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• World Backup Day

  - by red(at)work

  Here at Red Gate Towers, the SQL Backup development team have been hunkered down in their shed for the last few months, with the toolbox, blowtorch and chamois leather out, upgrading SQL Backup. When we started, autumn leaves were falling. Now we're about to finish, spring flowers are budding. If not quite a gleaming new machine, at the very least a familiar, reliable engine with some shiny new bits on it will trundle magnificently out of the workshop. One of the interesting things I've noticed about working on software development teams is that the team is together for so long 'implementing' stuff - designing, coding, testing, fixing bugs and so on - that you occasionally forget why you're doing what you're doing. Doubt creeps in. It feels like a long time since we launched this project in a fanfare of optimism and enthusiasm, and all that clarity of purpose and mission "yee-haw" has dissipated with the daily pressures of development. Every now and again, we look up from our bunker and notice all those thousands of users out there, with their different configurations and working practices and each with their own set of problems and requirements, and we ask ourselves "does anyone care about what we're doing?" Has the world moved on while we've been busy? Could we have been doing something more useful with the time and talent of all these excellent people we've assembled? In truth, you can research and test and validate all you like, but you never really know if you've done the right thing (or at least, something valuable for some users) until you release. All projects suffer this insecurity. If they don't, maybe you're not worrying enough about what you're building. The two enemies of software development are certainty and complacency. Oh, and of course, rival teams with Nerf guns. The goal of SQL Backup 7 is to make it so easy to schedule regular restores of your backups that you have no excuse not to. Why schedule a restore? Because your data is not as good as your last backup. It's only as good as your last successful restore. If you're not checking your backups by restoring them and running an integrity check on the database, you're only doing half the job. It seems that most DBAs know that this is best practice, but it can be tricky and time-consuming to set up, so it's one of those tasks that can get forgotten in the midst all the other demands on their time. Sometimes, they're just too busy firefighting. But if it was simple to do? That was our inspiration for SQL Backup 7. So it was heartening to read Brent Ozar's blog post the other day about World Backup Day. To be honest, I'd never heard of World Backup Day (Talk Like a Pirate Day, yes, but not this one); however, its emphasis on not just backing up your data but checking the validity of those backups was exactly the same message we had in mind when building SQL Backup 7. It's printed on a piece of A3 above our planning board - "Make backup verification so easy to do that no DBA has an excuse for not doing it" It's the missing piece that completes the puzzle. Simple idea, great concept, useful feature, but, as it turned out, far from straightforward to implement. The problem is the future. As Marty McFly discovered over the course of three movies, the future is uncertain and hard to predict - so when you are scheduling a restore to take place an hour, day, week or month after the backup, there are all kinds of questions that you wouldn't normally have to consider. Where will this backup live? Will it even exist at the time? Will it be split into multiple files? What will the file names be? Will it be encrypted? What files should it be restored to? SQL Backup needs to know what to expect at the time the restore job is actually run. Of course, a DBA will know the answer to all these questions, but to deliver the whole point of version 7, we wanted to make it easy for them to input that information into SQL Backup. We think we've done that. When you create your scheduled backup job, there is now an option to create a "reminder" to follow it up with a scheduled restore to verify the resulting backups. Actually, it's much more than a reminder, as it stores all the relevant data so you can click it and pre-populate the wizard with all the right settings to set up your verification restores. Simple. But, what do you think? We'd love you to try it. Post by Brian Harris

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• Tip #19 Module Private Visibility in OSGi

