadata properties that are stored with each record. To make it easier to locate specific properties, there is a grouping of the metadata, and each group has a label. The first metadata group is Identification and Status. It contains the Name, Title, and Description of the record. It shows the Unique Record Identifier for the record, and the unique identifier for the record Category to which the record belongs. Additional Metadata items track whether the record has been Declared, when it was Declared, and who Declared it: The General group for metadata tracks the Mimetype and the Size of the file content, as well as who Created or last made any modifications to the record. Additional metadata for the record is listed under groups like Record, Security, Vital Record Information, and Disposition. The Record group contains the metadata fields Location, Media Type, and Format, all of which are especially useful for managing non-electronic records. Record actions In the right-most column of the Record Details page, there is a list of Actions that are available to perform on the record. The list displayed is dynamic and changes based on the state of the record. For example, options like Declare as Record or Undo Cutoff are only displayed when the record is in a state where that action is possible: Download action The Download action does just that. Clicking on this action will cause the file content for the record to be downloaded to the user's desktop. Edit Metadata This action displays the Edit form matching the content type for the record. For example, if the record has a content type of cm:content, the Edit form associated with the type cm:content will be displayed to allow the editing of the metadata. Items identified with asterisks are required fields. Certain fields contain data that is not meant to change and are grayed out and non-selectable: Copy record Clicking on the Copy to action will pop up a repository directory browser that allows a copy of the record to be filed to any Folder within the File Plan. The name of the new record will start with the words "Copy of" and end with the name of the record being copied. Only a single copy of a record can be placed in a Folder without first changing the name of the first copy. It isn't possible to have two records in the same Folder with the same name. Move record Clicking on the Move to action pops up a dialog to browse to a new Folder for where the record will be moved. The record is removed from the original location and moved to the new location. File record Clicking on the File to action pops up a dialog to identify a new Folder for where the record will be filed. A reference to the record is placed in the new Folder. After this operation, the record will basically be in two locations. Deleting the record from either of the locations causes the record to be removed from both of the locations. After filing the record, a clip status icon is displayed on the upper-left next to the checkbox for selection. The status indicates that one record is filed in multiple Folders of the File Plan: Delete record Clicking on the Delete action permanently removes the item from the File Plan. Note that this action differs from Destroy that removes only the file content from a record as part of the final step of a disposition schedule. Audit log At any point in the lifecycle of a record, an audit log is available that shows a detailed history of all activities for the record. The record audit log can help to answer questions that may come up such as which users have been involved with the record and when specific lifecycle events for the record have occurred. The audit log also provides information that can confirm whether activities in the records system are both effective and compliant with record policies. The View Audit Log action creates and pops up a dialog containing a detailed historical report for the record. The report includes very detailed and granular information about every change that has ever been made to the record. Each entry in the audit log includes a timestamp for when the change was made, the user that made the change, and the type of change or event that occurred. If the event involved the change of any metadata, the original values and the changed values for the metadata are noted in the report. By clicking on the File as Record button on the dialog, the audit report for the record itself can be captured as a record that can then be filed within the File Plan. The report is saved in HTML file format. Clicking on the Export button at the top of the dialog enables the audit report to be downloaded in HTML format: The Audit log, discussed here, provides very granular information about any changes that have occurred to a specific record. Alfresco also provides a tool included with the Records Management Console, also called Audit, which can create a very detailed report showing all activities and actions that have occurred throughout the records system. Links Below the Actions component is a panel containing the Share component. This is a standard component that is also used in the Share Document Library. The component lists three URL links in fields that can be easily copied from and pasted to. The URLs allow record content and metadata to be easily shared with others. The first link in the component is the Download File URL. Referencing this link causes the content for the record to be downloaded as a file. The second link is the Document URL. It is similar to the first link, but if the browser is capable of viewing the file format type, the content will be displayed in the browser; otherwise it is downloaded as a file. The third link is the This Page URL. This is the URL to the record details page. Trying to access any of these three URLs will require the user to first authenticate himself/herself before access to any content will be allowed. Events Below the Flash preview panel on the Details page for the record is an area that displays any Events that are currently available to be manually triggered for this record. Remember that each step of a disposition schedule is actionable after either the expiration of a time deadline or by the manual triggering of an event. Events are triggered manually by a user needing to click on a button to indicate that an event has occurred. The location of the event trigger buttons differs depending on how the disposition in the record Category was applied. If the disposition was applied at the Folder level, the manual event trigger buttons will be available on the Details page for the Folder. If the disposition was applied at the record level, the event trigger buttons are available on the Record Details page. The buttons that we see on this page are the ones available from the disposition being applied at the record level. The event buttons that apply to a particular state will be grouped together based on whether or not the event has been marked as completed. After clicking on completion, the event is moved to the Completed group. If there are multiple possible events, it takes only a single one of them to complete in order to make the action available. Some actions, like cutoff, will be executed by the system. Other actions, like destruction, require a user to intervene, but will become available from the Share user interface: References Often it is useful to create references or relationships between records. A reference is a link that relates one record to another. Clicking on the link will retrieve and view the related record. In the lower right of the Details page, there is a component for tracking references from this record and to other records in the File Plan. It is especially useful for tracking, for instance, reference links to superseded or obsolete versions of the current record. To attach references, click on the Manage button on the References component: Then, from the next screen, select New Reference: A screen containing a standard Alfresco form will then be displayed. From this screen, it is possible to name the reference, pick another record to reference, and to mark the type of reference. Available reference types include: SupersededBy / Supersedes ObsoletedBy / Obsoletes Supporting Documentation / Supported Documentation VersionedBy / Versions Rendition Cross-Reference After creating the reference, you will then see the new reference show up in the list: How does it work? We've now looked at the functionality of the details page for records and the Series, Category, and Folder containers. In this "How does it work?" section, we'll investigate in greater detail how some of the internals for the record Details page work.

  Microsoft Dynamics AX 2009 Administration A practical and efficient approach to planning, installing and configuring your Dynamics AX 2009 environment. Effectively consolidate and standardize processes across your organization with a centralized source for a variety of business needs Discover how to effectively plan and implement Dynamics AX 2009 in your business and fully grasp the necessary hardware, network, and software requirements to do so Understand the varied components that make up your Dynamics AX environment, including the role of base server components, how to implement the Enterprise Portal and Role Centers for web browser access to Dynamics AX, and the various workflow capabilities required to fit the needs of your company Get to grips with Dynamics AX data components and understand when and how to exchange data synchronously or asynchronously and migrate data Includes carefully organized instructions along with screenshots that clearly display how to administer and configure your Dynamics AX environment with ease Workflow prerequisites Before we begin installing and setting up Workflow, you will need to have administrator privileges on the machines in which you are installing Workflow on. The following prerequisites are required: Internet Information Services (IIS) 7 .NET Framework 2.0 Business Connector The Workflow component for Dynamics AX utilizes the Business Connector to communicate directly to Dynamics AX from its web service. Although it depends on the number of users and computing resources available, it is best practice to implement the Workflow web service application on its own server. Workflow accounts setup The Workflow system in Dynamics AX utilizes two accounts to function properly. If these accounts are not specified, workflow will still function; however, it is best practice to have dedicated accounts. One account is the service account. This account is responsible for the communication between Dynamics AX and the Workflow web service. The other account is the execution account. This account is responsible for executing Workflow tasks and processes. Similar to the Business Connector proxy account, these two accounts must be created with the following criteria: The password must never expire It must not be interactive It must not be associated to any Dynamics AX users Once the Workflow accounts have been created, the next process is to ensure that the Dynamics AX Workflow system will use the accounts. To do this, perform the following steps: Log in to Dynamics AX 2009. Go to Administration | Setup | Security | System service accounts. In the System service accounts form, specify the Workflow System Account and the Workflow Execution Account. To specify the accounts that were created in the Active Directory, mark the Alias field radio boxes. When complete, click on the OK button. Now that the Workflow accounts have been specified, the Dynamics AX Workflow system can utilize these accounts when communicating with the Workflow web service. It is also possible to create a user within Dynamics AX but not Active Directory, and use the Dynamics AX user accounts as the Workflow Service and Execution accounts. These accounts may appear as different users in Dynamics AX; however, these accounts will be impersonated by the AOS service account to the Workflow web service. This can make troubleshooting and connection auditing more difficult and therefore, it is not recommended. Installing Workflow Since Workflow consists of various parts that function together to create the Dynamics AX 2009 Workflow system, we will break down each part’s setup and complete each setup individually. Creating a website for Workflow Before we can install the Workflow extended server component, we must have a website available to install upon. It is possible to use the default website that is on port 80. However, it is not recommended; therefore, a new website must be created. For information regarding how to create a website in IIS 7, refer to http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc772350(WS.10).aspx. Installing the Workflow component By now you should be accustomed to the