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• How did you learn to be a programming guru?

  - by Xonara

  College courses are obviously very helpful, but I hear all the time about great programmers that just "taught themselves," and I wonder how the hell they did it. Online tutorials are nice - online support, even better - but learning with nothing but online resources is difficult to say the least, and I don't know anybody that's experienced enough to help me learn. Even if I did, they probably wouldn't have the time for it. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Becoming an application/game designer is something I've wanted to achieve for a long, long time, even if I never use it for a career, and it does mean alot to me. However, I'm constantly thwarted by lack of motivation, or perhaps confidence. Though I've found some good tutorials online, sometimes I feel it just isn't enough to really get me somewhere, and my limited knowledge of computers (and any other technology) in general is hardly reassuring. I'm constantly getting the feeling that maybe it isn't "in me." Well, guess that's it. I just don't want to join the legions of aspiring techies that just gave up.

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• C++ template type deduction problem

  - by hamishmcn

  motivation: I would like to create a utility class so that instead of having to write: if( someVal == val1 || someVal == val2 || someVal == val3 ) I could instead write: if( is(someVal).in(val1, val2, val3) ) which is much closer to the mathematical 'a is an element of (b,c,d)' and also would save on a lot of typing when the variable name 'someVal' is long. Here is the code I have so far (for 2 and 3 values): template<class T> class is { private: T t_; public: is(T t) : t_(t) { } bool in(const T& v1, const T& v2) { return t_ == v1 || t_ == v2; } bool in(const T& v1, const T& v2, const T& v3) { return t_ == v1 || t_ == v2 || t_ == v3; } }; However it fails to compile if I write: is(1).in(3,4,5); instead I have to write is<int>(1).in(3,4,5); Which isn't too bad, but it would be better if somehow the compiler could figure out that the type is int with out me having to explicitly specify it. Is there anyway to do this or I am stuck with specifying it explicitly?

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• PHP site scheduling Java execution?

  - by obfuscation

  I'm trying to get started on combining my (slightly limited) PHP experience with my (better) Java experience, in a project where I need to allow uploads of Java source files to the server, which the server then executes Javac on to compile it. Then, at a set time (e.g. specified on upload) I need to run that once on the server, which will generate some database info for the PHP site to display. To describe my current programming abilities- I have made many desktop Java programs, and am confident in 'pure' Java, but so far have only undertaken a couple of PHP projects (including using the CodeIgniter framework). My motivation for using PHP as the frontend is because I know it is very fast, lightweight and I will be able to display the results I need very easily with it (simple DB readout). Ideally, the technology used should be able to be developed on a localhost (e.g. WAMP, Tomcat etc..) Is there any advice which you could give on what technology I should consider to use to bridge this gap, and what resources could help in using that technology? I have looked at a few, but have struggled to find documentation helping in achieving what I need.

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• Beginner Question ; About Prime Generation in "C" - What is wrong with my code ? -

  - by alorsoncode

  I'm a third year irregular CS student and ,i just realized that i have to start coding. I passed my coding classes with lower bound grades so that i haven't a good background in coding&programming. I'm trying to write a code that generates prime numbers between given upper and lower bounds. Not knowing C well, enforce me to write a rough code then go over it to solve. I can easily set up the logic for intended function but i probably create a wrong algorithm through several different ways. Here I share my last code, i intend to calculate that when a number gives remainder Zero , it should be it self and 1 , so that count==2; What is wrong with my implementation and with my solution generating style? I hope you will warm me up to programming world, i couldn't find enough motivation and courage to get deep into programming. Thanks in Advance :) Stdio and Math.h is Included int primegen(int down,int up) { int divisor,candidate,count=0,k; for(candidate=down;candidate<=up;candidate++) { for(divisor=1;divisor<=candidate;divisor++) { k=(candidate%divisor); } if (k==0) count++; if(count==2) { printf("%d\n", candidate); count=0; } else { continue; } } } int main() { primegen(3,15); return 0; }

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• What are the best websites/web applications for specific languages?

  - by JM4

  Browsing around Stackoverflow, I get overwhelmed with the number of "Why should I learn Python/Ruby/PHP/.Net/jQuery..." and the list goes on. Most answers, although good, are usually battles from language A programmer to language B programmer detailing why one piece sucks more than another. People can discuss the theoretical benefits of one over another but in the end, money/glitz talks and the rest walks. I am more interested in the potential opportunity that can come from one language or another over others. A little background, I am a project manager turned novice 'programmer' out of corporate necessity within the small company I currently work with so I have both relatively no set preference or experience, more out of curiosity. While I realize all are not created equal and for similar things, I think it would be interesting to start a list of the best websites / web applications built on specific languages/frameworks just to highlight the possibilities with each and give somebody like me motivation to say "How the heck was that done? Time to buy a book/take a class and learn." Tell me and I will forget, Show me and I will learn, Involve me and I will understand - Teton Lakota

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• Using ddply() to Get Frequency of Certain IDs, by Appearance in Multiple Rows (in R)

  - by EconomiCurtis

  Goal If the following description is hard follow, please see the example "before" and "after" to see a straightforward example. I have bartering data, with unique trade ids, and two sides of the trade. Side1 and Side2 are baskets, lists of item ids that represent both sides of the barter transaction. I'd like to count the frequency each ITEM appears in TRADES. E.g, if item "001" appeared in 3 trades, I'd have a count of 3 (ignoring how many times the item appeared in each trade). Further, I'd like to do this with the plyr ddply function. (If you're interested as to my motivation, I working over many hundreds of thousands of transactions and am already using a ddply to calculate several other summary statistics. I'd like to add this to the ddply I'm already using, rather than calculate it after, and merge it into the ddply output.... sorry if that was difficult to follow.) In terms of pseudo code I'm working off of: merge each row of Side1 and Side2 by row, get unique() appearances of each item id apply table() function transpose and relabel output from table Example of the structure of my data, and the output I desire. Data Example (before): df <- data.frame(TradeID = c("01","02","03","04")) df$Side1 = list(c("001","001","002"), c("002","002","003"), c("001","004"), c("001","002","003","004")) df$Side2 = list(c("001"),c("007"),c("009"),c()) Desired Output (after): df.ItemRelFreq_byTradeID <- data.frame(ItemID = c("001","002","003","004","007","009"), RelFreq_byTrade = c(3,3,2,2,1,1)) One method to do this without ddply I've worked out one way to do this below. My problem is that I can't quite seem to get ddply to do this for me. temp <- table(unlist(sapply(mapply(c,df$Side1,df$Side2), unique))) df.ItemRelFreq_byTradeID <- data.frame(ItemID = names(temp), RelFreq_byTrade = temp[]) Thanks for any help you can offer! Curtis

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• Trouble setting up PATH for Java on Debian

  - by milkmansrevenge

  I am trying to get Oracle Java 7 update 3 working correctly on Debian 6. I have downloaded and set up the files in /usr/java/jre1.7.0_03. I have also set the following two lines at the end of /etc/bash.bashrc: export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jre1.7.0_03 export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin Logging in as other users and root is fine, Java can be found: chris@mc:~$ java -version java version "1.7.0_03" Java(TM) SE Runtime Environment (build 1.7.0_03-b04) Java HotSpot(TM) 64-Bit Server VM (build 22.1-b02, mixed mode) However there are two cases where Java cannot be found as detailed below. Note that both of these worked fine when I have previously installed OpenJDK Java 6 via aptitude, but I need Oracle Java 7 for various reasons. Most importantly, I cannot run commands as another user via su, despite the PATH showing that Java should be present. The user was created with adduser chris root@mc:~# su chris -c "echo $PATH" /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/java/jre1.7.0_03/bin:/bin root@mc:~# su chris -c "java -version" bash: java: command not found root@mc:~# su chris -c "/usr/java/jre1.7.0_03/bin/java -version" java version "1.7.0_03" ... How can it be in the PATH but not be found? Update 05/04/2012: explained by Daniel, to do with it being a non-interactive shell so files such as /etc/profile and /etc/bash.bashrc are not executed. Doing a full swap to that user and running Java works: root@mc:~# su chris chris@mc:/root$ java -version java version "1.7.0_03" ... I run a script on start up which exhibits similar but slightly different problems. The script is located in /etc/init.d/start-mystuff.sh and calls a jar: #!/bin/bash # /etc/init.d/start-mystuff.sh java -jar /opt/Mars.jar I can confirm that the script runs on start up and the exit code is 127, which indicates command not found. Inserting a line to print/save the PATH shows that it is: /sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin This second problem isn't as important because I can just point directly to the Java executable in the script, but I am still curious! I have tried setting the full PATH and JAVA_HOME explicitly in /etc/environment which didn't help. I have also tried setting them in /etc/profile which doesn't seem to help either. I have tried logging in and out again after setting PATH in the various locations (duh!). Anyway, long post for what will probably have a simple one line solution :( Any help with this would be greatly appreciated, I have spent far too long trying to fix it by myself. Motivation The first problem may seem obscure but in my system I have users that are not allowed SSH access yet I still want to run processes as them. I have a ton of scripts operating in this way and don't want to have to change them all.