  - by ByronNevins

  I hate public and protected methods and classes.  It requires so much work to change them in a huge project like GlassFish.  Not to mention that you may well have to support those APIs forever.  They are highly overused in GlassFish.  In fact I'd bet that > 95% of classes are marked as public for no good reason.  It's just (bad) habit is my guess. private and default visibility (I call it package-private) is easier to maintain.  It is much much easier to change such classes and methods around.  If you have ANY public method or public class in GlassFish you'll need to grep through a tremendous amount of source code to find all callers.  But even that won't be theoretically reliable.  What if a caller is using reflection to access public methods?  You may never find such usages. If you have package private methods, it's easy.  Simply grep through all the code in that one package.  As long as that package compiles ok you're all set.  There can' be any compile errors anywhere else.  It's a waste of time to even look around or build the "outside" world.  So you may be thinking: "Aha!  I'll just make my module have one giant package with all the java files.  Then I can use the default visibility and maintenance will be much easier.  But there's a problem.  You are wasting a very nice feature of java -- organizing code into separate packages.  It also makes the code much more encapsulated.  Unfortunately to share code between the packages you have no choice but to declare public visibility. What happens in practice is that a module ends up having tons of public classes and methods that are used exclusively inside the module.  Which finally brings me to the point of this blog:  If Only There Was A Module-Private Visibility Available Well, surprise!  There is such a mechanism.  If your project is running under OSGi that is.  Like GlassFish does!  With this mechanism you can easily add another level of visibility by telling OSGi exactly which public you want to be exposed outside of the module.  You get the best of both worlds: Better encapsulation of your code so that maintenance is easier and productivity is increased. Usage of public visibility inside the module so that you can encapsulate intra-module better with packages. How I do this in GlassFish: Carefully plan out at least one package that will contain "true" publics.  This is the package that will be exported by OSGi.  I recommend just one package. Here is how to tell OSGi to use it in GlassFish -- edit osgi.bundle like so:-exportcontents:     org.glassfish.mymodule.truepublics;  version=${project.osgi.version} Now all publics declared in any other packages will be visible module-wide but not outside the module. There is one caveat: Accessing "module-private" items outside of the module is controlled at run-time, not compile-time.  The compiler has no clue that a public in a dependent module isn't really public.  it will happily compile it.  At runtime you will definitely see fireworks.  The good news is that you don't have to wait for the code path that tries to use the "module-private" items to fire.  OSGi will complain loudly when that module gets loaded.  OSGi will refuse to load it.  You will see an error like this: remote failure: Error while loading FOO: Exception while adding the new configuration : Error occurred during deployment: Exception while loading the app : org.osgi.framework.BundleException: Unresolved constraint in bundle com.oracle.glassfish.miscreant.code [115]: Unable to resolve 115.0: missing requirement [115.0] osgi.wiring.package; (osgi.wiring.package=org.glassfish.mymodule.unexported). Please see server.log for more details. That is if you accidentally change code in module B to use a public that is really a "module-private" in module A, then you will see the error immediately when you try to test whatever you were changing in module B.

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• OIM 11g - Multi Valued attribute reconciliation of a child form

  - by user604275

  This topic gives a brief description on how we can do reconciliation of a child form attribute which is also multi valued from a flat file . The format of the flat file is (an example): ManagementDomain1|Entitlement1|DIRECTORY SERVER,EMAIL ManagementDomain2|Entitlement2|EMAIL PROVIDER INSTANCE - UMS,EMAIL VERIFICATION In OIM there will be a parent form for fields Management domain and Entitlement.Reconciliation will assign Servers ( which are multi valued) to corresponding Management  Domain and Entitlement .In the flat file , multi valued fields are seperated by comma(,). In the design console, Create a form with 'Server Name' as a field and make it a child form . Open the corresponding Resource Object and add this field for reconcilitaion.While adding , choose 'Multivalued' check box. (please find attached screen shot on how to add it , Child Table.docx) Open process definiton and add child form fields for recociliation. Please click on the 'Create Reconcilitaion Profile' buttton on the resource object tab. The API methods used for child form reconciliation are : 1.           reconEventKey =   reconOpsIntf.createReconciliationEvent(resObjName, reconData,                                                            false); ·                                    ‘False’  here tells that we are creating the recon for a child table . 2.               2.       reconOpsIntf.providingAllMultiAttributeData(reconEventKey, RECON_FIELD_IN_RO, true);                RECON_FIELD_IN_RO is the field that we added in the Resource Object while adding for reconciliation, please refer the screen shot) 3.    reconOpsIntf.addDirectBulkMultiAttributeData(reconEventKey,RECON_FIELD_IN_RO, bulkChildDataMapList);                 bulkChildDataMapList  is coded as below :                 List<Map> bulkChildDataMapList = new ArrayList<Map>();                   for (int i = 0; i < stokens.length; i++) {                            Map<String, String> attributeMap = new HashMap<String, String>();                           String serverName = stokens[i].toUpperCase();                           attributeMap.put("Server Name", stokens[i]);                           bulkChildDataMapList.add(attributeMap);                         } 4                  4.       reconOpsIntf.finishReconciliationEvent(reconEventKey); 5.       reconOpsIntf.processReconciliationEvent(reconEventKey); Now, we have to register the plug-in, import metadata into MDS and then create a scheduled job to execute which will run the reconciliation.