process of installing the extended components for Dynamics AX. Installing Workflow is no different. The following steps will guide you through the process: Run the Microsoft Dynamics AX Setup wizard to add new components. In the Add or modify components screen of the wizard, mark the Workflow checkbox, as shown in the following screenshot and then click on the Next button: In the following screen of the wizard, specify the password for the .NET Business Connector proxy account, and then click on the Next button: The Domainuser name field will automatically be populated if the Business Connector proxy user is specified in the Administration | Setup | Security | System service accounts form in the Business Connector Proxy group. In the next section of the wizard, you will be prompted to tweak the Workflow service. In other words, you can select which website you want to install the Workflow service into. By default, the wizard will select the default website in IIS. However, it is recommended to install Workflow on its own dedicated site and port, you have the flexibility to do so. When you are satisfied with the settings on this page, click on the Next button. In the following screen you will be prompted to specify the AOS account for the Workflow service to grant permissions to. If there is more than one AOS and each AOS service account is different, provide the accounts for each AOS so that they can access the Workflow service. In the following step, you are prompted to complete the installation of the Workflow by clicking on the Finish button. You will want to restart IIS after the Workflow has been successfully installed. Therefore, leave the option checked at the bottom, as shown in the following screenshot: Once installed, you will be prompted with the final screen. The final screen will display the result of the installation of the Dynamics AX 2009 Workflow system. If the installation is successful, you will see a green box next to the installed component. Otherwise, if the box is orange or red, you should open the log file after you close the wizard by marking the checkbox at the bottom. Enabling Workflow in Windows Server 2008 R2 In Windows Server 2008 R2, additional setup is required to enable the Workflow web service. The Workflow web service application pool must be enabled to run 32-bit applications. Otherwise, the Workflow service will fail. To set up the application pool to run 32-bit applications, perform the following steps: Go to the IIS console and access the web server that you installed the Workflow web service on. Under &ltYour web server&gt | Application Pools, select the Dynamics AX Workflow application pool. Under Actions, go to Advanced Settings.... In the Advanced Settings window, set the Enable 32-Bit Applications property to True. When complete, click on the OK button to save the changes. After performing these steps, the Workflow web service can then be used by Dynamics AX to process Workflows. Next, we will set up Dynamics AX to use the Workflow web service.

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Getting Started with Microsoft Application Virtualization 4.6 Q: What is the need for virtualization? A: With virtual environments we rapidly start gaining the agility, scalability, cost-saving, and the security that almost any business today requires. Following are some advantages: Reduces infrastructure downtime by several hours Saves time and resources that is spend deploying/providing operating systems to users Saves troubleshooting time for application installations Q: How do cloud service models assist virtualization? A: The cloud service model is all around us, which presents to us several new ways of thinking about technology: Software as a Service (SaaS or S+S): Delivering applications over the network without any local installations or maintenance. Platform as a Service (PaaS): Providing solutions, like an Active Directory solution, as a service, avoiding the deployment tasks. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS): Supplying computer infrastructure as a service. Instead of companies thinking about buying new hardware and the maintenance costs that implies, the infrastructure is provided (typically in virtual machines) as they need it. Q: Where do we stand today with regards to virtualizastion? A: Fortunately, today's demand regarding virtualization is incredibly high, which is why the possibilities and offerings are even higher. We can virtualize servers, appliances, desktops, and applications, achieving presentation and profile virtualization; you name it and there's probably already a bunch of products and technologies you can use to virtualize it. Application virtualization is still one of the emerging platforms but is increasing rapidly in the IT world. More and more of the dynamic aspects of isolating and scaling the applications deployment are being implemented. And Microsoft's App-V represents one of the strongest technologies we can rely on. Q: How does virtualization achieve faster and dynamic deployments? A: Handling server or desktop deployments is always a painful thing to do, requiring hours of deployment, tuning, and troubleshooting; all of these aspects are inherited in any operating system lifecycle. Having virtual machines as baselines would reduce OS deployment from several hours to a few minutes. The desktop virtualization concept provides the end user the same environment as using a local desktop computer but working with remote computer resources. Taking this strategy will enhance the provisioning of desktop environments, more resources can be added on demand, and the deployment will no longer depend on specific hardware. Building virtual machines templates ready to go, self-service portals to provision virtual machines for our power users whenever they need a virtual environment to test an application; these are some of the other features that can be included using a virtualization platform. Q: How does virtualization achieve cost savings? A: Listed below are two major factors that acheive cost saving: Lower power consumption: Large datacenters also include large electricity consumption; removing the physical layer from your servers will translate yearly to a nice reduced number in electrical bills. This is no small matter; most of the capacity and costs planning for implementing virtualization, also includes the "power consumption" variable. It won't be long until "Green Datacenters" and "Green IT" will be a requirement for every mid-size and large business. Hardware cost savings: Before thinking about probably needing expensive servers to host your entire infrastructure let me ask you this, did you know that the average hardware resources usage is around 5% to 7%? That means we are currently wasting around 90% of the money invested in that hardware. Virtualization will optimize and protect your investment; we can guarantee that the consolidation of your servers will be not only effective but also efficient.   Q: How does virtualization improve efficiency? A: There's a common scenario in several organizations where there are users that only depend on, for example, the Office suite for their work; but the cost of applying a different hardware baseline to them, that fits their needs exactly, is extremely high. That is why efficiency also plays an important variable in your desktop-using desktop virtualization you can be certain that you are not over-or under-resourcing any end-user workstation. You can easily provide all the necessary resources to a user as long for as they need them. Q: How does it achieve scalable and easy-to-manage platforms? A: A new contingency layer for every machine, taking a snapshot of an operating system, is a concept that didn't appear before virtualization existed. Whenever you introduce a change in your platform (like a new service pack release) there's always a risk that things won't be just as fine as they were before. Having a quick, immediate, and safe restore point of a server/desktop could represent a cost-saving solution. Virtual machines and snapshot possibilities will give you the necessary features to manage and easily maintain your labs for testing updates or environment changes, even the facilities to add/remove memory, CPUs, hard drives, and other devices to a machine in just a few seconds. Q: How does virtualization enhance backup and recovery? A: Virtual environments will let you redesign your disaster recovery plan and minimize any disruption to the services you are providing. The possibilities around virtual machine's hot backups and straightforward recoveries will give you the chance to arrange and define different service level agreements (SLAs) with your customers and company. The virtualization model offers you the possibility to remove the hardware dependencies of your roles, services, and applications; a hardware failure can present only a minor issue in the continuity of your business, simply by moving the virtual machines to different physical servers without major disruptions. Q: How is application deployment incompatibility issue addressed? A: Inserting a virtualized environment into our applications deployment will reduce the time invested in maintaining and troubleshooting operating system and applications incompatibilities. Allowing the applications to run in a virtualized and isolated environment every time they are deployed removes possible conflicts with other applications. It is also a common scenario for most organizations to face incompatibility issues with their business applications whenever there's a change—new operating system, new hardware, or even problems with the development of the application that starts generating issues with particular environments. You can say goodbye to those problems, facilitating real-time and secure deployments of applications that are decoupled from tons of requirements. Q: What is Application Virtualization? A: As virtual machines that work abstracting the hardware layer from physical servers, application virtualization abstracts the application and its dependencies from the operating system, effectively isolating the application from the OS and other applications. Application Virtualization, in general terms, represents a set of components and tools that remove the complexity of deploying and maintaining applications for desktop users; preserving only a small footprint of the operating system. Getting more specific, Application Virtualization is a process for packaging (or virtualizing) an application and the environment in which the application works, and distributing this package to end users. The use of this package (which can contain more than one application) is completely decoupled from the common requirements (like the installation and uninstallation processes) attached to applications. The Technical Overview of Application Virtualization offered by Microsoft represents a fine graphic explanation about how normal applications interact with the operating system and their components; and how virtualized applications do the same. Take a look at http://www.microsoft.com/systemcenter/appv/techoverview.mspx. Q: What are the drawbacks of a normal business application scenario? A: The three major aspects are: Special configurations every time that is deployed. Customizing files or setting special values within the application configuration environment. It is also interconnected with other applications (for example, Java Runtime Environment, a local database engine, or some other particular requirement). It demands several hours every week to support end users deployments and troubleshooting configurations. Application Virtualization offer us the possibility to guarantee that end users always have the same configuration deployed, no matter when or where, as you only need to configure it once and then wrap up the entire set of applications into one package. Q: How does Application Virtualization differ from running normal applications? A: In standard OS environments, applications install their settings onto the host operating system, hard-coding the entire system to fit that application's needs. Other applications' settings can be overwritten, possibly causing them to malfunction or break. Here's a common example of how two applications co-exist in the same operating system, and if these applications share some registry values the application's (or even operating system's) usability could be compromised. With Application Virtualization, each application brings down its own set of configurations on-demand, and executes in a way such that it only sees its own settings. Each virtual application is able to read and write information in their application profile and can access operating system settings in the registry or DLLs, but cannot change them.