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• ISC DHCP - Force clients to get a new IP address, instead of the being re-issued their previous lease's IP

  - by kce

  We are in the middle of a migration of our DHCP and DNS services from a Debian-based server to a Windows Server 2008 R2 implementation. The Debian server is running isc-dhcpd-V3.1.1. All of workstations are configured to have fixed-addresses between .3 and .40 (the motivation behind that choice is mostly management/political much like here). DHCP leases are given out in the range of .100 to .175. Statically configured servers live in the .200 block and above (which is mostly empty). When we move to the Windows platform, management/political considerations require me to move the IP ranges around again. We would like to keep .1 - .10 reserved for network appliances, switches, and other infrastructure. .200 will remain designated for servers. The addressing space in between should be available to clients and IPs should be dynamically allocated (Edit: instead of automatic as originally mentioned) by the server. My Address Pool on the Windows Server looks like this: 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.254 (Address range for distribution) 192.168.0.1 192.168.0.10 (IP addresses excluded from distribution) 192.168.0.200 192.168.0.254 (IP addresses excluded from distribution) Currently, we have all of our clients still on the .3 - .40 range, and a few machines still active in the .100 - .175 (although there are lots devices that are powered off that still have expired leases with IPs from that range). Since the lease "database" isn't shared between the old and new DHCP server how can I prevent clients from receiving a lease with an IP address that is currently being held by client with a non-expired lease from the old DHCP server? If I just expand the range on the Debian DHCP server to be 192.168.0.10 - 192.168.0.199 is there a way to force clients to not re-use their old IP address when they send their DHCPDISCOVER? Can I make the Windows DHCP server be authoritiative like the ISC implementation? The dhcpd.conf from the Debian server: ddns-update-style none; authoritative; default-lease-time 43200; #12 hours max-lease-time 86400; #24 hours subnet 192.168.0.0 netmask 255.255.255.0 { option routers 192.168.0.1; option subnet-mask 255.255.255.0; option broadcast-address 192.168.0.255; range 192.168.0.100 192.168.0.175; } host workstation-1 { hardware ethernet 00:11:22:33:44:55; fixed-address 192.168.0.3; } ... and so on until 192.168.0.40

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• Building an SSL server farm

  - by dan

  I'm interested in building the the architecture in the article referenced below. I currently have a modestly-priced layer-4 load balancer and my application servers are the SSL endpoints. I want to put an SSL server farm in between my load balancer and my app servers. Then I will put another inexpensive load balancer between the SSL farm and my app servers, to do layer-7 routing. My web application has a fairly high amount of consumer traffic, that 6 servers can handle at about 50% capacity. Additionally, I have infrastructure traffic that is several orders of magnitude heavier than my consumer traffic. This is data coming in from all over the world that must integrate with my web application in real time. In total I have 18 app servers to handle all the traffic, plus 6 database servers. I will be adding 6 more app servers over the next 2 weeks and another 6 the 2 weeks after that. Conservatively, I estimate I will need to scale to 120 servers by the end of the year. My motivation right now is to separate the consumer traffic from the infrastructure traffic. The consumer traffic is higher priority than the infrastructure traffic and I cannot allow a stampede on the infrastructure side to take down my consumer-facing servers. Having a website that is always up is the top priority. However if there is a failure in one of the consumer app servers, I want to route that traffic to the servers designated for infrastructure traffic. The complication is that all the traffic is addressed using the same hostname and is nearly 100% https. The only way in my case to distinguish infrastructure from consumer traffic is by URL (poor architecture I inherited), so I need a layer 7 load balancer to be able to route. However for that to work I need either a fancy hardware-based SSL terminator or an SSL server farm as described above. Because my user base is rapidly scaling, I worry that if I go down the hardware path it will become very expensive very fast, especially since I will need 4 of everything for high availability (2 identical setups in 2 facilities). Meanwhile, the above diagram seems very flexible and more horizontally scalable. Has anyone built this before? Are there pre-built configurations? What considerations should I make and what software should I use (I've heard of people using apache with mod-ssl, nginx, and stunnel)? Also, when does it make sense to buy an expensive load balancer vs building an SSL server farm? http://1wt.eu/articles/2006_lb/index_05.html

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• Change Comes from Within

  - by John K. Hines

  I am in the midst of witnessing a variety of teams moving away from Scrum. Some of them are doing things like replacing Scrum terms with more commonly understood terminology. Mainly they have gone back to using industry standard terms and more traditional processes like the RAPID decision making process. For example: Scrum Master becomes Project Lead. Scrum Team becomes Project Team. Product Owner becomes Stakeholders. I'm actually quite sad to see this happening, but I understand that Scrum is a radical change for most organizations. Teams are slowly but surely moving away from Scrum to a process that non-software engineers can understand and follow. Some could never secure the education or personnel (like a Product Owner) to get the whole team engaged. And many people with decision-making authority do not see the value in Scrum besides task planning and tracking. You see, Scrum cannot be mandated. No one can force a team to be Agile, collaborate, continuously improve, and self-reflect. Agile adoptions must start from a position of mutual trust and willingness to change. And most software teams aren't like that. Here is my personal epiphany from over a year of attempting to promote Agile on a small development team: The desire to embrace Agile methodologies must come from each and every member of the team. If this desire does not exist - if the team is satisfied with its current process, if the team is not motivated to improve, or if the team is afraid of change - the actual demonstration of all the benefits prescribed by Agile and Scrum will take years. I've read some blog posts lately that criticise Scrum for demanding "Big Change Up Front." One's opinion of software methodologies boils down to one's perspective. If you see modern software development as successful, you will advocate for small, incremental changes to how it is done. If you see it as broken, you'll be much more motivated to take risks and try something different. So my question to you is this - is modern software development healthy or in need of dramatic improvement? I can tell you from personal experience that any project that requires exploration, planning, development, stabilisation, and deployment is hard. Trying to make that process better with only a slightly modified approach is a mistake. You will become completely dependent upon the skillset of your team (the only variable you can change). But the difficulty of planned work isn't one of skill. It isn't until you solve the fundamental challenges of communication, collaboration, quality, and efficiency that skill even comes into play. So I advocate for Big Change Up Front. And I advocate for it to happen often until those involved can say, from experience, that it is no longer needed. I hope every engineer has the opportunity to see the benefits of Agile and Scrum on a highly functional team. I'll close with more key learnings that can help with a Scrum adoption: Your leaders must understand Scrum. They must understand software development, its inherent difficulties, and how Scrum helps. If you attempt to adopt Scrum before the understanding is there, your leaders will apply traditional solutions to your problems - often creating more problems. Success should be measured by quality, not revenue. Namely, the value of software to an organization is the revenue it generates minus ongoing support costs. You should identify quality-based metrics that show the effect Agile techniques have on your software. Motivation is everything. I finally understand why so many Agile advocates say you that if you are not on a team using Agile, you should leave and find one. Scrum and especially Agile encompass many elegant solutions to a wide variety of problems. If you are working on a team that has not encountered these problems the the team may never see the value in the solutions.   Having said all that, I'm not giving up on Agile or Scrum. I am convinced it is a better approach for software development. But reality is saying that its adoption is not straightforward and highly subject to disruption. Unless, that is, everyone really, really wants it.

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• &ldquo;My life at Oracle&rdquo;

  - by cristian.condurache(at)oracle.com

  Hello everybody! My name is Eva and I currently work in Oracle Italy as Sales Programs Manager for the Technology Sales organization. Since 2009, I also proudly represent the Oracle Education Foundation within my country as the Ambassador for Italy. My career path in this amazing company began 5 years ago as a fresh graduate: after various years studying abroad, in Germany and Ireland mainly, I was looking for a valuable and concrete opportunity which could fulfill my energetic spirit. I wanted to develop myself inside a stimulating and “fast” business environment.. and here came Oracle and I really couldn’t ask for anything better!  THE PARTNER EXPERIENCE The first department I had the chance to work into was the Alliances and Channels organization, where I had the opportunity to join a brilliant team of great and visionary guys. I began having the responsibility to analyze and rationalize the portfolio of Oracle business partners and to identify potential cross-area solutions, which had to be highlighted both on the local market and internationally: this ended up with the implementation of the “Partner Community” model, a business environment of selected Oracle partners, specialized on the different technology focus areas. This new concept was then recognized as an EMEA Best Practice and replicated internationally. Having the opportunity to strengthen day after day strategic relationships with several business partners and study the market positioning of their technology solutions, I was given the role to develop the “Oracle Partner Network Innovation Award” in Italy: the EMEA competition encouraging and rewarding proven and successful technology innovations, creating high value for our common customers and generating new business potential. Several Italian partner solutions won different prizes and I decided that it was worth collecting all those valuable projects, winners and short-listed, inside two specific books in order also to provide them an international market visibility: OPN Innovation Award Booklet 2007 and OPN Innovation Award Booklet 2008 Inside the Alliances and Channels department I really had the opportunity to do    amazing things, like for example working side-by-side with one of the most exceptional teams in Oracle I have ever worked with: the EMEA Recruitment Team. Together, in fact, we conceived a brand new business initiative for our partners, called “Oracle Campus Joint Program”. This program was awarded as an EMEA Best Practice and acknowledged by both Italian public institutions and press media. Italy   is currently running its 5th edition.   Briefly, the “Oracle Campus Joint Program” aims at facing the growing issue of lack of  technology competences and skills on the market. By identifying a specific technology area and developing an intensive 4-6 week Oracle University training course and by collaborating with important academic institutes, international “gurus” and professionals, our business partners are able to benefit from a pool of brilliant top talented young consultants and offer them a significant career opportunity. BUSINESS BUT NOT ONLY: THE NO-PROFIT EXPERIENCE OF ORACLE Currently my mission in Oracle is to continue driving the implementation of strategic business development and sales programs for the entire Oracle Technology stack, involving both partners and the end-customers. But as a completely distinguished role from the day-today business, I’m also honored to represent in Italy the charity global organization founded by Oracle - the Oracle Education Foundation - and drive its corporate citizenship and marketing programs. Oracle Education Foundation is an independent charitable organization funded by Oracle and is dedicated to helping students develop 21st century skills through project learning and the use of technology. It provides “ThinkQuest” as a free program to primary and secondary (K12) schools. Just some significant numbers: today 548,000 students/teachers in 47 countries use ThinkQuest and the Oracle Education Foundation partners with 40+ no-profit or government organizations globally. ABOUT MYSELF AND MY INTERESTS About myself…I’m very enthusiastic and positive, trying always to transform difficult issues in challenging opportunities. My day usually begins very early in the morning with running, swimming or when I need to collect some “zen” energies with a yoga session or better with a long walk with my dog. I definitely love animals and generally speaking I’m very keen on environmental issues and try, as much as I can, to carry out a healthy and “planet respectful” lifestyle. My thirst for knowledge pushed me some time ago to begin a new personal challenge: I decided to enroll, dedicating a good part of my free time, for a second university degree: I chose “Neuroeconomics”, an innovative academic path which combines psychology, economics, and neuroscience and studies how people make decisions and the role of the brain when people evaluate these decisions, categorizing risks and rewards and generally interacting with each other. I’ve been very glad to talk about my experience in this article, as working for Oracle is something very stimulating. This company ensures you the opportunity to face new challenges, work with highly talented people and be professionally highlighted also globally. Motivation, good results and innovation is always pursued, recognized and fully supported. Thanks and wish you all an amazing career! If you have any question please contact [email protected]. For our job opportunities, please look at http://campus.oracle.com.   Technorati Tags: EMEA,Oracle Partners,Oracle Campus,Oracle Education,experience,EMEA Recruitment Team