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• Content in Context: The right medicine for your business applications

  - by Lance Shaw

  For many of you, your companies have already invested in a number of applications that are critical to the way your business is run. HR, Payroll, Legal, Accounts Payable, and while they might need an upgrade in some cases, they are all there and handling the lifeblood of your business. But are they really running as efficiently as they could be? For many companies, the answer is no. The problem has to do with the important information caught up within documents and paper. It’s everywhere except where it truly needs to be – readily available right within the context of the application itself. When the right information cannot be easily found, business processes suffer significantly. The importance of this recently struck me when I recently went to meet my new doctor and get a routine physical. Walking into the office lobby, I couldn't help but notice rows and rows of manila folders in racks from floor to ceiling, filled with documents and sensitive, personal information about various patients like myself.  As I looked at all that paper and all that history, two things immediately popped into my head.  “How do they find anything?” and then the even more alarming, “So much for information security!” It sure looked to me like all those documents could be accessed by anyone with a key to the building. Now the truth is that the offices of many general practitioners look like this all over the United States and the world.  But it had me thinking, is the same thing going on in just about any company around the world, involving a wide variety of important business processes? Probably so. Think about all the various processes going on in your company right now. Invoice payments are being processed through Accounts Payable, contracts are being reviewed by Procurement, and Human Resources is reviewing job candidate submissions and doing background checks. All of these processes and many more like them rely on access to forms and documents, whether they are paper or digital. Now consider that it is estimated that employee’s spend nearly 9 hours a week searching for information and not finding it. That is a lot of very well paid employees, spending more than one day per week not doing their regular job while they search for or re-create what already exists. Back in the doctor’s office, I saw this trend exemplified as well. First, I had to fill out a new patient form, even though my previous doctor had transferred my records over months previously. After filling out the form, I was later introduced to my new doctor who then interviewed me and asked me the exact same questions that I had answered on the form. I understand that there is value in the interview process and it was great to meet my new doctor, but this simple process could have been so much more efficient if the information already on file could have been brought directly together with the new patient information I had provided. Instead of having a highly paid medical professional re-enter the same information into the records database, the form I filled out could have been immediately scanned into the system, associated with my previous information, discrepancies identified, and the entire process streamlined significantly. We won’t solve the health records management issues that exist in the United States in this blog post, but this example illustrates how the automation of information capture and classification can eliminate a lot of repetitive and costly human entry and re-creation, even in a simple process like new patient on-boarding. In a similar fashion, by taking a fresh look at the various processes in place today in your organization, you can likely spot points along the way where automating the capture and access to the right information could be significantly improved. As you evaluate how content-process flows through your organization, take a look at how departments and regions share information between the applications they are using. Business applications are often implemented on an individual department basis to solve specific problems but a holistic approach to overall information management is not taken at the same time. The end result over the years is disparate applications with separate information repositories and in many cases these contain duplicate information, or worse, slightly different versions of the same information. This is where Oracle WebCenter Content comes into the story. More and more companies are realizing that they can significantly improve their existing application processes by automating the capture of paper, forms and other content. This makes the right information immediately accessible in the context of the business process and making the same information accessible across departmental systems which has helped many organizations realize significant cost savings. Here on the Oracle WebCenter team, one of our primary goals is to help customers find new ways to be more effective, more cost-efficient and manage information as effectively as possible. We have a series of three webcasts occurring over the next few weeks that are focused on the integration of enterprise content management within the context of business applications. We hope you will join us for one or all three and that you will find them informative. Click here to learn more about these sessions and to register for them. There are many aspects of information management to consider as you look at integrating content management within your business applications. We've barely scratched the surface here but look for upcoming blog posts where we will discuss more specifics on the value of delivering documents, forms and images directly within applications like Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft Enterprise, JD Edwards Enterprise One, Siebel CRM and many others. What do you think?  Are your important business processes as healthy as they can be?  Do you have any insights to share on the value of delivering content directly within critical business processes? Please post a comment and let us know the value you have realized, the lessons learned and what specific areas you are interested in.