R Graph Cookbook Detailed hands-on recipes for creating the most useful types of graphs in R – starting from the simplest versions to more advanced applications Learn to draw any type of graph or visual data representation in R Filled with practical tips and techniques for creating any type of graph you need; not just theoretical explanations All examples are accompanied with the corresponding graph images, so you know what the results look like Each recipe is independent and contains the complete explanation and code to perform the task as efficiently as possible       Setting colors of points, lines, and bars In this recipe we will learn the simplest way to change the colors of points, lines, and bars in scatter plots, line plots, histograms, and bar plots. Getting ready All you need to try out this recipe is to run R and type the recipe at the command prompt. You can also choose to save the recipe as a script so that you can use it again later on. How to do it... The simplest way to change the color of any graph element is by using the col argument. For example, the plot() function takes the col argument: plot(rnorm(1000), col="red")   The code file can be downloaded from here. If we choose plot type as line, then the color is applied to the plotted line. Let’s use the dailysales.csv example dataset. First, we need to load it: Sales <- read.csv("dailysales.csv",header=TRUE) plot(sales$units~as.Date(sales$date,"%d/%m/%y"), type="l", #Specify type of plot as l for line col="blue")   Similarly, the points() and lines() functions apply the col argument's value to the plotted points and lines respectively. barplot() and hist() also take the col argument and apply them to the bars. So the following code would produce a bar plot with blue bars: barplot(sales$ProductA~sales$City, col="blue") The col argument for boxplot() is applied to the color of the boxes plotted. How it works... The col argument automatically applies the specified color to the elements being plotted, based on the plot type. So, if we do not specify a plot type or choose points, then the color is applied to points. Similarly, if we choose plot type as line then the color is applied to the plotted line and if we use the col argument in the barplot() or histogram() commands, then the color is applied to the bars. col accepts names of colors such as red, blue, and black. The colors() (or colours()) function lists all the built-in colors (more than 650) available in R. We can also specify colors as hexadecimal codes such as #FF0000 (for red), #0000FF (for blue), and #000000 (for black). If you have ever made any web pages¸ you would know that these hex codes are used in HTML to represent colors. col can also take numeric values. When it is set to a numeric value, the color corresponding to that index in the current color palette is used. For example, in the default color palette the first color is black and the second color is red. So col=1 and col=2 refers to black and red respectively. Index 0 corresponds to the background color. There's more... In many settings, col can also take a vector of multiple colors, instead of a single color. This is useful if you wish to use more than one color in a graph. The heat.colors() function takes a number as an argument and returns a vector of those many colors. So heat.colors(5) produces a vector of five colors. Type the following at the R prompt: heat.colors(5) You should get the following output: [1] "#FF0000FF" "#FF5500FF" "#FFAA00FF" "#FFFF00FF" "#FFFF80FF" Those are five colors in the hexadecimal format. Another way of specifying a vector of colors is to construct one: barplot(as.matrix(sales[,2:4]), beside=T, legend=sales$City, col=c("red","blue","green","orange","pink"), border="white") In the example, we set the value of col to c("red","blue","green","orange","pink"), which is a vector of five colors. We have to take care to make a vector matching the length of the number of elements, in this case bars we are plotting. If the two numbers don’t match, R will 'recycle’ values by repeating colors from the beginning of the vector. For example, if we had fewer colors in the vector than the number of elements, say if we had four colors in the previous plot, then R would apply the four colors to the first four bars and then apply the first color to the fifth bar. This is called recycling in R: barplot(as.matrix(sales[,2:4]), beside=T, legend=sales$City, col=c("red","blue","green","orange"), border="white") In the example, both the bars for the first and last data rows (Seattle and Mumbai) would be of the same color (red), making it difficult to distinguish one from the other. One good way to ensure that you always have the correct number of colors is to find out the length of the number of elements first and pass that as an argument to one of the color palette functions. For example, if we did not know the number of cities in the example we have just seen; we could do the following to make sure the number of colors matches the number of bars plotted: barplot(as.matrix(sales[,2:4]), beside=T, legend=sales$City, col=heat.colors(length(sales$City)), border="white") We used the length() function to find out the length or the number of elements in the vector sales$City and passed that as the argument to heat.colors(). So, regardless of the number of cities we will always have the right number of colors. See also In the next four recipes, we will see how to change the colors of other elements. The fourth recipe is especially useful where we look at color combinations and palettes.

  Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step 2010 The smart guide to the successful delivery of Microsoft Dynamics Business Solutions Learn how to effectively use Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step to implement the right Dynamics business solution with quality, on-time and on-budget results. Understand the review and optimization offerings available from Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step to further enhance your business solution delivery during and after go-live. Gain knowledge of the project and change management content provided in Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step. Familiarize yourself with the approach to adopting the Microsoft Dynamics Sure Step methodology as your own.        Upgrade assessment and the diagnostic phase In this section, we will discuss the process, particularly the Upgrade Assessment Decision Accelerator offering, in more detail. We begin by reintroducing the diagram showing the flow of activities and Decision Accelerator offerings for an existing customer. You may recall that the flow is very similar to the one for a prospect, with the only difference being the Upgrade Assessment DA offering replacing the Requirements and Process Review DA. (Move the mouse over the image to enlarge.) As noted before, the flow for the existing customer also begins with Diagnostic Preparation, similar to that for a prospect. The guidance in the activity page can be leveraged to explain/understand the capabilities and features of the new version of the corresponding Microsoft Dynamics solution that is being considered. When interest is established in moving the existing solution to the current version of the solution, the next step is the Upgrade Assessment DA offering, which is the key step in this process. The Upgrade Assessment Decision Accelerator offering The Upgrade Assessment DA is the most important step in the process for an existing Microsoft Dynamics customer. The Upgrade Assessment DA is executed by the services delivery team to get an understanding of the existing solution being used by the customer, determine the components that need to be upgraded to the current release of the product, and determine if any other features need to be enabled as part of the upgrade engagement. In combination with the Scoping Assessment DA offering, the delivery team will also determine the optimal approach, resource plan and estimate, and overall timeline to upgrade the solution to the current product version. Before initiating the Upgrade Assessment DA, the services delivery team should meet with the customer to ascertain and confirm that there is interest in performing the upgrade. Especially where delivery resources are in high demand, this is an important step that the sales teams need to carry out before involving the delivery resources such as solution architects and senior application consultants. Sales personnel can use the resources in the Sure Step Diagnostic Preparation activity to understand and position the current capabilities of the corresponding Microsoft Dynamics solution. Once customer interest in upgrading has been determined, the services delivery team can employ the Upgrade Assessment DA offering. The aim of the Upgrade Assessment is to identify the complexity of upgrading the existing solution and to highlight areas of feature enhancements, complexities, and risks. The steps performed in the execution of the Upgrade Assessment are shown in the following diagram. The delivery team begins the Upgrade Assessment by understanding the overall objectives for the Upgrade. Teams can leverage the product-specific questionnaires provided in Sure Step for Microsoft Dynamics AX, CRM, GP, NAV, and SL. These questionnaires also include specific sections and questions for interfaces, infrastructure, and