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• Formal Languages, Inductive Proofs &amp; Regular Expressions

  - by MarkPearl

  So I am slogging away at my UNISA stuff. I have just finished doing the initial once non stop read through the first 11 chapters of my COS 201 Textbook - “Introduction to Computer Theory 2nd Edition” by Daniel Cohen. It has been an interesting couple of days, with familiar concepts coming up as well as some new territory. In this posting I am going to cover the first couple of chapters of the book. Let start with Formal Languages… What exactly is a formal language? Pretty much a no duh question for me but still a good one to ask – a formal language is a language that is defined in a precise mathematical way. Does that mean that the English language is a formal language? I would say no – and my main motivation for this is that one can have an English sentence that is correct grammatically that is also ambiguous. For example the ambiguous sentence: "I once shot an elephant in my pyjamas.” For this and possibly many other reasons that I am unaware of, English is termed a “Natural Language”. So why the importance of formal languages in computer science? Again a no duh question in my mind… If we want computers to be effective and useful tools then we need them to be able to evaluate a series of commands in some form of language that when interpreted by the device no confusion will exist as to what we were requesting. Imagine the mayhem that would exist if a computer misinterpreted a command to print a document and instead decided to delete it. So what is a Formal Language made up of… For my study purposes a language is made up of a finite alphabet. For a formal language to exist there needs to be a specification on the language that will describe whether a string of characters has membership in the language or not. There are two basic ways to do this: By a “machine” that will recognize strings of the language (e.g. Finite Automata). By a rule that describes how strings of a language can be formed (e.g. Regular Expressions). When we use the phrase “string of characters”, we can also be referring to a “word”. What is an Inductive Proof? So I am not to far into my textbook and of course it starts referring to proofs and different types. I have had to go through several different approaches of proofs in the past, but I can never remember their formal names , so when I saw “inductive proof” I thought to myself – what the heck is that? Google to the rescue… An inductive proof is like a normal proof but it employs a neat trick which allows you to prove a statement about an arbitrary number n by first proving it is true when n is 1 and then assuming it is true for n=k and showing it is true for n=k+1. The idea is that if you want to show that someone can climb to the nth floor of a fire escape, you need only show that you can climb the ladder up to the fire escape (n=1) and then show that you know how to climb the stairs from any level of the fire escape (n=k) to the next level (n=k+1). Does this sound like a form of recursion? No surprise then that in the same chapter they deal with recursive definitions. An example of a recursive definition for the language EVEN would the 3 rules below: 2 is in EVEN If x is in EVEN then so is x+2 The only elements in the set EVEN are those that be produced by the rules above. Nothing to exciting… So if a definition for a language is done recursively, then it makes sense that the language can be proved using induction. Regular Expressions So I am wondering to myself what use is this all – in fact – I find this the biggest challenge to any university material is that it is quite hard to find the immediate practical applications of some theory in real life stuff. How great was my joy when I suddenly saw the word regular expression being introduced. I had been introduced to regular expressions on Stack Overflow where I was trying to recognize if some text measurement put in by a user was in a valid form or not. For instance, the imperial system of measurement where you have feet and inches can be represented in so many different ways. I had eventually turned to regular expressions as an easy way to check if my parser could correctly parse the text or not and convert it to a normalize measurement. So some rules about languages and regular expressions… Any finite language can be represented by at least one if not more regular expressions A regular expressions is almost a rule syntax for expressing how regular languages can be formed regular expressions are cool For a regular expression to be valid for a language it must be able to generate all the words in the language and no other words. This is important. It doesn’t help me if my regular expression parses 100% of my measurement texts but also lets one or two invalid texts to pass as well. Okay, so this posting jumps around a bit – but introduces some very basic fundamentals for the subject which will be built on in later postings… Time to go and do some practical examples now…

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• SQL Saturday #44 Huntington Beach Recap

  What a great day. It was long and tiring, but rewarding in so many ways. On Sunday morning, I was driving home and I decided to take the Pacific Coast Highway from Huntington Beach.  It was a great chance to exhale and just enjoy the sun and smells of the beach (I really love SoCal sometimes). And for future reference for all you speakers, the beach and ocean are only 5 minutes from the SQL Saturday location.  I just could help noticing also the shocking number of high priced cars on the road (4 Bentleys, 3 Ferraris, 1 Aston Martins, 3 Maserati, 1 Rolls Royce, and 2 Lamborghinis).  It made me think about this: Price of all those cars: $ 150,000+.  Impacting the ability of people to learn: Priceless.  We have positively impacted the education, knowledge, capabilities of not only our attendees, but also all of their companies and people they might help as well.  That is just staggering and something to be immensely proud of. To all of my fellow community leaders, I salute you. So lets talk about the event Overall We had over 220 people register for the event and had 180+ people attend the event. I was shooting for the magical 200 number, but I guess it just gives us more motivation to make it even bigger and better next time. We had a few snags along the way, but what event doesnt, but I think everything turned out great. I did not hear any negative comments and heard lots of positive comments along with people asking when the next one is going to be (More on that later). Location- Golden West College We could not have asked for a better partner for the event. Herb Cohen from Golden West College was the wizard behind the curtains. From the beginning, he was our advocate to the GWC Board and was instrumental in getting our event approved. The day off, Herb was a HUGE help getting any and all logistics that we needed taken care of. In the craziness of the early morning registration crush it was a big help knowing that he and Bret Stateham (Blog | Twitter) were taking care of testing projectors in all the rooms. Anything we needed he was there and was even proactive in getting some things that I had not even thought of (i.e. a dumpster for all of our garbage). I cannot thank Herb enough along with other members of the GWC staff including Minnie Higgins of the Career and Technical Education Division office, Jack Taylor, public safety, and Ron Pryor, Tech Services Support. And last, but not least, the Wireless on campus was absolutely FANTASTIC! Some lessons learned Unless you are a glutton for punishment, as I no doubt am, you most certainly want to give yourself more than six weeks to plan the event. I am lucky that I have a very understanding wife and had a wonderful set of co-coordinators helping me out. A big thanks goes out to Phil, Marlon (Blog | Twitter), Nitin (Twitter), Thomas (Blog | Twitter), Bret (Blog | Twitter), Ben, and Laurie. Thankfully, the sponsor and speaker community was hugely supportive and we were able to fill out the entire event with speakers and sponsors. I have to say that there is not a lot that I would change after this years event. There are obviously going to be some things that we can do better or differently next time, but overall I think it was a great event and I was more than happy with the response we received from the community. Sponsors We obviously could not have put together our event without our sponsors. So certainly have to show them some love. Platinum Sponsors Quest Software http://www.quest.com My Space http://www.myspace.com/ Gold Strategy Companion http://www.strategycompanion.com Silver Fusion-IO http://www.fusionio.com Bronze WestClinTech http://westclintech.com Professional Association For SQL Server http://www.sqlpass.org Attunity http://www.attunity.com Sharepoint 360 http://www.sharepoint360.com Some additional Thanks Andy Warren (Blog | Twitter) Always there to answer my question and help out when I had some issues or questions with the website. The amount of work that he and everyone else put into SQL Saturday is very amazing. What a great gift to the community! Einstein Bros. Bagels They were our Breakfast Vendor and arrived perfectly on time with yummy bagels, sweets and most importantly coffee. Luccis Deli (http://www.luccisdeli.com) Luccis was out Lunch Vendor. They were great to work with and the food was excellent. They worked with us to give us a great price. Heard lots of great comments about the lunches. Definitely not your ordinary box lunch. Moving Forward Unfortunately, the work does not end after the event. We have a few things to clear up such as surveys, sponsor stuff, presentations uploaded to the website, expense reimbursement, stuff like that. Hopefully, all that should be cleared up within the next couple weeks. After that as a group we are going to get together and decide what our next steps are. We definitely want to keep some of the momentum that we are building as a SQL Community and channel that into future SQL Saturdays and other types of community events. In the meantime, for additional training be sure to check out your local User Group and PASS. San Diego SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sdsqlug.org/home/index.cfm ) Orange County SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sqloc.com/ ) L.A. SQL Server Users Group ( http://www.sql.la/ ) SQL PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/ ) 24 Hours of PASS ( http://www.sqlpass.org/24hours/2010/ ) So stay tuned, there will be more events to come in SoCal!!Did you know that DotNetSlackers also publishes .net articles written by top known .net Authors? We already have over 80 articles in several categories including Silverlight. Take a look: here.

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• An MCM exam, Rob? Really?