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• My own personal use of Oracle Linux

  - by wcoekaer

  It always is easier to explain something with examples... Many people still don't seem to understand some of the convenient things around using Oracle Linux and since I personally (surprise!) use it at home, let me give you an idea. I have quite a few servers at home and I also have 2 hosted servers with a hosted provider. The servers at home I use mostly to play with random Linux related things, or with Oracle VM or just try out various new Oracle products to learn more. I like the technology, it's like a hobby really. To be able to have a good installation experience and use an officially certified Linux distribution and not waste time trying to find the right libraries, I, of course, use Oracle Linux. Now, at least I can get a copy of Oracle Linux for free (even if I was not working for Oracle) and I can/could use that on as many servers at home (or at my company if I worked elsewhere) for testing, development and production. I just go to http://edelivery.oracle.com/linux and download the version(s) I want and off I go. Now, I also have the right (and not because I am an employee) to take those images and put them on my own server and give them to someone else, I in fact, just recently set up my own mirror on my own hosted server. I don't have to remove oracle-logos, I don't have to rebuild the ISO images, I don't have to recompile anything, I can just put the whole binary distribution on my own server without contract. Perfectly free to do so. Of course the source code of all of this is there, I have a copy of the UEK code at home, just cloned from https://oss.oracle.com/git/?p=linux-2.6-unbreakable.git. And as you can see, the entire changelog, checkins, merges from Linus's tree, complete overview of everything that got changed from kernel to kernel, from patch to patch, errata to errata. No obfuscating, no tar balls and spending time with diff, or go read bug reports to find out what changed (seems silly to me). Some of my servers are on the external network and I need to be current with security errata, but guess what, no problem, my servers are hooked up to http://public-yum.oracle.com which is open, free, and completely up to date, in a consistent, reliable way with any errata, security or bugfix. So I have nothing to worry about. Also, not because I am an employee. Anyone can. And, with this, I also can, and have, set up my own mirror site that hosts these RPMs. both binary and source rpms. Because I am free to get them and distribute them. I am quite capable of supporting my servers on my own, so I don't need to rely on the support organization so I don't need to have a support subscription :-). So I don't need to pay. Neither would you, at least not with Oracle Linux. Another cool thing. The hosted servers came (unfortunately) with Centos installed. While Centos works just fine as is, I tend to prefer to be current with my security errata(reliably) and I prefer to just maintain one yum repository instead of 2, I converted them over to Oracle Linux as well (in place) so they happily receive and use the exact same RPMs. Since Oracle Linux is exactly the same from a user/application point of view as RHEL, including files like /etc/redhat-release and no changes from .el. to .centos. I know I have nothing to worry about installing one of the RHEL applications. So, OL everywhere makes my life a lot easier and why not... Next! Since I run Oracle VM and I have -tons- of VM's on my machines, in some cases on my big WOPR box I have 15-20 VMs running. Well, no problem, OL is free and I don't have to worry about counting the number of VMs, whether it's 1, or 4, or more than 10 ... like some other alternatives started doing... and finally :) I like to try out new stuff, not 3 year old stuff. So with UEK2 as part of OL6 (and 6.3 in particular) I can play with a 3.0.x based kernel and it just installs and runs perfectly clean with OL6, so quite current stuff in an environment that I know works, no need to toy around with an unsupported pre-alpha upstream distribution with libraries and versions that are not compatible with production software (I have nothing against ubuntu or fedora or opensuse... just not what I can rely on or use for what I need, and I don't need a desktop). pretty compelling. I say... and again, it doesn't matter that I work for Oracle, if I was working elsewhere, or not at all, all of the above would still apply. Student, teacher, developer, whatever. contrast this with $349 for 2 sockets and oneguest and selfsupport per year to even just get the software bits.

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• Developing Schema Compare for Oracle (Part 4): Script Configuration

