3 hours ago, PerfectPhase wrote

If the video's here aren't your sort of thing I highly recommend http://pluralsight.com/training

Seconded. Pluralsight is the best video store for MS stack devs, I cannot stop going back to it. Clear concise explanations, that cover nearly everything you need to know to go from newbie to pro.  

It would be nice to see better support for OpenGL in Windows, but DirectX is pretty much proven technology, I don't see it going anywhere. 

And the offending piece of code at which it breaks:

// HACK : override appendChild, replaceChild, insertBefore for IE, since it doesn't support DOM events
    if (isInternetExplorer)
    {
        var appendChildOriginal = doc.body.appendChild;
        doc.body.appendChild = function(element)
        {
            appendChildOriginal(element);
            var tag = element.tagName.toLowerCase();
            
            if ("video" == tag)
            {
                ProcessVideoElement(element);
            }
        }

       ....
}

I can simply continue but it's very annoying. So is there way to disable this error? 

So I have another problem. I need to check out a file from PVCS from an ASP.NET webpage. In order to do so I spawn a process that calls a batch file which sets some environment variables and then calls the pvcs command get.exe to get the file. This all works great when I run it on my local machine, but as soon as I deploy to the server all hell breaks lose. The website impersonates the main user, this happens in the web.config (still not sure if relevant). 

After trial and error, I narrowed down the problem to communication with shared drives. PVCS drive is mapped in the server. So I made a small batch script that only does a cd to a directory on this shared drive and it failed. Code is simply "cd Z:/work/".

Google gave some answers and more questions still. Apparently impersonation and shared drives simply do not work. But I'm not certain if that pertains to spawned process using C# Process class. Though, given that the webpage works perfectly in my machine without impersonation, this might have something to do with it. C# spawned processes have limited permissions, but I don't think this is the problem since my code is failing in doing a simple cd Z:\work\. 

So I created a console app which does the check out (same code as the webpage) and it worked in the web server without a problem. The problem only occurs when I spawned the process from the webpage in the webserver. I made some dummy code to test.

I even tried to call the console app from the website, but that still doesn't work. 

public partial class _Default : System.Web.UI.Page
    {
        
        protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            

        }

        protected void btnCheckout_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            Command cmd = new Command(@"cmd", @"/c testpath.bat");
            cmd.execute();
          
            lblError.Text = cmd.stderr;
            lblOutput.Text = cmd.stdout;
        }
    }


public class Command
    {
        // Private members
        private Process process;
        private int timeout;

        // Public members
        public string stderr { get; private set; }
        public string stdout { get; private set; }
        public string exception { get; private set; }
        public bool done { get; private set; }
        public int exitLevel { get; private set; }


        /// <summary>
        /// Construct a Command object that will be executed in a Windows environment.
        /// </summary>
        /// <param name="args">the command to execute in command prompt</param>
        /// <param name="timeout">This is optional and consists of the time in milliseconds to wait for the command to finish. Default is 10 seconds.</param>
        public Command(string exec, string args, string workingDir="", int timeout = 5000)
        {
            this.timeout = timeout;
            this.exception = "";
            process = new Process();
            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(workingDir))
                process.StartInfo.WorkingDirectory = workingDir;
            process.StartInfo.FileName = exec;
            process.StartInfo.Arguments = args;
            process.StartInfo.UseShellExecute = false;
            process.StartInfo.CreateNoWindow = true;
            process.StartInfo.RedirectStandardError = true;
            process.StartInfo.RedirectStandardOutput = true;
            process.OutputDataReceived += process_OutputDataReceived;
        }

        void process_OutputDataReceived(object sender, DataReceivedEventArgs e)
        {
            if (!string.IsNullOrEmpty(e.Data))
            {
                stdout = e.Data;
            }
        }

        public void execute()
        {
            try
            {
                process.Start();
                process.BeginOutputReadLine();                  // Note that the following three lines in any 
                stderr = process.StandardError.ReadToEnd();     // other order will deadlock. 
                process.WaitForExit(timeout);
            }
            catch (Exception e)
            {
                exception = e.Message;
                Debug.WriteLine(e.Message + "\n" + e.StackTrace);
            }
            Thread.Sleep(1000);
        }

       
    }

Does anybody have any clue what my problem is?