  - by Rob Farley

  I took the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam while in Seattle for the PASS Summit ten days ago. I wasn’t planning to do it, but I got persuaded to try. I was meaning to write this post to explain myself before the result came out, but it seems I didn’t get typing quickly enough. Those of you who know me will know I’m a big fan of certification, to a point. I’ve been involved with Microsoft Learning to help create exams. I’ve kept my certifications current since I first took an exam back in 1998, sitting many in beta, across quite a variety of topics. I’ve probably become quite good at them – I know I’ve definitely passed some that I really should’ve failed. I’ve also written that I don’t think exams are worth studying for. (That’s probably not entirely true, but it depends on your motivation. If you’re doing learning, I would encourage you to focus on what you need to know to do your job better. That will help you pass an exam – but the two skills are very different. I can coach someone on how to pass an exam, but that’s a different kind of teaching when compared to coaching someone about how to do a job. For example, the real world includes a lot of “it depends”, where you develop a feel for what the influencing factors might be. In an exam, its better to be able to know some of the “Don’t use this technology if XYZ is true” concepts better.) As for the Microsoft Certified Master certification… I’m not opposed to the idea of having the MCM (or in the future, MCSM) cert. But the barrier to entry feels quite high for me. When it was first introduced, the nearest testing centres to me were in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. Now there’s one in Perth, but that’s still a big effort. I know there are options in the US – such as one about an hour’s drive away from downtown Seattle, but it all just seems too hard. Plus, these exams are more expensive, and all up – I wasn’t sure I wanted to try them, particularly with the fact that I don’t like to study. I used to study for exams. It would drive my wife crazy. I’d have some exam scheduled for some time in the future (like the time I had two booked for two consecutive days at TechEd Australia 2005), and I’d make sure I was ready. Every waking moment would be spent pouring over exam material, and it wasn’t healthy. I got shaken out of that, though, when I ended up taking four exams in those two days in 2005 and passed them all. I also worked out that if I had a Second Shot available, then failing wasn’t a bad thing at all. Even without Second Shot, I’m much more okay about failing. But even just trying an MCM exam is a big effort. I wouldn’t want to fail one of them. Plus there’s the illusion to maintain. People have told me for a long time that I should just take the MCM exams – that I’d pass no problem. I’ve never been so sure. It was almost becoming a pride-point. Perhaps I should fail just to demonstrate that I can fail these things. Anyway – boB Taylor (@sqlboBT) persuaded me to try the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam at the PASS Summit. They set up a testing centre in one of the room there, so it wasn’t out of my way at all. I had to squeeze it in between other commitments, and I certainly didn’t have time to even see what was on the syllabus, let alone study. In fact, I was so exhausted from the week that I fell asleep at least once (just for a moment though) during the actual exam. Perhaps the questions need more jokes, I’m not sure. I knew if I failed, then I might disappoint some people, but that I wouldn’t’ve spent a great deal of effort in trying to pass. On the other hand, if I did pass I’d then be under pressure to investigate the MCM Lab exam, which can be taken remotely (therefore, a much smaller amount of effort to make happen). In some ways, passing could end up just putting a bunch more pressure on me. Oh, and I did.

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• An MCM exam, Rob? Really?

  - by Rob Farley

  I took the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam while in Seattle for the PASS Summit ten days ago. I wasn’t planning to do it, but I got persuaded to try. I was meaning to write this post to explain myself before the result came out, but it seems I didn’t get typing quickly enough. Those of you who know me will know I’m a big fan of certification, to a point. I’ve been involved with Microsoft Learning to help create exams. I’ve kept my certifications current since I first took an exam back in 1998, sitting many in beta, across quite a variety of topics. I’ve probably become quite good at them – I know I’ve definitely passed some that I really should’ve failed. I’ve also written that I don’t think exams are worth studying for. (That’s probably not entirely true, but it depends on your motivation. If you’re doing learning, I would encourage you to focus on what you need to know to do your job better. That will help you pass an exam – but the two skills are very different. I can coach someone on how to pass an exam, but that’s a different kind of teaching when compared to coaching someone about how to do a job. For example, the real world includes a lot of “it depends”, where you develop a feel for what the influencing factors might be. In an exam, its better to be able to know some of the “Don’t use this technology if XYZ is true” concepts better.) As for the Microsoft Certified Master certification… I’m not opposed to the idea of having the MCM (or in the future, MCSM) cert. But the barrier to entry feels quite high for me. When it was first introduced, the nearest testing centres to me were in Kuala Lumpur and Manila. Now there’s one in Perth, but that’s still a big effort. I know there are options in the US – such as one about an hour’s drive away from downtown Seattle, but it all just seems too hard. Plus, these exams are more expensive, and all up – I wasn’t sure I wanted to try them, particularly with the fact that I don’t like to study. I used to study for exams. It would drive my wife crazy. I’d have some exam scheduled for some time in the future (like the time I had two booked for two consecutive days at TechEd Australia 2005), and I’d make sure I was ready. Every waking moment would be spent pouring over exam material, and it wasn’t healthy. I got shaken out of that, though, when I ended up taking four exams in those two days in 2005 and passed them all. I also worked out that if I had a Second Shot available, then failing wasn’t a bad thing at all. Even without Second Shot, I’m much more okay about failing. But even just trying an MCM exam is a big effort. I wouldn’t want to fail one of them. Plus there’s the illusion to maintain. People have told me for a long time that I should just take the MCM exams – that I’d pass no problem. I’ve never been so sure. It was almost becoming a pride-point. Perhaps I should fail just to demonstrate that I can fail these things. Anyway – boB Taylor (@sqlboBT) persuaded me to try the SQL 2008 MCM Knowledge exam at the PASS Summit. They set up a testing centre in one of the room there, so it wasn’t out of my way at all. I had to squeeze it in between other commitments, and I certainly didn’t have time to even see what was on the syllabus, let alone study. In fact, I was so exhausted from the week that I fell asleep at least once (just for a moment though) during the actual exam. Perhaps the questions need more jokes, I’m not sure. I knew if I failed, then I might disappoint some people, but that I wouldn’t’ve spent a great deal of effort in trying to pass. On the other hand, if I did pass I’d then be under pressure to investigate the MCM Lab exam, which can be taken remotely (therefore, a much smaller amount of effort to make happen). In some ways, passing could end up just putting a bunch more pressure on me. Oh, and I did.

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• The ugly evolution of running a background operation in the context of an ASP.NET app

  - by Jeff

  If you’re one of the two people who has followed my blog for many years, you know that I’ve been going at POP Forums now for over almost 15 years. Publishing it as an open source app has been a big help because it helps me understand how people want to use it, and having it translated to six languages is pretty sweet. Despite this warm and fuzzy group hug, there has been an ugly hack hiding in there for years. One of the things we find ourselves wanting to do is hide some kind of regular process inside of an ASP.NET application that runs periodically. The motivation for this has always been that a lot of people simply don’t have a choice, because they’re running the app on shared hosting, or don’t otherwise have access to a box that can run some kind of regular background service. In POP Forums, I “solved” this problem years ago by hiding some static timers in an HttpModule. Truthfully, this works well as long as you don’t run multiple instances of the app, which in the cloud world, is always a possibility. With the arrival of WebJobs in Azure, I’m going to solve this problem. This post isn’t about that. The other little hacky problem that I “solved” was spawning a background thread to queue emails to subscribed users of the forum. This evolved quite a bit over the years, starting with a long running page to mail users in real-time, when I had only a few hundred. By the time it got into the thousands, or tens of thousands, I needed a better way. What I did is launched a new thread that read all of the user data in, then wrote a queued email to the database (as in, the entire body of the email, every time), with the properly formatted opt-out link. It was super inefficient, but it worked. Then I moved my biggest site using it, CoasterBuzz, to an Azure Website, and it stopped working. So let’s start with the first stupid thing I was doing. The new thread was simply created with delegate code inline. As best I can tell, Azure Websites are more aggressive about garbage collection, because that thread didn’t queue even one message. When the calling server response went out of scope, so went the magic background thread. Duh, all I had to do was move the thread to a private static variable in the class. That’s the way I was able to keep stuff running from the HttpModule. (And yes, I know this is still prone to failure, particularly if the app recycles. For as infrequently as it’s used, I have not, however, experienced this.) It was still failing, but this time I wasn’t sure why. It would queue a few dozen messages, then die. Running in Azure, I had to turn on the application logging and FTP in to see what was going on. That led me to a helper method I was using as delegate to build the unsubscribe links. The idea here is that I didn’t want yet another config entry to describe the base URL, appended with the right path that would match the routing table. No, I wanted the app to figure it out for you, so I came up with this little thing: public static string FullUrlHelper(this Controller controller, string actionName, string controllerName, object routeValues = null) { var helper = new UrlHelper(controller.Request.RequestContext); var requestUrl = controller.Request.Url; if (requestUrl == null) return String.Empty; var url = requestUrl.Scheme + "://"; url += requestUrl.Host; url += (requestUrl.Port != 80 ? ":" + requestUrl.Port : ""); url += helper.Action(actionName, controllerName, routeValues); return url; } And yes, that should have been done with a string builder. This is useful for sending out the email verification messages, too. As clever as I thought I was with this, I was using a delegate in the admin controller to format these unsubscribe links for tens of thousands of users. I passed that delegate into a service class that did the email work: Func<User, string> unsubscribeLinkGenerator = user => this.FullUrlHelper("Unsubscribe", AccountController.Name, new { id = user.UserID, key = _profileService.GetUnsubscribeHash(user) }); _mailingListService.MailUsers(subject, body, htmlBody, unsubscribeLinkGenerator); Cool, right? Actually, not so much. If you look back at the helper, this delegate then will depend on the controller context to learn the routing and format for the URL. As you might have guessed, those things were turning null after a few dozen formatted links, when the original request to the admin controller went away. That this wasn’t already happening on my dedicated server is surprising, but again, I understand why the Azure environment might be eager to reclaim a thread after servicing the request. It’s already inefficient that I’m building the entire email for every user, but going back to check the routing table for the right link every time isn’t a win either. I put together a little hack to look up one generic URL, and use that as the basis for a string format. If you’re wondering why I didn’t just use the curly braces up front, it’s because they get URL formatted: var baseString = this.FullUrlHelper("Unsubscribe", AccountController.Name, new { id = "--id--", key = "--key--" }); baseString = baseString.Replace("--id--", "{0}").Replace("--key--", "{1}"); Func unsubscribeLinkGenerator = user => String.Format(baseString, user.UserID, _profileService.GetUnsubscribeHash(user)); _mailingListService.MailUsers(subject, body, htmlBody, unsubscribeLinkGenerator); And wouldn’t you know it, the new solution works just fine. It’s still kind of hacky and inefficient, but it will work until this somehow breaks too.