so on, so they can also be leveraged in the following steps. One of the important tasks at the outset is to review the upgrade path for Microsoft Dynamics and any associated ISV software, to determine whether the upgrade from the customer's existing product version to the targeted version of Microsoft Dynamics is supported. This will have a bearing on how the upgrade can be executed—can you follow a supported upgrade path, or is it pretty much a full reimplementation of the solution? The next step in executing the Upgrade Assessment is to assess the existing solution's configurations and customizations. In this step, the delivery team reviews which features of Microsoft Dynamics have been enabled for the customer, including which ones have been configured to meet the customer's needs and which ones have been customized. This will allow the delivery team to take the overall objectives for the upgrade and determine which of these configurations and customizations will need to be ported over to the new solution, and which ones should be retired. For example, the older version may have necessitated customizations in areas where the solution did not have corresponding functionality. Or perhaps the solution needed a specific ISV solution to meet a need. If the current product version provides these features as standard functionality, these customizations or ISV solutions no longer need to be part of the new solution. The next Upgrade Assessment step is to examine the custom interfaces for the existing solution. This includes assessing any custom code written to interface the solution to third-party solutions, such as an external database for reporting purposes. This step is followed by reviewing the existing infrastructure and architecture configuration so that the delivery team can understand the hardware components that can be leveraged for the new solution. The delivery team can provide confirmation on whether the existing infrastructure can support the upgrade application or if additional infrastructure components may be necessary. The final step of the Upgrade Assessment DA offering is for the delivery team to complete the detailed analysis of the customer's existing solution and generate a report of their findings. The report, to be presented to the customer for approval, will include the following topics: The scope of the upgrade, including a list of functional and technical areas that will be enhanced in the new solution. A list of the functional areas of the application categorized to show the expected complexity involved in upgrading them. If there are areas of the existing implementation that will require further examination or additional effort to upgrade successfully due to the inherent complexity, they must be highlighted. Areas of the current solution that could be remapped to new functionality in the current version of the base Microsoft Dynamics product. An overall recommended approach to the upgrade, including alternatives to address any new functionality desired. The Upgrade Assessment provides the customer early identification of issues and risks that could occur during an upgrade so that appropriate mitigating actions can be initiated accordingly. The customer can also get a level of confidence that an appropriate level of project governance for the upgrade is available, as well as that the correct upgrade approach will be undertaken by the delivery team. In the next sections, we will discuss how the Upgrade Assessment DA becomes the basis for completing the customer's due diligence, and sets the stage for a quality upgrade of the customer's solution. When to use the other Decision Accelerator offerings After the Upgrade Assessment DA has been executed, the remaining DA offerings may also be needed in the due diligence process for the existing Microsoft Dynamics customer. In this section, we will discuss the scenarios that may call for the usage of the DA offerings, and which ones would apply to that particular scenario. From the Upgrade Assessment DA, the delivery team determines the existing business functions and requirements that need to be upgraded to the new release. Using the Fit Gap and Solution Blueprint DA offering, they can then determine and document how these requirements will be ported over. If meeting the requirement is more than implementing standard features, the approach maybe a re-configuration, custom code rewrite, or workflow setup. Additionally, if new features are required as part of the upgrade, these requirements should also be classified in the Fit Gap worksheet either as Fit or as Gap. They should also be further classified as Standard, Configuration, or Workflow as the case may be for the Fits, and Customization for the Gaps. The Architecture Assessment DA can be used determine the new hardware configuration for the upgraded solution. It can also be used to address any performance issues up-front through the execution of the Proof of Concept Benchmark sub-offering. The Scoping Assessment DA can be used to determine the effort, timeline, and resources needed to execute the upgrade. If it was determined with the Upgrade Assessment DA that new functionality will be introduced, the delivery team and the customer must also determine the Release plan. We will discuss upgrade approaches and Release planning in more detail in the next section. It is important to note that all three of the above Decision Accelerator Offerings— the Fit Gap and Solution Blueprint, the Architecture Assessment, and the Scoping Assessment can be executed together with the Upgrade Assessment DA as one engagement for the customer. The point of this section is not that each of these offerings needs to be positioned individually for the customer. On the contrary, depending on the scope, the delivery team could easily perform the exercise in tandem. The point of emphasis in this section for the reader is that if you are assessing an upgrade for the customer, you should be able to leverage the templates in each of the DA offerings, and combine them as you deem fit for your engagement. Lastly, the Proof of Concept DA offering and Business Case DA offering may also apply to an upgrade engagement, but typically only for a small subset of customers. Examples include customers who maybe on a very old version of the Microsoft Dynamics solution so that they pretty much need a re-implementation of the solution with the new version of the product, or customers that need complex functionality to be enabled as part of the upgrade. In both these cases, the customer may request the delivery team to prove out certain components of the solution prior to embarking on a full upgrade, in which case the Proof of Concept DA may be executed. They may also request assistance from the delivery team to assess the return on investment for the upgraded solution, in which case the Business Case DA may be employed. Determining the upgrade approach and release schedule As noted in the previous section, the customer and the delivery team should work together to select the right approach for the upgrade during the course of the upgrade diagnostics. Sure Step recommends two approaches to Upgrades: Technical upgrade: Use this approach if the upgrade mostly applies to application components, such as executable files, code components, and DLLs. This approach can be used to bring a customized solution to the latest release, provided the application functionality and business workflow stay relatively the same. Functional upgrade: Use this approach if new application functionality or major changes in the existing business workflows are desired during the course of the upgrade. Additional planning, testing, and rework of the existing solution are inherent in this complex upgrade process, and as such more aligned to a Functional upgrade. Functional upgrades are typically performed in multiple Releases. The following diagram depicts the two Upgrade approaches and the Release schedules. Depending on the scope of the upgrade, the customer engagement may have one or more delivery Releases. If for example, the customer's solution is on a supported upgrade path, the Technical Upgrade maybe delivered in a single Release using the Sure Step Upgrade project type. If the new solution requires several new processes to be enabled, the Functional Upgrade may be delivered in two or more Releases. For example, if the customer needs advanced supply chain functionality such as production scheduling and/or advanced warehousing to be enabled as part of the upgrade, the recommended approach is to first complete the Technical Upgrade using the Sure Step Upgrade project type to port the existing functionality over to the new product version in Release 1, then add the advanced supply chain functionality using the Rapid, Standard, Agile, or Enterprise project types in Release 2. As noted earlier, the DA offerings can be executed individually or in combination, depending on the customer engagement. Regardless of how they are executed, it is imperative that the customer and delivery team select the right approach and develop the necessary plans such as Project Plan, Resource Plan, Project Charter, and/or Communication Plan. These documents should form the basis for the upgrade delivery Proposal. When the Proposal and Statement of Work are approved, it is time to begin the execution of the solution upgrade.  