MPI_Init(&argc, &argv);
  MPI_Comm_rank(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &my_rank);
  MPI_Comm_size(MPI_COMM_WORLD, &comm_sz);

  if(my_rank == 0) {
    for(i=1; i<=n;++i)
      a[i-1] = i-1;

    // Distribute                                                                                                        
    MPI_Send(a, n, MPI_INT, my_rank+1, n, MPI_COMM_WORLD);

  } else {
    // Receive and distribute initial values                                                                             
    MPI_Recv(a, n, MPI_INT, MPI_ANY_SOURCE, MPI_ANY_TAG, MPI_COMM_WORLD, &status);
    k = status.MPI_TAG/2;
    if(k!=0) {
      MPI_Send(a+1, k, MPI_INT, my_rank+1, k, MPI_COMM_WORLD); //pass sub-array [1..k]                                   
      MPI_Send(a+k+1, k, MPI_INT, k+my_rank+1, k, MPI_COMM_WORLD); //pass sub-array [k+1..2k+1]                          
    }
    partial = a[0];
    printf("rank: %d\tvalue: %d\n", my_rank, partial);

    // Carry out Prefix Sum algorithm : for 1 to log2(n)   - THIS IS WHERE IT FAILS                                                          
    j = (int)(log((float)n+1)/log((float)2));
    //printf("Log(n) = %d\n", j);                                                                                        
    for(i=0; i<j; ++i) {
      k = (int)(pow((float)2,(float)i));
      printf("**rank: %d, k=%d\n", my_rank, k);
      if(my_rank+k<=n) MPI_Send(&partial, 1, MPI_INT, my_rank+k, 0, MPI_COMM_WORLD/*, &request*/);
      if(my_rank-k>=1) {
        MPI_Recv(&value, 1 , MPI_INT, my_rank-k, 0, MPI_COMM_WORLD, &status);
        partial += value;
      }
    }
    printf("rank: %d\tpartial: %d\n", my_rank, partial);
  }

  MPI_Finalize();

And it's deadlocking. It works about 80% of the time and the other time, it fails. I've noticed that when it fails, a process usually sends messages, ends before its receiver has received yet. Does anyone know if an MPI process can send message and finalize before message is received?

I can't see why it's deadlocking, any ideas?

1 hour ago, blowdart wrote

The HTML file input control *always* uploads the file. Always.

So then the HTML input control and a plain input control in a ASP.NET app are not the same? For example something like this:

<input type="file" id="test"/>

I have something like that and browsing to something does not (seem) to upload anything. Now if I create an asp.net input type, as soon as I browse to something it starts uploading. I had to implement the ICallbackEventHandler in the .cs file, but it seems to be doing what I need so far. 

As for the zip reader, I wasn't aware javascript could give me what I want, still new to this. I was looking at System.IO.Packaging and thinking of hooking up more client controls to server side functions to do the trick... 

So now I'm trying to, if possible, read the content (file names) from a .zip file when somebody browses to a zipped file using my HTML file input. Is this possible without uploading the zipped file to the server (given I have a UNC path)? 

To make it clearer, a use case would be a user come to my website, uses my html file input to browse to a zipped file, then clicks a html or asp.net button and my website outputs the names of all the files inside the zipped file (ideally without any upload). 

Thanks.

If not, then how effective would it be to let this site into their Trusted Sites, and such only this website could make use of this ActiveX object? I noticed that this website already works in our network with the only caveat of producing a pop-up asking for confirmation, so it's not like I need to make any changes to the systems as I initially thought. Recall that this is an intranet site, no one will change internet zones. 

Regards 

-- Update ---

Looks like browse with UNC path will do fine.

Thanks for the feedback.

Preferably I'd like that message turned off for my site only, an intranet site which only allows access to a few selected people. But any method to turn that message off would work, I'll leave it to the users whether they want to or not. 

What I'm doing is, reading users' mapped drives to the actual UNC paths so I can copy files from whatever mapped path they select. 

var WshNetwork = new ActiveXObject("WScript.Network");
var Drives = WshNetwork.EnumNetworkDrives();

Which gives me this warning:
"An ActiveX control on this page might be unsafe to interact with other parts of the page. Do you want to allow this interaction?  YES  NO"

Does anyone know how I can make it so that I can ask the user to install or do something so that that message doesn't pop up again?

Btw I'm targeting .NET 3.5 so I don't think .NET 4.5 should affect my app, since it's not .NET 4...

[Update]

Solved it! It was definitely IIS Express giving me trouble, went into Project properties and changed it to use VS local dev server and it works as expected now. Thanks for leading me in the right direction 

requestor = User.Identity.Name;

Same web.config as well. Both running in Debug mode in IE8. What did VS2012 do to the development server? 

I'm still intrigued though, why does the file get uploaded without any code doing so after someone browses to a file and causes a postback?

[edit]

I just thought of something, is it because it needs to be loaded into memory otherwise it loses the state and the path to the file..

Thanks blowdart, now I know FileUpload is definitely a big nono. 