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• LINQ und ArcObjects

  - by Marko Apfel

  LINQ und ArcObjects Motivation LINQ1 (language integrated query) ist eine Komponente des Microsoft .NET Frameworks seit der Version 3.5. Es erlaubt eine SQL-ähnliche Abfrage zu verschiedenen Datenquellen wie SQL, XML u.v.m. Wie SQL auch, bietet LINQ dazu eine deklarative Notation der Problemlösung - d.h. man muss nicht im Detail beschreiben wie eine Aufgabe, sondern was überhaupt zu lösen ist. Das befreit den Entwickler abfrageseitig von fehleranfälligen Iterator-Konstrukten. Ideal wäre es natürlich auf diese Möglichkeiten auch in der ArcObjects-Programmierung mit Features zugreifen zu können. Denkbar wäre dann folgendes Konstrukt: var largeFeatures = from feature in features where (feature.GetValue("SHAPE_Area").ToDouble() > 3000) select feature; bzw. dessen Äquivalent als Lambda-Expression: var largeFeatures = features.Where(feature => (feature.GetValue("SHAPE_Area").ToDouble() > 3000)); Dazu muss ein entsprechender Provider zu Verfügung stehen, der die entsprechende Iterator-Logik managt. Dies ist leichter als man auf den ersten Blick denkt - man muss nur die gewünschten Entitäten als IEnumerable<IFeature> liefern. (Anm.: nicht wundern - die Methoden GetValue() und ToDouble() habe ich nebenbei als Erweiterungsmethoden deklariert.) Im Hintergrund baut LINQ selbständig eine Zustandsmaschine (state machine)2 auf deren Ausführung verzögert ist (deferred execution)3 - d.h. dass erst beim tatsächlichen Anfordern von Entitäten (foreach, Count(), ToList(), ..) eine Instanziierung und Verarbeitung stattfindet, obwohl die Zuweisung schon an ganz anderer Stelle erfolgte. Insbesondere bei mehrfacher Iteration durch die Entitäten reibt man sich bei den ersten Debuggings verwundert die Augen wenn der Ausführungszeiger wie von Geisterhand wieder in die Iterator-Logik springt. Realisierung Eine ganz knappe Logik zum Konstruieren von IEnumerable<IFeature> lässt sich mittels Durchlaufen eines IFeatureCursor realisieren. Dazu werden die einzelnen Feature mit yield ausgegeben. Der einfachen Verwendung wegen, habe ich die Logik in eine Erweiterungsmethode GetFeatures() für IFeatureClass aufgenommen: public static IEnumerable GetFeatures(this IFeatureClass featureClass, IQueryFilter queryFilter, RecyclingPolicy policy) { IFeatureCursor featureCursor = featureClass.Search(queryFilter, RecyclingPolicy.Recycle == policy); IFeature feature; while (null != (feature = featureCursor.NextFeature())) { yield return feature; } //this is skipped in unit tests with cursor-mock if (Marshal.IsComObject(featureCursor)) { Marshal.ReleaseComObject(featureCursor); } } Damit kann man sich nun ganz einfach die IEnumerable<IFeature> erzeugen lassen: IEnumerable features = _featureClass.GetFeatures(RecyclingPolicy.DoNotRecycle); Etwas aufpassen muss man bei der Verwendung des "Recycling-Cursors". Nach einer verzögerten Ausführung darf im selben Kontext nicht erneut über die Features iteriert werden. In diesem Fall wird nämlich nur noch der Inhalt des letzten (recycelten) Features geliefert und alle Features sind innerhalb der Menge gleich. Kritisch würde daher das Konstrukt largeFeatures.ToList(). ForEach(feature => Debug.WriteLine(feature.OID)); weil ToList() schon einmal durch die Liste iteriert und der Cursor somit einmal durch die Features bewegt wurde. Die Erweiterungsmethode ForEach liefert dann immer dasselbe Feature. In derartigen Situationen darf also kein Cursor mit Recycling verwendet werden. Ein mehrfaches Ausführen von foreach ist hingegen kein Problem weil dafür jedes Mal die Zustandsmaschine neu instanziiert wird und somit der Cursor neu durchlaufen wird – das ist die oben schon erwähnte Magie. Ausblick Nun kann man auch einen Schritt weiter gehen und ganz eigene Implementierungen für die Schnittstelle IEnumerable<IFeature> in Angriff nehmen. Dazu müssen nur die Methode und das Property zum Zugriff auf den Enumerator ausprogrammiert werden. Im Enumerator selbst veranlasst man in der Reset()-Methode das erneute Ausführen der Suche – dazu übergibt man beispielsweise ein entsprechendes Delegate in den Konstruktur: new FeatureEnumerator( _featureClass, featureClass => featureClass.Search(_filter, isRecyclingCursor)); und ruft dieses beim Reset auf: public void Reset() {     _featureCursor = _resetCursor(_t); } Auf diese Art und Weise können Enumeratoren für völlig verschiedene Szenarien implementiert werden, die clientseitig restlos identisch nach obigen Schema verwendet werden. Damit verschmelzen Cursors, SelectionSets u.s.w. zu einer einzigen Materie und die Wiederverwendbarkeit von Code steigt immens. Obendrein lässt sich ein IEnumerable in automatisierten Unit-Tests sehr einfach mocken - ein großer Schritt in Richtung höherer Software-Qualität.4 Fazit Nichtsdestotrotz ist Vorsicht mit diesen Konstrukten in performance-relevante Abfragen geboten. Dadurch dass im Hintergrund eine Zustandsmaschine verwalten wird, entsteht einiges an Overhead dessen Verarbeitung zusätzliche Zeit kostet - ca. 20 bis 100 Prozent. Darüber hinaus ist auch das Arbeiten ohne Recycling schnell ein Performance-Gap. Allerdings ist deklarativer LINQ-Code viel eleganter, fehlerfreier und wartungsfreundlicher als das manuelle Iterieren, Vergleichen und Aufbauen einer Ergebnisliste. Der Code-Umfang verringert sich erfahrungsgemäß im Schnitt um 75 bis 90 Prozent! Dafür warte ich gerne ein paar Millisekunden länger. Wie so oft muss abgewogen werden zwischen Wartbarkeit und Performance - wobei für mich Wartbarkeit zunehmend an Priorität gewinnt. Zumeist ist sowieso nicht der Code sondern der Anwender die Bremse im Prozess. Demo-Quellcode support.esri.de   [1] Wikipedia: LINQ http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINQ [2] Wikipedia: Zustandsmaschine http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endlicher_Automat [3] Charlie Calverts Blog: LINQ and Deferred Execution http://blogs.msdn.com/b/charlie/archive/2007/12/09/deferred-execution.aspx [4] Clean Code Developer - gelber Grad/Automatisierte Unit Tests http://www.clean-code-developer.de/Gelber-Grad.ashx#Automatisierte_Unit_Tests_8

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• Goodbye XML&hellip; Hello YAML (part 2)

  - by Brian Genisio's House Of Bilz

  Part 1 After I explained my motivation for using YAML instead of XML for my data, I got a lot of people asking me what type of tooling is available in the .Net space for consuming YAML.  In this post, I will discuss a nice tooling option as well as describe some small modifications to leverage the extremely powerful dynamic capabilities of C# 4.0.  I will be referring to the following YAML file throughout this post Recipe: Title: Macaroni and Cheese Description: My favorite comfort food. Author: Brian Genisio TimeToPrepare: 30 Minutes Ingredients: - Name: Cheese Quantity: 3 Units: cups - Name: Macaroni Quantity: 16 Units: oz Steps: - Number: 1 Description: Cook the macaroni - Number: 2 Description: Melt the cheese - Number: 3 Description: Mix the cooked macaroni with the melted cheese Tooling It turns out that there are several implementations of YAML tools out there.  The neatest one, in my opinion, is YAML for .NET, Visual Studio and Powershell.  It includes a great editor plug-in for Visual Studio as well as YamlCore, which is a parsing engine for .Net.  It is in active development still, but it is certainly enough to get you going with YAML in .Net.  Start by referenceing YamlCore.dll, load your document, and you are on your way.  Here is an example of using the parser to get the title of the Recipe: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var title = recipe["Title"] as string; In a similar way, you can access data in the Ingredients set: var yaml = YamlLanguage.FileTo("Data.yaml") as Hashtable; var recipe = yaml["Recipe"] as Hashtable; var ingredients = recipe["Ingredients"] as ArrayList; foreach (Hashtable ingredient in ingredients) { var name = ingredient["Name"] as string; } You may have noticed that YamlCore uses non-generic Hashtables and ArrayLists.  This is because YamlCore was designed to work in all .Net versions, including 1.0.  Everything in the parsed tree is one of two things: Hashtable, ArrayList or Value type (usually String).  This translates well to the YAML structure where everything is either a Map, a Set or a Value.  Taking it further Personally, I really dislike writing code like this.  Years ago, I promised myself to never write the words Hashtable or ArrayList in my .Net code again.  They are ugly, mostly depreciated collections that existed before we got generics in C# 2.0.  Now, especially that we have dynamic capabilities in C# 4.0, we can do a lot better than this.  With a relatively small amount of code, you can wrap the Hashtables and Array lists with a dynamic wrapper (wrapper code at the bottom of this post).  The same code can be re-written to look like this: dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); var title = doc.Recipe.Title; And dynamic doc = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); foreach (dynamic ingredient in doc.Recipe.Ingredients) { var name = ingredient.Name; } I significantly prefer this code over the previous.  That’s not all… the magic really happens when we take this concept into WPF.  With a single line of code, you can bind to the data dynamically in the view: DataContext = YamlDoc.Load("Data.yaml"); Then, your XAML is extremely straight-forward (Nothing else.  No static types, no adapter code.  Nothing): <StackPanel> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Title}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Description}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.Author}" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Recipe.TimeToPrepare}" /> <TextBlock Text="Ingredients:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Ingredients}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Quantity}" /> <TextBlock Text=" " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Units}" /> <TextBlock Text=" of " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Name}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> <TextBlock Text="Steps:" FontWeight="Bold" /> <ItemsControl ItemsSource="{Binding Recipe.Steps}" Margin="10,0,0,0"> <ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Number}" /> <TextBlock Text=": " /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Description}" /> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ItemsControl.ItemTemplate> </ItemsControl> </StackPanel> This nifty XAML binding trick only works in WPF, unfortunately.  Silverlight handles binding differently, so they don’t support binding to dynamic objects as of late (March 2010).  This, in my opinion, is a major lacking feature in Silverlight and I really hope we will see this feature available to us in Silverlight 4 Release.  (I am not very optimistic for Silverlight 4, but I can hope for the feature in Silverlight 5, can’t I?) Conclusion I still have a few things I want to say about using YAML in the .Net space including de-serialization and using IronRuby for your YAML parser, but this post is hopefully enough to see how easy it is to incorporate YAML documents in your code. Codeplex Site for YAML tools Dynamic wrapper for YamlCore