  WordPress 3 Complete Create your own complete website or blog from scratch with WordPress Learn everything you need for creating your own feature-rich website or blog from scratch Clear and practical explanations of all aspects of WordPress In-depth coverage of installation, themes, plugins, and syndication Explore WordPress as a fully functional content management system Clear, easy-to-follow, concise; rich with examples and screenshots Recent posts from a Category Widget In this section, we will see how to write a widget that displays recent posts from a particular category in the sidebar. The user will be able to choose how many recent posts to show and whether or not to show an RSS feed link. It will look like the following screenshot: Let's get started! Naming the widget Widgets, like plugins, need to have a unique name. Again, I suggest you search the Web for the name you want to use in order to be sure of its uniqueness. Because of the widget class, you don't need to worry so much about uniqueness in your function and variable names, since the widget class unique-ifies them for you. I've given this widget the filename ahs_postfromcat_widget.php. As for the introduction, this comment code is the same as what you use for the plugin. For this widget, the introductory comment is this: /* Plugin Name: April's List Posts Cat Widget Plugin URI: http://springthistle.com/wordpress/plugin_postfromcat Description: Allows you to add a widget with some number of most recent posts from a particular category Author: April Hodge Silver Version: 1.0 Author URI: http://springthistle.com */ Widget structure When building a widget using the widget class, your widget needs to have the following structure: class UNIQUE_WIDGET_NAME extends WP_Widget { function UNIQUE_WIDGET_NAME() { $widget_ops = array(); $control_ops = array(); $this->WP_Widget(); } function form ($instance) { // prints the form on the widgets page } function update ($new_instance, $old_instance) { // used when the user saves their widget options } function widget ($args,$instance) { // used when the sidebar calls in the widget } } // initiate the widget // register the widget Of course, we need an actual unique widget name. I'm going to use Posts_From_Category. Now, let's flesh out this code one section at a time. Widget initiation function Let's start with the widget initiation function. Blank, it looks like this: function Posts_From_Category() { $widget_ops = array(); $control_ops = array(); $this->WP_Widget(); } In this function, which has the same name as the class itself and is therefore the constructor, we initialize various things that the WP_Widget class is expecting. The first two variables, to which you can give any name you want, are just a handy way to set the two array variables expected by the third line of code. Let's take a look at these three lines of code: The $widget_ops variable is where you can set the class name, which is given to the widget div itself, and the description, which is shown in the WP Admin on the widgets page. The $control_ops variable is where you can set options for the control box in the WP Admin on the widget page, like the width and height of the widget and the ID prefix used for the names and IDs of the items inside. When you call the parent class' constructor, WP_Widget(), you'll tell it the widget's unique ID, the widget's display title, and pass along the two arrays you created. For this widget, my code now looks like this: function Posts_From_Category() { $widget_ops = array( 'classname' => 'postsfromcat', 'description' => 'Allows you to display a list of recent posts within a particular category.'); $control_ops = array( 'width' => 250, 'height' => 250, 'id_base' => 'postsfromcat-widget'); $this->WP_Widget('postsfromcat-widget', 'Posts from a Category', $widget_ops, $control_ops ); } Widget form function This function has to be named form(). You may not rename it if you want the widget class to know what it's purpose is. You also need to have an argument in there, which I'm calling $instance, that the class also expects. This is where current widget settings are stored. This function needs to have all of the functionalities to create the form that users will see when adding the widget to a sidebar. Let's look at some abbreviated code and then explore what it's doing: <?php function form ($instance) { $defaults = array('numberposts' => '5','catid'=>'1','title'=>'','rss'=>''); $instance = wp_parse_args( (array) $instance, $defaults ); ?> <p> <label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title'); ?>">Title:</label> <input type="text" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('title') ?>" id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('title') ?> " value="<?php echo $instance['title'] ?>" size="20"> </p> <p> <label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('catid'); ?>">Category ID:</label> <?php wp_dropdown_categories('hide_empty=0&hierarchical=1&id='.$this->get_field_id('catid').'&name='.$this->get_field_name('catid').'&selected='.$instance['catid']); ?> </p> <p> <label for='<?php echo $this->get_field_id('numberposts'); ?>">Number of posts:</label> <select id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('numberposts'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('numberposts'); ?>"> <?php for ($i=1;$i<=20;$i++) { echo '<option value="'.$i.'"'; if ($i==$instance['numberposts']) echo ' selected="selected"'; echo '>'.$i.'</option>'; } ?> </select> </p> <p> <input type="checkbox" id="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('rss'); ?>" name="<?php echo $this->get_field_name('rss'); ?>" <?php if ($instance['rss']) echo 'checked="checked"' ?> /> <label for="<?php echo $this->get_field_id('rss'); ?>">Show RSS feed link?</label> </p> <?php } ?> First, I set some defaults, which in this case is just for the number of posts, which I think it would be nice to set to 5. You can set other defaults in this array as well. Then you use a WordPress function named wp_parse_args(), which creates an $instance array that your form will use. What's in it depends on what defaults you've set and what settings the user has already saved. Then you create form fields. Note that for each form field, I make use of the built-in functions that will create unique names and IDs and input existing values. $this->get-field_id creates a unique ID based on the widget instance (remember, you can create more than one instance of this widget). $this->get_field_name() creates a unique name based on the widget instance. The $instance array is where you will find the current values for the widget, whether they are defaults or user-saved data. All the other code in there is just regular PHP and HTML. Note that if you give the user the ability to set a title, name that field "title", WordPress will show it on the widget form when it's minimized. The widget form this will create will look like this:  

  ASP.NET MVC 2 Cookbook A fast-paced cookbook with recipes covering all that you wanted to know about developing with ASP.NET MVC Solutions to the most common problems encountered with ASP.NET MVC development Build and maintain large applications with ease using ASP.NET MVC Recipes to enhance the look, feel, and user experience of your web applications Expand your MVC toolbox with an introduction to lots of open source tools Part of Packt's Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible         Introduction ASP.NET MVC provides a simple, but powerful, framework for validating forms. In this article, we'll start by creating a simple form, and then incrementally extend the functionality of our project to include client-side validation, custom validators, and remote validation. Basic input validation The moment you create an action to consume a form post, you're validating. Or at least the framework is. Whether it is a textbox validating to a DateTime, or checkbox to a Boolean, we can start making assumptions on what should be received and making provisions for what shouldn't. Let's create a form. How to do it... Create an empty ASP.NET MVC 2 project and add a master page called Site.Master to Views/Shared. In the models folder, create a new model called Person. This model is just an extended version of the Person class.Models/Person.cs: public class Person { [DisplayName("First Name")] public string FirstName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Middle Name")] public string MiddleName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Last Name")] public string LastName { get; set; } [DisplayName("Birth Date")] public DateTime BirthDate { get; set; } public string Email { get; set; } public string Phone { get; set; } public string Postcode { get; set; } public string Notes { get; set; } } Create a controller called HomeController and amend the Index action to return a new instance of Person as the view model.Controllers/HomeController.cs: public ActionResult Index() { return View(new Person()); } Build and then right-click on the action to create an Index view. Make it an empty view that strongly types to our Person class. Create a basic form in the Index view.Views/Home/Index.aspx: <% using (Html.BeginForm()) {%> <%: Html.EditorForModel() %> <input type="submit" name="submit" value="Submit" /> <% } %> We'll go back to the home controller now to capture the form submission. Create a second action called Index, which accepts only POSTs.Controllers/HomeController.cs: [HttpPost] public ActionResult Index(... At this point, we have options. We can consume our form in a few different ways, let's have a look at a couple of them now:Controllers/HomeController.cs (Example): // Individual Parameters public ActionResult Index(string firstName, DateTime birthdate... // Model Public ActionResult Index(Person person) { Whatever technique you choose, the resolution of the parameters is roughly the same. The technique that I'm going to demonstrate relies on a method called UpdateModel. But first we need to differentiate our POST action from our first catch-all action. Remember, actions are just methods, and overrides need to take sufficiently different parameters to prevent ambiguity. We will do this by taking a single parameter of type FormCollection, though we won't necessarily make use of it.Controllers/HomeController.cs: [HttpPost] public ActionResult Index(FormCollection form) { var person = new Person(); UpdateModel(person); return View(person); } The UpdateModel technique is a touch more long-winded, but comes with advantages. The first is that if you add a breakpoint on the UpdateModel line, you can see the exact point when an empty model becomes populated with the form collection, which is great for demonstration purposes. The main reason I go back to UpdateModel time and time again, is the optional second parameter, includeProperties. This parameter allows you to selectively update the model, thereby bypassing validation on certain properties that you might want to handle independently. Build, run, and submit your form. If your page validates, your info should be returned back to you. However, add your birth date in an unrecognized format and watch it bomb. UpdateModel is a temperamental beast. Switch your UpdateModel for TryUpdateModel and see what happens. TryUpdateModel will return a Boolean indicating the success or failure of the submission. However, the most interesting thing is happening in the browser. How it works... With ASP.NET MVC, it sometimes feels like you're stripping the development process back to basics. I think this is a good thing; more control to render the page you want is good. But there is a lot of clever stuff going on in the background, starting off with Model Binders. When you send a request (GET, POST, and so on) to an ASP.NET MVC application, the query string, route values and the form collection are passed through model binding classes, which result in usable structures (for example, your action's input parameters). These model binders can be overridden and extended to deal with more complex scenarios, but since ASP.NET MVC2, I've rarely made use of this. A good starting point for further investigation would be with DefaultModelBinder and IModelBinder. What about that validation message in the last screenshot, where did it come from? Apart from LableFor and EditorFor, but we also have ValidationMessageFor. If the model binders fail at any point to build our input parameters, the model binder will add an error message to the model state. The model state is picked up and displayed by the ValidationMessageFor method, but more on that later.