After modifying web.config as follows:

<httpRuntime executionTimeout="1000000000" maxRequestLength="2097151"/>

I can upload files over 1GB, but it still fails when it comes to files at 4GB or higher. 

Another thing I've noticed is that going into any event handler after browsing to a large file, takes a long time, even if the handler's code has nothing to do with the upload. I'm not really sure how the FileUpload control works, but it seems as if some copying is going on before it even gets to my handler, sure hope it's not putting all of that information in memory.

Can anybody shed some light on this? thanks niners. 

3 hours ago, lensman wrote

Also consider that asp.net apps operate within a sand box.  Your thread might not have rights to view the destination location. 

 I think you may just be right about that. This is an exception I got from a File.Delete in another thread spawned:
"The account used is a computer account. Use your global user account or local user account to access this server.  "

And blowdart comes to the rescue yet again, you're awesome, thanks. 

My app has to check for several paths on network shares, this is done with Directory.Exists(path). However this is always returning False when called from inside one of my spawned threads, if called from the main Thread with the same path, it returns True.

Can anyone shed some light as to why this happens? 

Thanks  

 I'm very new to C# Threading, so I'm learning a lot through this project. Our website was initially done in ASP.NET Framework 2.0, I've changed it to 3.5 but the server does not support anything above that, so now I'm looking through the multiple ways of accomplishing this and best practices. Currently going through "C# in a Nutshell" which has been great. Your suggestions are much appreciated.

In global scope, I have defined  a thread and a static list (which is modified by such thread) and set thread to null and list to new List<string>().

I did a workaround by checking that the list has been changed, if not the it goes back to the old way of fetching after user request. Still, it intrigues me why that error is being thrown and I seem unable to replicate, it'll probably be something very simple I'm overlooking.

All the relevant code:

protected void ddlRelTypeSelected(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            lblRelType.Visible = true;

            string strALPHA ="";
           
            if (ddlPlatform.Text == "IVWEX")
            {
                if (ddlType.Text == "QA.Builds" || ddlType.Text == "QA.Releases")
                {
                    // ...
                }
                else
                {
                    // ...
                }
            }
            else if (ddlPlatform.Text == "ALPHA")
            {
                if (ddlType.Text == "QA.Candidates")
                {
                    // ...
                }
                else if (ddlType.Text == "SCM.QA_Images")
                {
                    // ...
                }
                else    // QA.Releases
                {
                    strALPHA = ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["RelTypeAlpha"].ToString();
                    string[] arrALPHA = strALPHA.Split(chsep);
                    ddlRelType.DataSource = arrALPHA;

                    // spawn osThread and gameThread
                    osThread = new Thread(() => getReleases("OS", alist));   
                    osThread.Start();
                    gamesThread = new Thread(() => getReleases("GAMES", blist));
                    gamesThread.Start();
                }
                ddlRelType.DataBind();
                ddlRelType.Visible = true;
            }     
        }

        private void getReleases(string SType, List<string> list)
        {
            OleDbConnection conn = openDBConnection(SCMSoftwareReleases);
            string SqlQuery = " SELECT Release_Label as ReleaseLabel, Release_Type as ReleaseType "
                      + " FROM TrackReleases "
                      + " WHERE Platform = 'ALPHA' "
                      + " AND Software_Type = '" + SType + "' "
                      + " AND Release_Type <> 'Branch' "
                      + " ORDER by 1 asc";
            OleDbDataAdapter da = new OleDbDataAdapter(SqlQuery, conn);
            DataSet ds = new DataSet();
            da.Fill(ds);
            DataRowCollection drc = ds.Tables["Table"].Rows;    // Table is default name
            list.Clear();
            
            for (int i = 0; i < drc.Count; ++i)
                list.Add(drc[i][0].ToString() + "|" + drc[i][1].ToString());
            if (conn != null)
                conn.Close();
        }

        private void fetchReleases(ref string[] arr, string SType)
        {
            osThread.Join();    // null reference exception
            
            // ...
        }

The webpage is a bunch of dropdown menus that leads to the sql query. The threads are without a doubt being spawned before fetchReleases is called because fetchReleases can only be called from a UI element that only appears after the call to ddlRelTypeSelected event handler.

Actually stepping through the debugger shows me that threads are finished before going to fetchReleases.
Now I'm thinking it's due to being a web app, the stateless nature of web apps has gotten me again?!

I'm currently looking into BackgroundWorker, I've been reading a bit on it and it sounds pretty good. I wasn't too worried about Threads using up too many resources because I spawn very very few of them anyways, but it doesn't hurt to recycle. 

You guys have been of great help though.