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• ct.sym steals the ASM class

  - by Geertjan

  Some mild consternation on the Twittersphere yesterday. Marcus Lagergren not being able to find the ASM classes in JDK 8 in NetBeans IDE: And there's no such problem in Eclipse (and apparently in IntelliJ IDEA). Help, does NetBeans (despite being incredibly awesome) suck, after all? The truth of the matter is that there's something called "ct.sym" in the JDK. When javac is compiling code, it doesn't link against rt.jar. Instead, it uses a special symbol file lib/ct.sym with class stubs. Internal JDK classes are not put in that symbol file, since those are internal classes. You shouldn't want to use them, at all. However, what if you're Marcus Lagergren who DOES need these classes? I.e., he's working on the internal JDK classes and hence needs to have access to them. Fair enough that the general Java population can't access those classes, since they're internal implementation classes that could be changed anytime and one wouldn't want all unknown clients of those classes to start breaking once changes are made to the implementation, i.e., this is the rt.jar's internal class protection mechanism. But, again, we're now Marcus Lagergen and not the general Java population. For the solution, read Jan Lahoda, NetBeans Java Editor guru, here: https://netbeans.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=186120 In particular, take note of this: AFAIK, the ct.sym is new in JDK6. It contains stubs for all classes that existed in JDK5 (for compatibility with existing programs that would use private JDK classes), but does not contain implementation classes that were introduced in JDK6 (only API classes). This is to prevent application developers to accidentally use JDK's private classes (as such applications would be unportable and may not run on future versions of JDK). Note that this is not really a NB thing - this is the behavior of javac from the JDK. I do not know about any way to disable this except deleting ct.sym or the option mentioned above. Regarding loading the classes: JVM uses two classpath's: classpath and bootclasspath. rt.jar is on the bootclasspath and has precedence over anything on the "custom" classpath, which is used by the application. The usual way to override classes on bootclasspath is to start the JVM with "-Xbootclasspath/p:" option, which prepends the given jars (and presumably also directories) to bootclasspath. Hence, let's take the first option, the simpler one, and simply delete the "ct.sym" file. Again, only because we need to work with those internal classes as developers of the JDK, not because we want to hack our way around "ct.sym", which would mean you'd not have portable code at the end of the day. Go to the JDK 8 lib folder and you'll find the file: Delete it. Start NetBeans IDE again, either on JDK 7 or JDK 8, doesn't make a difference for these purposes, create a new Java application (or use an existing one), make sure you have set the JDK above as the JDK of the application, and hey presto: The above obviously assumes you have a build of JDK 8 that actually includes the ASM package. And below you can see that not only are the classes found but my build succeeded, even though I'm using internal JDK classes. The yellow markings in the sidebar mean that the classes are imported but not used in the code, where normally, if I hadn't removed "ct.sym", I would have seen red error marking instead, and the code wouldn't have compiled. Note: I've tried setting "-XDignore.symbol.file" in "netbeans.conf" and in other places, but so far haven't got that to work. Simply deleting the "ct.sym" file (or back it up somewhere and put it back when needed) is quite clearly the most straightforward solution. Ultimately, if you want to be able to use those internal classes while still having portable code, do you know what you need to do? You need to create a JDK bug report stating that you need an internal class to be added to "ct.sym". Probably you'll get a motivation back stating WHY that internal class isn't supposed to be used externally. There must be a reason why those classes aren't available for external usage, otherwise they would have been added to "ct.sym". So, now the only remaining question is why the Eclipse compiler doesn't hide the internal JDK classes. Apparently the Eclipse compiler ignores the "ct.sym" file. In other words, at the end of the day, far from being a bug in NetBeans... we have now found a (pretty enormous, I reckon) bug in Eclipse. The Eclipse compiler does not protect you from using internal JDK classes and the code that you create in Eclipse may not work with future releases of the JDK, since the JDK team is simply going to be changing those classes that are not found in the "ct.sym" file while assuming (correctly, thanks to the presence of "ct.sym" mechanism) that no code in the world, other than JDK code, is tied to those classes.

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• Dynamically switching the theme in Orchard

  - by Bertrand Le Roy

  It may sound a little puzzling at first, but in Orchard CMS, more than one theme can be active at any given time. The reason for that is that we have an extensibility point that allows a module (or a theme) to participate in the choice of the theme to use, for each request. The motivation for building the theme engine this way was to enable developers to switch themes based on arbitrary criteria, such as user preferences or the user agent (if you want to serve a mobile theme for phones for example). The choice is made between the active themes, which is why there is a difference between the default theme and the active themes. In order to have a say in the choice of the theme, all you have to do is implement IThemeSelector. That interface is quite simple as it only has one method, GetTheme, that takes the current RequestContext and returns a ThemeSelectorResult or null if the implementation of the interface does not want to participate in the current request (we'll see an example in a moment). ThemeSelectorResult itself is just a ThemeName string property and an integer Priority. We're using a priority so that an arbitrary number of implementations of IThemeSelector can contribute to the choice of a theme. If you look for existing implementations of the interface in Orchard, you'll find four: AdminThemeSelector: selects the TheAdmin theme with a very high priority (100) if the current request is for a page that is part of the admin. Otherwise, null is returned, which enables other implementations to choose the theme. PreviewThemeSelector: selects the preview theme if there is one, with a high priority (90), and null otherwise. This enables administrators to view the site under a different theme while everybody else continues to see the current default theme. SiteThemeSelector: this is the implementation that is doing what you expect most of the time, which is to get the current theme from site settings and set it with a priority of –5. SafeModeThemeSelector: this is the fallback implementation, which should almost never win. It sets the theme as the safe mode theme, which has no style and just uses the default templates for everything. The priority is very low (-100). While this extensibility mechanism is great to have, I wanted to bring that level of choice into the hands of the site administrator rather than just developers. In order to achieve that, I built the Vandelay Theme Picker module. The module provides administration UI to create rules for theme selection. It provides its own extensibility point (the IThemeSelectionRule interface) and one implementation of a rule: UserAgentThemeSelectorRule. This rule gets the current user agent from the context and tries to match it with a regular expression that the administrator can configure in the admin UI. You can for example configure a rule with a regular expression that matches IE6 and serve a different subtheme where the stylesheet has been tweaked for such an antique browser. Another possible configuration is to detect mobile devices from their agent string and serve the mobile theme. All those operations can be done with this module entirely from the admin UI, without writing a line of code. The module also offers the administrator the opportunity to inject a link into the front-end in a specific zone and with a specific position that enables the user to switch to the default theme if he wishes to. This is especially useful for sites that use a mobile theme but still want to allow users to use the full desktop site. While the module is nice and flexible, it may be overkill. On my own personal blog, I have only two active themes: the desktop theme and the mobile theme. I'm fine with going into code to change the criteria on which to switch the theme, so I'm not using my own Theme Picker module. Instead, I made the mobile theme a theme with code (in other words there is a csproj file in the theme). The project includes a single C# file, my MobileThemeSelector for which the code is the following: public class MobileThemeSelector : IThemeSelector { private static readonly Regex _Msie678 = new Regex(@"^Mozilla\/4\.0 \(compatible; MSIE [678]" + @"\.0; Windows NT \d\.\d(.*)\)$", RegexOptions.IgnoreCase); private ThemeSelectorResult _requestCache; private bool _requestCached; public ThemeSelectorResult GetTheme(RequestContext context) { if (_requestCached) return _requestCache; _requestCached = true; var userAgent = context.HttpContext.Request.UserAgent; if (userAgent.IndexOf("phone", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1 || _Msie678.IsMatch(userAgent) || userAgent.IndexOf("windows live writer", StringComparison.OrdinalIgnoreCase) != -1) { _requestCache = new ThemeSelectorResult { Priority = 10, ThemeName = "VuLuMobile" }; } return _requestCache; } } .csharpcode, .csharpcode pre { font-size: small; color: black; font-family: consolas, "Courier New", courier, monospace; background-color: #ffffff; /*white-space: pre;*/ } .csharpcode pre { margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .rem { color: #008000; } .csharpcode .kwrd { color: #0000ff; } .csharpcode .str { color: #006080; } .csharpcode .op { color: #0000c0; } .csharpcode .preproc { color: #cc6633; } .csharpcode .asp { background-color: #ffff00; } .csharpcode .html { color: #800000; } .csharpcode .attr { color: #ff0000; } .csharpcode .alt { background-color: #f4f4f4; width: 100%; margin: 0em; } .csharpcode .lnum { color: #606060; } The theme selector selects the current theme for Internet Explorer versions 6 to 8, for phones, and for Windows Live Writer (so that the theme that is used when I write posts is as simple as possible). What's interesting here is that it's the theme that selects itself here, based on its own criteria. This should give you a good panorama of what's possible in terms of dynamic theme selection in Orchard. I hope you find some fun uses for it. As usual, I can't wait to see what you're going to come up with…