  Magento 1.4 Themes Design Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine Install and configure Magento 1.4 and learn the fundamental principles behind Magento themes Customize the appearance of your Magento 1.4 e-commerce store with Magento's powerful theming engine by changing Magento templates, skin files and layout files Change the basics of your Magento theme from the logo of your store to the color scheme of your theme Integrate popular social media aspects such as Twitter and Facebook into your Magento store Facebook (http://www.facebook.com) is a social networking website that allows people to add each other as 'friends' and to send messages and share content. Move the mouse over the image to enlarge it. As with Twitter, there are two options you have for integrating Facebook with your Magento store: Adding a 'Like' button to your store's product pages to allow your customers to show their appreciation for individual products on your store. Integrating a widget of the latest news from your store's Facebook profile. Adding a 'Like' button to your Magento store's product pages The Facebook 'Like' button allows Facebook users to show that they approve of a particular web page and you can put this to use on your Magento store. Getting the 'Like' button markup To get the markup required for your store's 'Like' button, go to the Facebook Developers website at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/ plugins/like. Fill in the form below the description text with relevant values, leaving the URL to like field as URLTOLIKE for now, and setting the Width to 200: Click on the Get Code button at the bottom of the form and then copy the code that is presented in the iframe field: The generated markup should look like the following: <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href= URLTOLIKE&amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width= 200&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=80" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:200px; height:80px;" allowTransparency="true"> </iframe> You now need to replace the URLTOLIKE in the previous markup to the URL of the current page in your Magento store. The PHP required to do this in Magento looks like the following: <?php $currentUrl = $this->helper(‘core/url’)->getCurrentUrl(); ?> The new Like button markup for your Magento store should now look like the following: <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href= ".<?php $currentUrl = $this->helper(‘core/url’)->getCurrentUrl(); ?>". &amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=200&amp;action= like&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=80» scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:200px; height:80px;" allowTransparency="true"> </iframe> Open your theme's view.phtml file in the /app/design/frontend/default/m2/ template/catalog/product directory and locate the lines that read: <div class="std"><?php echo $_helper->productAttribute($_product, nl2br($_product->getShortDescription()), 'short_description') ?> </div></div> Insert the code generated by Facebook here, so that it now reads the following: <div class="std"><?php echo $_helper->productAttribute($_product, nl2br($_product->getShortDescription()), 'short_description') ?> </div> <iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo $this->helper('core/url')->getCurrentUrl();?>&amp;layout= standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=200&amp;action=like&amp; colorscheme=light&amp;height=80" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:200px; height:80px;" allowTransparency="true"> </iframe> </div> Save and upload this file back to your Magento installation and then visit a product page within your store to see the button appear below the brief description of the product: That's it, your product pages can now be liked on Facebook!

  Microsoft SQL Azure Enterprise Application Development Build enterprise-ready applications and projects with SQL Azure Develop large scale enterprise applications using Microsoft SQL Azure Understand how to use the various third party programs such as DB Artisan, RedGate, ToadSoft etc developed for SQL Azure Master the exhaustive Data migration and Data Synchronization aspects of SQL Azure. Includes SQL Azure projects in incubation and more recent developments including all 2010 updates Appendix In order to use this program and follow the article you should have an account on the Windows Azure Platform on which preferably an SQL Azure server has been provisioned. This would also imply that you have a Windows Live ID to access the portal. As mentioned, in this article we look at some of the features of this web based tool and carry out a few tasks. Click the Launch Houston button in the Project Houston CTP1 page shown here on the SQLAzureLabs portal page. This brings up a world map displaying the current Windows Azure Data Centers available and you have to choose the data center on which you have an account. For the present article we will use the Southeast Asia data center and sometimes the North Central US data center. Click on Southeast Asia location. The Silverlight application gets launched from the URL: https://manage-sgp.cloudapp.net/ displaying the license information that you need to agree to before going forward. When you click OK, the Login in page is displayed as shown. You need to enter the server information at the Southeast Asia data center as shown. Click Connect. The connection gets established to the above SQL Azure server as shown in the next image. This is much better looking than the somewhat ‘drab’ looking SSMS interface (albeit fully mature)shown here for comparison. Changing the database If you need to work with a different database, click on Connect DB at the top left of 'Houston' user interface, as shown in the next image. The conneciton interface comes up again where you indicate the name of database as shown. Here the database has been changed to master. Click Connect now connects you to the master database as shown.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 High Availability Minimize downtime, speed up recovery, and achieve the highest level of availability and reliability for SQL server applications by mastering the concepts of database mirroring,log shipping,clustering, and replication  Install various SQL Server High Availability options in a step-by-step manner  A guide to SQL Server High Availability for DBA aspirants, proficient developers and system administrators  Learn the pre and post installation concepts and common issues you come across while working on SQL Server High Availability  Tips to enhance performance with SQL Server High Availability  External references for further study  Windows domains and domain users In the early era of Windows, operating system user were created standalone until Windows NT operating system hit the market. Windows NT, that is, Windows New Technology introduced some great feature to the world—including domains. A domain is a group of computers that run on Windows operating systems. Amongst them is a computer that holds all the information related to user authentication and user database and is called the domain controller (server), whereas every user who is part of this user database on the domain controller is called a domain user. Domain users have access to any resource across the domain and its subdomains with the privilege they have, unlike the standalone user who has access to the resources available to a specific system. With the release of Windows Server 2000, Microsoft released Active Directory (AD), which is now widely used with Windows operating system networks to store, authenticate, and control users who are part of the domain. A Windows domain uses various modes to authenticate users—encrypted passwords, various handshake methods such as PKI, Kerberos, EAP, SSL certificates, NAP, LDAP, and IP Sec policy—and makes it robust authentication. One can choose the authentication method that suits business needs and based on the environment. Let's now see various authentication methods in detail. Public Key Infrastructure (PKI): This is the most common method used to transmit data over insecure channels such as the Internet using digital certificates. It has generally two parts—the public and private keys. These keys are generated by a Certificate Authority, such as, Thawte. Public keys are stored in a directory where they are accessible by all parties. The public key is used by the message sender to send encrypted messages, which then can be decrypted using the private key. Kerberos: This is an authentication method used in client server architecture to authorize the client to use service(s) on a server in a network. In this method, when a client sends a request to use a service to a server, a request goes to the authentication server, which will generate a session key and a random value based on the username. This session key and a random value are then passed to the server, which grants or rejects the request. These sessions are for certain time period, which means for that particular amount of time the client can use the service without having to re-authenticate itself. Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP): This is an authentication protocol generally used in wireless and point-to-point connections. SSL Certificates: A Secure Socket Layer certificate (SSL) is a digital certificate that is used to identify a website or server that provides a service to clients and sends the data in an encrypted form. SSL certificates are typically used by websites such as GMAIL. When we type a URL and press Enter, the web browser sends a request to the web server to identify itself. The web server then sends a copy of its SSL certificate, which is checked by the browser. If the browser trusts the certificate (this is generally done on the basis of the CA and Registration Authority and directory verification), it will send a message back to the server and in reply the web server sends an acknowledgement to the browser to start an encrypted session. Network Access Protection (NAP): This is a new platform introduced by Microsoft with the release of Windows Server 2008. It will provide access to the client, based on the identity of the client, the group it belongs to, and the level compliance it has with the policy defined by the Network Administrators. If the client doesn't have a required compliance level, NAP has mechanisms to bring the client to the compliance level dynamically and allow it to access the network. Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP): This is a protocol that runs over TCP/IP directly. It is a set of objects, that is, organizational units, printers, groups, and so on. When the client sends a request for a service, it queries the LDAP server to search for availability of information, and based on that information and level of access, it will provide access to the client. IP Security (IPSEC): IP Security is a set of protocols that provides security at the network layer. IP Sec provides two choices: Authentication Header: Here it encapsulates the authentication of the sender in a header of the network packet. Encapsulating Security Payload: Here it supports encryption of both the header and data. Now that we know basic information on Windows domains, domain users, and various authentication methods used with Windows servers, I will walk you through some of the basic and preliminary stuff about SQL Server security! Understanding SQL Server Security Security!! Now-a-days we store various kinds of information into databases and we just want to be sure that they are secured. Security is the most important word to the IT administrator and vital for everybody who has stored their information in a database as he/she needs to make sure that not a single piece of data should be made available to someone who shouldn't have access. Because all the information stored in the databases is vital, everyone wants to prevent unauthorized access to highly confidential data and here is how security implementation in SQL Server comes into the picture. With the release of SQL Server 2000, Microsoft (MS) has introduced some great security features such as authentication roles (fixed server roles and fixed database roles), application roles, various permissions levels, forcing protocol encryption, and so on, which are widely used by administrators to tighten SQL Server security. Basically, SQL Server security has two paradigms: one is SQL Server's own set of security measures and other is to integrate them with the domain. SQL Server has two methods of authentication. Windows authentication In Windows authentication mode, we can integrate domain accounts to authenticate users, and based on the group they are members of and level of access they have, DBAs can provide them access on the particular SQL server box. Whenever a user tries to access the SQL Server, his/her account is validated by the domain controller first, and then based on the permission it has, the domain controller allows or rejects the request; here it won't require separate login ID and password to authenticate. Once the user is authenticated, SQL server will allow access to the user based on the permission it has. These permissions are in form of Roles including Server, fixed DB Roles, and Application roles. Fixed Server Roles: These are security principals that have server-wide scope. Basically, fixed server roles are expected to manage the permissions at server level. We can add SQL logins, domain accounts, and domain groups to these roles. There are different roles that we can assign to a login, domain account, or group—the following table lists them. Fixed DB Roles: These are the roles that are assigned to a particular login for the particular database; its scope is limited to the database it has permission to. There are various fixed database roles, including the ones shown in the following table: Application Role: The Application role is a database principal that is widely used to assign user permissions for an application. For example, in a home-grown ERP, some users require only to view the data; we can create a role and add a db_datareader permission to it and then can add all those users who require read-only permission. Mixed Authentication: In the Mixed authentication mode, logins can be authenticated by the Windows domain controller or by SQL Server itself. DBAs can create logins with passwords in SQL Server. With the release of SQL Server 2005, MS has introduced password policies for SQL Server logins. Mixed mode authentication is used when one has to run a legacy application and it is not on the domain network. In my opinion, Windows authentication is good because we can use various handshake methods such as PKI, Kerberos, EAP, SSL NAP, LDAP, or IPSEC to tighten the security. SQL Server 2005 has enhancements in its security mechanisms. The most important features amongst them are password policy, native encryption, separation of users and schema, and no need to provide system administrator (SA) rights to run profiler. These are good things because SA is the super user, and with the power this account has, a user can do anything on the SQL box, including: The user can grant ALTER TRACE permission to users who require to run profiler The user can create login and users The user can grant or revoke permission to other users A schema is an object container that is owned by a user and is transferable to any other users. In earlier versions, objects are owned by users, so if the user leaves the company we cannot delete his/her account from the SQL box just because there is some object he/she has created. We first have to change the owner of that object and then we can delete that account. On the other hand, in the case of a schema, we could have dropped the user account because the object is owned by the schema. Now, SQL Server 2008 will give you more control over the configuration of security mechanisms. It allows you to configure metadata access, execution context, and auditing events using DDL triggers—the most powerful feature to audit any DDL event. If one wishes to know more about what we have seen till now, he/she can go through the following links: http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/Security.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2005/en/us/security-features.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc966507.aspx In this section, we understood the basics of domains, domain users, and SQL Server security. We also learned why security is given so much emphasize these days. In the next section, we will understand the basics of clustering and its components. What is clustering? Before starting with SQL Server clustering, let's have a look at clustering in general and Windows clusters. The word Cluster itself is self-descriptive—a bunch or group. When two or more than two computers are connected to each other by means of a network and share some of the common resources to provide redundancy or performance improvement, they are known as a cluster of computers. Clustering is usually deployed when there is a critical business application running that needs to be available 24 X 7 or in terminology—High Availability. These clusters are known as Failover clusters because the primary goal to set up the cluster is to make services or business processes that are business critical available 24 X 7. MS Windows server Enterprise and Datacenter edition supports failover clustering. This is achieved by having two identical nodes connected to each other by means of private network or commonly used resources. In case of failure of any common resource or services, the first node (Active) passes the ownership to another node (Passive). SQL Server Clustering is built on top of Windows Clustering, which means before we go about installing SQL Server clustering, we should have Windows clustering installed. Before we start, let's understand the commonly used shared resources for the cluster server. Clusters with 2, 4, 8, 12 or 32 nodes can be built Windows Server 2008 R2. Clusters are categorized in the following manner: High-Availability Clusters: This type of cluster is known as a Failover cluster. High Availability clusters are implemented when the purpose is to provide highly available services. For implementing a failover or high availability cluster one may have up to 16 nodes in a Microsoft Cluster. Clustering in Windows operating systems was first introduced with the release of Windows NT 4.0 Enterprise Edition, and was enhanced gradually. Even though we can have non-identical hardware, we should use identical hardware. This is because if the node to which cluster fails over has lower configuration, then we might face degradation in performance. Load Balancing: This is the second form of cluster that can be configured. This type of cluster can be configured by linking multiple computers with each other and making use of each resource they need for operation. From the user's point of view, all of these servers/nodes linked to each other are different. However, it is collectively and virtually a single system, with the main goal being to balance work by sharing CPU, disk, and every possible resource among the linked nodes and that is why it is known as a Load Balancing cluster. SQL Server doesn't support this form of clustering. Compute Clusters: When computers are linked together with the purpose of using them for simulation for aircraft, they are known as a compute cluster. A well-known example is Beowulf computers. Grid Computing: This is one kind of clustering solution, but it is more often used when there is a dispersed location. This kind of cluster is called a Supercomputer or HPC. The main application is scientific research, academic, mathematical, or weather forecasting where lots of CPUs and disks are required—SETI@home is a well-known example. If we talk about SQL Server clusters, there are some cool new features that are added in the latest release of SQL Server 2008, although with the limitation that these features are available only if SQL Server 2008 is used with Windows Server 2008. So, let's have a glance at these features: Service SID: Service SIDs were introduced with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. They enable us to bind permissions directly to Windows services. In the earlier version of SQL Server 2005, we need to have a SQL Server Services account that is a member of a domain group so that it can have all the required permissions. This is not the case with SQL Server 2008 and we may choose Service SIDs to bypass the need to provision domain groups. Support for 16 nodes: We may add up to 16 nodes in our SQL Server 2008 cluster with SQL Server 2008 Enterprise 64-bit edition. New cluster validation: As a part of the installation steps, a new cluster validation step is implemented. Prior to adding a node into an existing cluster, this validation step checks whether or not the cluster environment is compatible. Mount Drives: Drive letters are no longer essential. If we have a cluster configured that has limited drive letters available, we may mount a drive and use it in our cluster environment, provided it is associated with the base drive letter. Geographically dispersed cluster node: This is the super-cool feature introduced with SQL Server 2008, which uses VLAN to establish connectivity with other cluster nodes. It breaks the limitation of having all clustered nodes at a single location. IPv6 Support: SQL Server 2008 natively supports IPv6, which increases network IP address size to 128 bit from 32 bit. DHCP Support: Windows server 2008 clustering introduced the use of DHCP-assigned IP addresses by the cluster services and it is supported by SQL Server 2008 clusters. It is recommended to use static IP addresses. This is because if some of our application depends on IP addresses, or in case of failure of renewing IP address from DHCP server, there would be a failure of IP address resources. iSCSI Support: Windows server 2008 supports iSCSI to be used as storage connection; in earlier versions, only SAN and fibre channels were supported.