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• SUPINFO International University in Mauritius

  Since a while I'm considering to pick up my activities as a student and I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science. Personal motivation I mean after all this years as a professional software (and database) developer I have the personal urge to complete this part of my education. Having various certifications by Microsoft and being awarded as an Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) twice looks pretty awesome on a resume but having a "proper" degree would just complete my package. During the last couple of years I already got in touch with C-SAC (local business school with degree courses), the University of Mauritius and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT to check the options to enroll as an experienced software developer. Quite frankly, it was kind of alienating to receive that feedback: Start from scratch! No seriously? Spending x amount of years to sit for courses that might be outdated and form part of your daily routine? Probably being in an awkward situation in which your professional expertise might exceed the lecturers knowledge? I don't know... but if that's path to walk... Well, then I might have to go for it. SUPINFO International University Some weeks ago I was contacted by the General Manager, Education Recruitment and Development of Medine Education Village, Yamal Matabudul, to have a chat on how the local IT scene, namely the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community (MSCC), could assist in their plans to promote their upcoming campus. Medine went into partnership with the French-based SUPINFO International University and Mauritius will be the 36th location world-wide for SUPINFO. Actually, the concept of SUPINFO is very likely to the common understanding of an apprenticeship in Germany. Not only does a student enroll into the programme but will also be placed into various internships as part of the curriculum. It's a big advantage in my opinion as the person stays in touch with the daily procedures and workflows in the real world of IT. Statements like "We just received a 'crash course' of information and learned new technology which is equivalent to 1.5 months of lectures at the university" wouldn't form part of the experience of such an education. Open Day at the Medine Education Village Last Saturday, Medine organised their Open Day and it was the official inauguration of the SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. It's now listed on their website, too - but be warned, the site is mainly in French language although the courses are all done in English. Not only was it a big opportunity to "hang out" on the campus of Medine but it was great to see the first professional partners for their internship programme, too. Oh, just for the records, IOS Indian Ocean Software Ltd. will also be among the future employers for SUPINFO students. More about that in an upcoming blog entry. Open Day at Medine Education Village - SUPINFO International University in Mauritius Mr Alick Mouriesse, President of SUPINFO, arrived the previous day and he gave all attendees a great overview of the roots of SUPINFO, the general development of the educational syllabus and their high emphasis on their partnerships with local IT companies in order to assist their students to get future jobs but also feel the heartbeat of technology live. Something which is completely missing in classic institutions of tertiary education in Computer Science. And since I was on tour with my children, as usual during weekends, he also talked about the outlook of having a SUPINFO campus in Mauritius. Apart from the close connection to IT companies and providing internships to students, SUPINFO clearly works on an international level. Meaning students of SUPINFO can move around the globe and can continue their studies seamlessly. For example, you might enroll for your first year in France, then continue to do 2nd and 3rd year in Canada or any other country with a SUPINFO campus to earn your bachelor degree, and then live and study in Mauritius for the next 2 years to achieve a Master degree. Having a chat with Dale Smith, Expand Technologies, after his interesting session on Technological Entrepreneurship - TechPreneur More questions by other craftsmen of the Mauritius Software Craftsmanship Community And of course, this concept works in any direction, giving Mauritian students a huge (!) opportunity to live, study and work abroad. And thanks to this, Medine already announced that there will be new facilities near Cascavelle to provide dormitories and other facilities to international students coming to our island. Awesome! Okay, but why SUPINFO? Well, coming back to my original statement - I'd like to get a degree in Computer Science - SUPINFO has a process called Validation of Acquired Experience (VAE) which is tailor-made for employees in the field of IT, and allows you to enroll in their course programme. I already got in touch with their online support chat but was only redirected to some FAQs on their website, unfortunately. So, during the Open Day I seized the opportunity to have an one-on-one conversation with Alick Mouriesse, and he clearly encouraged me to gather my certifications and working experience. SUPINFO does an individual evaluation prior to their assignment regarding course level, and hopefully my chances of getting some modules ahead of studies are looking better than compared to the other institutes. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to go down the easy route but why should someone sit for "Database 101" or "Principles of OOP" when applying and preaching database normalisation and practicing Clean Code Developer are like flesh and blood? Anyway, I'll be off to get my transcripts of certificates together with my course assignments from the old days at the university. Yes, I studied Applied Chemistry for a couple of years before intersecting into IT and software development particularly... ;-)

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• Employee Engagement Q&A with John Brunswick

  - by Kellsey Ruppel

  As we are focusing this week on Employee Engagement, I recently sat down with industry expert and thought leader John Brunswick on the topic. Here is the Q&A dialogue we shared.  Q: How do you effectively engage employees to drive business value?A: Motivation, both extrinsic and intrinsic, combined with the relevancy of various channels to support it.  Beyond chaining business strategies like compensation models within an organization, engagement ultimately is most successful when driven by employee's motivations.  Business value derived from engagement through technical capabilities can be objectively measured through metrics like the rate and accuracy of problem solving for a given business function or frequency of innovation created.  Providing employees performing "knowledge work" with capabilities that allow them to perform work with a higher degree of accuracy in the same or ideally less time, adds value for that individual and in turn, drives their level of engagement to drive business value. Q: Organizations with high levels of employee engagement outperform the total stock market index by 22%. Can you comment on why you think this might be? A: Alignment through shared purpose.  Zappos is an excellent example of a culture that arguably has higher than average levels of employee engagement and it permeates every aspect of their organization – embodied externally through their customer experience.  I recently made my first purchase with them and it was obvious through their web experience, visual design, communication style, customer service and attention to detail down to green packaging, that they have an amazingly strong shared purpose.  The Zappos.com ‘About page’ outlines their "Family Core Values", the first three being "Deliver WOW Through Service, Embrace and Drive Change & Create Fun and A Little Weirdness" – all reflected externally in my interaction with them.  Strong shared purpose enables higher product and service experience, equating to a dedicated customer base, repeat purchases and expanded marketshare. Q: Have you seen any trends in the market regarding employee engagement? A: Some companies now see offering a form of social engagement similar to Facebook and LinkedIn as standard communication infrastructure like email or instant messaging.  Originally offered as standalone tools, the value is now seen when these capabilities are offered in an integrated fashion in the context of business entities.  An emerging area of focus is around employee activities related to their organization on external social platforms, implicitly creating external communities with employees acting on behalf of the brand and interacting with each other (e.g. Twitter).  Companies have reached a formal understand that this now established communication medium requires strategies allowing employees to engage.  I have personally met colleagues from Oracle, like Oracle User Experience Director Ultan O'Broin (@ultan), via Twitter before meeting first through internal channels. Q: Employee engagement is important, but what about engaging customers and partners? A: The last few years we have witnessed an interesting evolution from the novelty of self-service to expectations of "intelligent" self-service.  From a consumer standpoint, engagement can end up being a key differentiator, especially in mature markets.  Customers that perform some level of interaction with a brand develop greater affinity for the brand and have a greater probability of acting as an advocate.  As organizations move toward a model of deeper engagement, they must ensure that their business is positioned to support deeper relationships, offering potentially greater transparency. From a partner standpoint greater engagement can lead to new types of business opportunities, much in the way that Amazon.com offers a unified shopping experience that can potentially span various vendors.  This same model can be extended to blending services and product delivery models, based on a closeness not easily possible before increased capability of engagement mechanisms. Q: What types of solutions are available to successfully deliver employee engagement? A: Solutions enabling higher levels of engagement do so on the basis of relevancy.  This relevancy is generally supported by aspects of content management, social collaboration, business intelligence, portal and process management technologies.  These technologies can help deliver an experience tailored to a given role or process within an organization that applies equally to work that is structured or unstructured, appearing in the form of functionality as simple as an online employee directory search, knowledge communities supported by social collaboration, as well as more feature rich business intelligence dashboards and portals. Looking to learn more about how to effectively engage your employees? Check out this webcast, or read more from John Brunswick. 

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• Deciding On Features For Open Source

  - by Robz / Fervent Coder

  Open source feature selection is subjective. An interesting question was posed to me recently at a presentation - “How do you decide what features to include in the [open source] projects you manage?” Is It Objective? I’d like to say that it’s really objective and that we vote on features and look at what carries the most interest of the populace. Actually no I wouldn’t. I don’t think I would enjoy working on open source (OSS) as much if it someone else decided on what features I should include. It already works that way at work. I don’t want to come home from work and work on things that others decide for me unless they are paying me for those features. So how do I decide on features for our open source projects? I think there are at least three paths to feature selection and they are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Feature Selection IS the Set of Features For the Domain Your product, in whatever domain it is in, needs to have the basic set of features that make it answer the needs of that domain. That is different for every product, but if you take for example a build tool, at the very least it needs to be able to compile source. And these basic needed features are not always objective either. Two people could completely disagree what makes for a required feature to meet a domain need for a product. Even one person may disagree with himself/herself about what features are needed based on different timeframes. So that leads us down to subjective. Feature Selection IS An Answer To Competition Some features go in because the competition adds a feature that may draw others away from your product offering. With OSS, there are all free alternatives, so if your competition adds a killer feature and you don’t, there isn’t much other than learning (how to use the other product) to move your customers off to the competition. If you want to keep your customers, you need to be ready to answer the questions of adding the features your competition has added.  Sometimes it’s about adding a feature that your competition charges for, but you add it for free. That draws people to the free alternative – so sometimes that adds a motivation to select a feature. Sometimes it’s because you want those features in your product, either to learn how you can answer the question of how to do something and/or because you have a need for that feature and you want it in your product. That also leads us down the road to subjective. Feature Selection IS Subjective I decide on features based on what I want to see in the product I am working on. Things I am interested in or have the biggest need for usually get picked first, with things that do not interest me either coming later or not at all. Most people get interested in an area of OSS because it solves a need for them and/or they find it interesting. If one of these two things is not happening and they are not being paid, it’s likely that person will move on to something else they find interesting or just stop OSS altogether. OSS feature selection is just that – subjective. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be opinionated and it wouldn’t have a personality about it. Most people like certain OSS because they like where the product is going or the personalities behind the product. For me, I want my products to be easy to use and solve an important problem. If it takes you more than 5-10 minutes to learn how to use my product, I know you are probably going somewhere else. So I pick features that make the product easy to use and learn, and those are not always the simplest features to work on. I work for conventions and make the product opinionated, because I think that is what makes using a product easier, if it already works with little setup. And I like to provide the ability for power users to get in and change the conventions to suit their needs. So those are required features for me above and beyond the domain features. I like to think I do a pretty good job at this. Usually when I present on something I’ve created, I like seeing people’s eyes light up when they see how simple it is to set up a powerful product like UppercuT. Patches And/Or Donations But remember before you say I’m a bad person or won’t use my product, I’ll always accept patches or I might like the feature that you suggest. If you like using the products I provide and they solve a problem for you the two biggest compliments you can provide are either a patch or a donation.  If you think the product is great, but if it could do this one other thing, it would be awesome(!), then consider contacting me and providing a patch, or consider contacting me with a donation and a request to put the feature in. And alternatively, if it’s a big feature, you could hire me to work on the product to make it even better. What If There Are Multiple Committers? In the question of multiple committers, I choose that someone always makes the ultimate decision to select whether a feature should be part of a product or not. But for other OSS project maybe this is not the case. If there is not an ultimate decision maker, then there is the possibility of either adding every feature suggested or having a deadlock on two conflicting features.   So let me pose this question. If you work on Open Source, how do you decide on what features to put in your open source projects? How do you decide what doesn’t belong? What do you do when there are conflicting features?

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• Goto for the Java Programming Language

  - by darcy

  Work on JDK 8 is well-underway, but we thought this late-breaking JEP for another language change for the platform couldn't wait another day before being published. Title: Goto for the Java Programming Language Author: Joseph D. Darcy Organization: Oracle. Created: 2012/04/01 Type: Feature State: Funded Exposure: Open Component: core/lang Scope: SE JSR: 901 MR Discussion: compiler dash dev at openjdk dot java dot net Start: 2012/Q2 Effort: XS Duration: S Template: 1.0 Reviewed-by: Duke Endorsed-by: Edsger Dijkstra Funded-by: Blue Sun Corporation Summary Provide the benefits of the time-testing goto control structure to Java programs. The Java language has a history of adding new control structures over time, the assert statement in 1.4, the enhanced for-loop in 1.5,and try-with-resources in 7. Having support for goto is long-overdue and simple to implement since the JVM already has goto instructions. Success Metrics The goto statement will allow inefficient and verbose recursive algorithms and explicit loops to be replaced with more compact code. The effort will be a success if at least twenty five percent of the JDK's explicit loops are replaced with goto's. Coordination with IDE vendors is expected to help facilitate this goal. Motivation The goto construct offers numerous benefits to the Java platform, from increased expressiveness, to more compact code, to providing new programming paradigms to appeal to a broader demographic. In JDK 8, there is a renewed focus on using the Java platform on embedded devices with more modest resources than desktop or server environments. In such contexts, static and dynamic memory footprint is a concern. One significant component of footprint is the code attribute of class files and certain classes of important algorithms can be expressed more compactly using goto than using other constructs, saving footprint. For example, to implement state machines recursively, some parties have asked for the JVM to support tail calls, that is, to perform a complex transformation with security implications to turn a method call into a goto. Such complicated machinery should not be assumed for an embedded context. A better solution is just to expose to the programmer the desired functionality, goto. The web has familiarized users with a model of traversing links among different HTML pages in a free-form fashion with some state being maintained on the side, such as login credentials, to effect behavior. This is exactly the programming model of goto and code. While in the past this has been derided as leading to "spaghetti code," spaghetti is a tasty and nutritious meal for programmers, unlike quiche. The invokedynamic instruction added by JSR 292 exposes the JVM's linkage operation to programmers. This is a low-level operation that can be leveraged by sophisticated programmers. Likewise, goto is a also a low-level operation that should not be hidden from programmers who can use more efficient idioms. Some may object that goto was consciously excluded from the original design of Java as one of the removed feature from C and C++. However, the designers of the Java programming languages have revisited these removals before. The enum construct was also left out only to be added in JDK 5 and multiple inheritance was left out, only to be added back by the virtual extension method methods of Project Lambda. As a living language, the needs of the growing Java community today should be used to judge what features are needed in the platform tomorrow; the language should not be forever bound by the decisions of the past. Description From its initial version, the JVM has had two instructions for unconditional transfer of control within a method, goto (0xa7) and goto_w (0xc8). The goto_w instruction is used for larger jumps. All versions of the Java language have supported labeled statements; however, only the break and continue statements were able to specify a particular label as a target with the onerous restriction that the label must be lexically enclosing. The grammar addition for the goto statement is: GotoStatement: goto Identifier ; The new goto statement similar to break except that the target label can be anywhere inside the method and the identifier is mandatory. The compiler simply translates the goto statement into one of the JVM goto instructions targeting the right offset in the method. Therefore, adding the goto statement to the platform is only a small effort since existing compiler and JVM functionality is reused. Other language changes to support goto include obvious updates to definite assignment analysis, reachability analysis, and exception analysis. Possible future extensions include a computed goto as found in gcc, which would replace the identifier in the goto statement with an expression having the type of a label. Testing Since goto will be implemented using largely existing facilities, only light levels of testing are needed. Impact Compatibility: Since goto is already a keyword, there are no source compatibility implications. Performance/scalability: Performance will improve with more compact code. JVMs already need to handle irreducible flow graphs since goto is a VM instruction.

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• A tale of two dev accounts

  - by TechTwaddle

  Note: I am currently in the process of relocating my blog from http://www.geekswithblogs.net/techtwaddle to my new address at http://www.techtwaddle.net I suggest you point your feed readers to the new address as I slowly transition to my new shared-hosted, ad-free wordpress blog :)   You probably remember my rant from a while back about my windows mobile developer account having problems with the new AppHub, well, there have been few developments and I thought I should share it with you. First up, the issue isn’t fixed yet. I still cannot login to AppHub using my windows mobile 6.x developer account and can’t view details of my Minesweeper app. Who knows how many copies its sold. I had numerous exchanges with Microsoft’s support team on the AppHub forums and via email as well (support ticket), but somehow we never managed to get to the root of it. In fact, the support team itself grew so tired of the problem that they suggested I create a new dev account. I grew impatient, and it was really frustrating to have an app ready for submission but not being able to do anything with it. Eventually, the frustration had to show somewhere, and it was on this forum thread Prabhu Kumar in reply to Nick Nick, I feel for you and totally understand the frustration. Since day one I have been getting the XBOX profile linking error, We encountered an issue connecting your App Hub account with your Xbox Live Profile. Please visit Xbox.com and update your contact information. After you have updated your contact information, please return to the App Hub (https://users.create.msdn.com/Register) to continue. I have an app published on the Windows Mobile 6.x marketplace since Aug, now I can't view the details of this app. I completed work on my WP7 application 1.5 months ago and the first version is ready for submission to marketplace, only if I can login. You can imagine how frustrating all this can be, the issue has taken far too long to be fixed, this has drained all my motivation. I have exchanged numerous mails with Microsoft support team on this issue, and from the looks of it they really are trying their best, unfortunately, their best is not good enough for some of us. During the first week of December I was told that there would be an update happening to AppHub around mid of December. I was hoping that the issue would be fixed but it wasn't. After the update the only change I notice is that the xbox.com link on the error page now takes me to the correct link. Previously, this link used to take me to the 404 page you mentioned above. Out of desperation, I am now considering creating another developer account on AppHub with a new live id, even this I am not 100% sure will work. I asked the support team when the next update to AppHub was planned and got this reply, "We do not have  release date to announce for the next App Hub update at this time. In regards to the login issue you are experiencing at this point the only solution would be to create a new account with a different live ID but make sure to go to xbox.com before hand to get all the information in order on that side." I know it's an extra $99, and not that I can't afford it but it doesn't feel right and I shouldn't have to be doing it in the first place. I have lost all hope of this issue being resolved. I went ahead and created a new dev account, the id verification was in progress when Shaun Taulbee of Microsoft, who has been really helpful in the forums, replied saying, If you find it necessary to pay again to create a new account due to a Microsoft problem, send in a support request asking for a refund and we'll review it (and likely approve it given the circumstances). The thought of refund made me happy, but I had my doubts. So once my second account was verified by Geotrust I applied for a refund through the developer dashboard, by creating a support ticket. Couple of days later I got an email from Microsoft saying that the refund had been approved! yay! Few days and the refund showed up on my bill, Well, thank you Microsoft, it means a lot. I am glad it’s over now. The new account works flawlessly. I would still like to get my first account working again and look at my app numbers for Win Mo 6.x, and probably transfer the credits to the new account somehow, but I’ll save it for another day. If you’ve had similar problems with the AppHub, and had to create a new account to submit your app, I suggest you contact the support team and get your dollars refunded!

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