  Microsoft Forefront UAG 2010 Administrator's Handbook Explore Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway’s wide range of features and abilities to publish applications to remote users or partners, and provide remote-access to your network with world-class security. Maximize your business results by fully understanding how to plan your UAG integration Consistently be ahead of the game by taking control of your server with backup and advanced monitoring An essential tutorial for new users and a great resource for veterans Uncover the advantages and ease of use of Direct Access, the latest VPN technology from Microsoft Packed with detailed explanations of concepts, terms and technologies, with hand-in-hand guidance through the tough parts Includes the most updated information, up to and including Service Pack 1 for UAG 2010         What are Trunks and Applications? Just as we like to organize everything in life into containers, UAG also does the same. As a user of Microsoft products, you are probably used to files or programs that are grouped together within folders and which are stored on hard drives (or hard drive partitions). With UAG, there's one little difference, the primary organizational units are called "Trunks", and in those we create (or "publish") applications, and we can also group them in folders too. The reason for this difference in naming goes back into the distant past, but it doesn't really matter. The first step when starting to publish applications with UAG is to create a Trunk, and then, add applications to it, as needed. A UAG server can contain multiple trunks, depending on how many IP addresses are assigned to its external interface. Some organizations need only a single application on a single trunk, while others publish multiple trunks, with dozens of applications on each of them. If many applications need to be published on a single trunk, the administrator can also organize them into folders, which can make it easier for users to find. An "application" for UAG is a collection of settings and rules that determine how UAG publishes a certain internal website or application. These settings include, among others, the name or IP address of the internal server that will be published, what files and folders are accessible by the end users, and which users have access to what. At any point, an administrator can add IP addresses to the external NIC of the UAG server, add public DNS mappings to these addresses, and add more trunks. This is also an alternative way to organize the various applications—some organizations publish several Portals with different addresses, and provide the public URLs to groups of employees based on their needs. That is done, of course, in addition to defining the authorization on the trunks themselves. Types of trunks When creating a trunk, you can create trunks of two distinct types—HTTP (where traffic between the client and UAG is sent unencrypted as "clear-text") trunks and HTTPS (or "secure") trunks. The difference between these is simple—HTTP trunks are accessible by users over the HTTP protocol, while HTTPS trunks require the browser to communicate with encryption. Some UAG customers are perfectly fine with using HTTP trunks, but most customers prefer the more secure HTTPS trunks, because their users will be sending and receiving sensitive data over the link. From a technical perspective, a trunk is a website running on the IIS server that is active on the UAG server, and just like any other website in the world, it has an IP address and a TCP/IP port. If you have a single IP address assigned to the external NIC, you can choose to publish a single HTTP or HTTPS trunk on it. Naturally, you can choose to publish zero trunks, but for that, you don't need this article, or any article, really. For those of you familiar with previous products, such as e-Gap and IAG, you might be familiar with several types of trunks, such as Basic and Webmail, but UAG no longer has these. UAG does not support publishing trunks on ports other than 80 and 443 either. It does, however, support Redirect trunks. A redirect trunk is meant to make it easier for an organization's users to connect to their server easily when the UAG portal is published as an HTTPS trunk. This is useful, because most users are used to typing HTTP URLs into their browsers, and if they forget to type the HTTPS:// prefix to the URL, the browser will assume it is HTTP, and receive no response on port 80. The Redirect Trunk will listen on port 80, receive the request and reply with a "redirect" HTTP 302 response code, asking the user's browser to request the same web address, but with the HTTPS prefix. It is important to note that a redirect trunk is only available to redirect users from HTTP to HTTPS, and not the other way around. Therefore, on the UAG configuration console, the option for a Redirect Trunk is only available in the HTTP trunk wizard. A redirect trunk can only be created after the HTTPS trunk it needs to redirect to, has been created. A Basic trunk used to be available in IAG and e-Gap as a means of publishing a single web application on a single trunk, without going through a portal. Even though UAG does not offer a Basic trunk, there is still a way to achieve the same functionality, and we shall discuss this further along the way. A Webmail trunk was used with the previous versions of the product to publish, as the name indicates, webmail types of applications, such as different versions of Outlook Web Access (OWA), or Lotus Notes, as well as the now out-dated Outlook Mobile Access for Exchange 2003, and the Exchange ActiveSync Service, which allows Mobile phones running Windows Mobile to sync over the internet with Exchange servers. This trunk type is no longer available either, but you can still get the same functionality via the use of the Exchange publishing wizard on a UAG Portal trunk Following the demise of the Basic and Webmail trunks, the remaining options when creating new trunks are Portal trunks, and ADFS trunks. A portal trunk is the home page of UAG—it will be the home for all the applications you will be publishing on your UAG server. Users who log in to the trunk remotely will see these applications as a list of icons and links referred to as the Portal Home Page, and clicking on any of these will launch the specific application, whatever they may be. Another type of trunk that exists with UAG is the ADFS trunk. ADFS, or Active Directory Federation Services, is a technology that allows organizations to provide Single Sign-On (SSO) for users from different Active Directory forests. ADFS (sometimes written as "AD FS") has been a part of the Windows Server world since the release of Windows Server 2003 R2, and it is used primarily by large organizations. Such organizations can use ADFS to allow users which belong to one forest to access resources in another forest without requiring the need to sign on again. This nice trick can benefit an organization that has multiple forests, or an organization that needs to cooperate tightly with another organization, such as a business partner. This also means that the two organizations do not need to have a shared user database of any kind. For UAG, this means that users can log on to the portal, and access published applications on servers that belong to another organization quickly and easily.

Adjusting brightness and contrast One often needs to tweak the brightness and contrast level of an image. For example, you may have a photograph that was taken with a basic camera, when there was insufficient light. How would you correct that digitally? The brightness adjustment helps make the image brighter or darker whereas the contrast adjustments emphasize differences between the color and brightness level within the image data. The image can be made lighter or darker using the ImageEnhance module in PIL. The same module provides a class that can auto-contrast an image. Time for action – adjusting brightness and contrast Let's learn how to modify the image brightness and contrast. First, we will write code to adjust brightness. The ImageEnhance module makes our job easier by providing Brightness class. Download image 0165_3_12_Before_BRIGHTENING.png and rename it to Before_BRIGHTENING.png. Use the following code: 1 import Image 2 import ImageEnhance 3 4 brightness = 3.0 5 peak = Image.open( "C:imagesBefore_BRIGHTENING.png ") 6 enhancer = ImageEnhance.Brightness(peak) 7 bright = enhancer.enhance(brightness) 8 bright.save( "C:imagesBRIGHTENED.png ") 9 bright.show() On line 6 in the code snippet, we created an instance of the class Brightness. It takes Image instance as an argument. Line 7 creates a new image bright by using the specified brightness value. A value between 0.0 and less than 1.0 gives a darker image, whereas a value greater than 1.0 makes it brighter. A value of 1.0 keeps the brightness of the image unchanged. The original and resultant image are shown in the next illustration. Comparison of images before and after brightening. Let's move on and adjust the contrast of the brightened image. We will append the following lines of code to the code snippet that brightened the image. 10 contrast = 1.3 11 enhancer = ImageEnhance.Contrast(bright) 12 con = enhancer.enhance(contrast) 13 con.save( "C:imagesCONTRAST.png ") 14 con.show() Thus, similar to what we did to brighten the image, the image contrast was tweaked by using the ImageEnhance.Contrast class. A contrast value of 0.0 creates a black image. A value of 1.0 keeps the current contrast. The resultant image is compared with the original in the following illustration. The original image with the image displaying the increasing contrast. In the preceding code snippet, we were required to specify a contrast value. If you prefer PIL for deciding an appropriate contrast level, there is a way to do this. The ImageOps.autocontrast functionality sets an appropriate contrast level. This function normalizes the image contrast. Let's use this functionality now. Use the following code: import ImageOps bright = Image.open( "C:imagesBRIGHTENED.png ") con = ImageOps.autocontrast(bright, cutoff = 0) con.show() The highlighted line in the code is where contrast is automatically set. The autocontrast function computes histogram of the input image. The cutoff argument represents the percentage of lightest and darkest pixels to be trimmed from this histogram. The image is then remapped. What just happened? Using the classes and functionality in ImageEnhance module, we learned how to increase or decrease the brightness and the contrast of the image. We also wrote code to auto-contrast an image using functionality provided in the ImageOps module. Tweaking colors Another useful operation performed on the image is adjusting the colors within an image. The image may contain one or more bands, containing image data. The image mode contains information about the depth and type of the image pixel data. The most common modes we will use are RGB (true color, 3x8 bit pixel data), RGBA (true color with transparency mask, 4x8 bit) and L (black and white, 8 bit). In PIL, you can easily get the information about the bands data within an image. To get the name and number of bands, the getbands() method of the class Image can be used. Here, img is an instance of class Image. >>> img.getbands() ('R', 'G', 'B', 'A') Time for action – swap colors within an image! To understand some basic concepts, let's write code that just swaps the image band data. Download the image 0165_3_15_COLOR_TWEAK.png and rename it as COLOR_TWEAK.png. Type the following code: 1 import Image 2 3 img = Image.open( "C:imagesCOLOR_TWEAK.png ") 4 img = img.convert('RGBA') 5 r, g, b, alpha = img.split() 6 img = Image.merge( "RGBA ", (g, r, b, alpha)) 7 img.show() Let's analyze this code now. On line 2, the Image instance is created as usual. Then, we change the mode of the image to RGBA. Here we should check if the image already has that mode or if this conversion is possible. You can add that check as an exercise! Next, the call to Image.split() creates separate instances of Image class, each containing a single band data. Thus, we have four Image instances—r, g, b, and alpha corresponding to red, green, and blue bands, and the alpha channel respectively. The code in line 6 does the main image processing. The first argument that Image.merge takes mode as the first argument whereas the second argument is a tuple of image instances containing band information. It is required to have same size for all the bands. As you can notice, we have swapped the order of band data in Image instances r and g while specifying the second argument. The original and resultant image thus obtained are compared in the next illustration. The color of the flower now has a shade of green and the grass behind the flower is rendered with a shade of red. Please download and refer to the supplementary PDF file Chapter 3 Supplementary Material.pdf. Here, the color images are provided that will help you see the difference. Original (left) and the color swapped image (right). What just happened? We accomplished creating an image with its band data swapped. We learned how to use PIL's Image.split() and Image.merge() to achieve this. However, this operation was performed on the whole image. In the next section, we will learn how to apply color changes to a specific color region.