  - by Simon Cooper

  If you've had a chance to play around with the Schema Compare for Oracle beta, you may have come across this screen in the synchronization wizard: This screen is one of the few screens that, along with the project configuration form, doesn't come from SQL Compare. This screen was designed to solve a couple of issues that, although aren't specific to Oracle, are much more of a problem than on SQL Server: Datatype conversions and NOT NULL columns. 1. Datatype conversions SQL Server is generally quite forgiving when it comes to datatype conversions using ALTER TABLE. For example, you can convert from a VARCHAR to INT using ALTER TABLE as long as all the character values are parsable as integers. Oracle, on the other hand, only allows ALTER TABLE conversions that don't change the internal data format. Essentially, every change that requires an actual datatype conversion has to be done using a rebuild with a conversion function. That's OK, as we can simply hard-code the various conversion functions for the valid datatype conversions and insert those into the rebuild SELECT list. However, as there always is with Oracle, there's a catch. Have a look at the NUMTODSINTERVAL function. As well as specifying the value (or column) to convert, you have to specify an interval_unit, which tells oracle how to interpret the input number. We can't hardcode a default for this parameter, as it is entirely dependent on the user's data context! So, in order to convert NUMBER to INTERVAL DAY TO SECOND/INTERVAL YEAR TO MONTH, we need to have feedback from the user as to what to put in this parameter while we're generating the sync script - this requires a new step in the engine action/script generation to insert these values into the script, as well as new UI to allow the user to specify these values in a sensible fashion. In implementing the engine and UI infrastructure to allow this it made much more sense to implement it for any rebuild datatype conversion, not just NUMBER to INTERVALs. For conversions which we can do, we pre-fill the 'value' box with the appropriate function from the documentation. The user can also type in arbitary SQL expressions, which allows the user to specify optional format parameters for the relevant conversion functions, or indeed call their own functions to convert between values that don't have a built-in conversion defined. As the value gets inserted as-is into the rebuild SELECT list, any expression that is valid in that context can be specified as the conversion value. 2. NOT NULL columns Another problem that is solved by the new step in the sync wizard is adding a NOT NULL column to a table. If the table contains data (as most database tables do), you can't just add a NOT NULL column, as Oracle doesn't know what value to put in the new column for existing rows - the DDL statement will fail. There are actually 3 separate scenarios for this problem that have separate solutions within the engine: Adding a NOT NULL column to a table without a rebuild Here, the workaround is to add a column default with an appropriate value to the column you're adding: ALTER TABLE tbl1 ADD newcol NUMBER DEFAULT <value> NOT NULL; Note, however, there is something to bear in mind about this solution; once specified on a column, a default cannot be removed. To 'remove' a default from a column you change it to have a default of NULL, hence there's code in the engine to treat a NULL default the same as no default at all. Adding a NOT NULL column to a table, where a separate change forced a table rebuild Fortunately, in this case, a column default is not required - we can simply insert the default value into the rebuild SELECT clause. Changing an existing NULL to a NOT NULL column To implement this, we run an UPDATE command before the ALTER TABLE to change all the NULLs in the column to the required default value. For all three, we need some way of allowing the user to specify a default value to use instead of NULL; as this is essentially the same problem as datatype conversion (inserting values into the sync script), we can re-use the UI and engine implementation of datatype conversion values. We also provide the option to alter the new column to allow NULLs, or to ignore the problem completely. Note that there is the same (long-running) problem in SQL Compare, but it is much more of an issue in Oracle as you cannot easily roll back executed DDL statements if the script fails at some point during execution. Furthermore, the engine of SQL Compare is far less conducive to inserting user-supplied values into the generated script. As we're writing the Schema Compare engine from scratch, we used what we learnt from the SQL Compare engine and designed it to be far more modular, which makes inserting procedures like this much easier.

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• Building a Repository Pattern against an EF 5 EDMX Model - Part 1

  - by Juan

  I am part of a year long plus project that is re-writing an existing application for a client.  We have decided to develop the project using Visual Studio 2012 and .NET 4.5.  The project will be using a number of technologies and patterns to include Entity Framework 5, WCF Services, and WPF for the client UI.This is my attempt at documenting some of the successes and failures that I will be coming across in the development of the application.In building the data access layer we have to access a database that has already been designed by a dedicated dba. The dba insists on using Stored Procedures which has made the use of EF a little more difficult.  He will not allow direct table access but we did manage to get him to allow us to use Views.  Since EF 5 does not have good support to do Code First with Stored Procedures, my option was to create a model (EDMX) against the existing database views.   I then had to go select each entity and map the Insert/Update/Delete functions to their respective stored procedure. The next step after I had completed mapping the stored procedures to the entities in the EDMX model was to figure out how to build a generic repository that would work well with Entity Framework 5.  After reading the blog posts below, I adopted much of their code with some changes to allow for the use of Ninject for dependency injection.http://www.tcscblog.com/2012/06/22/entity-framework-generic-repository/ http://www.tugberkugurlu.com/archive/generic-repository-pattern-entity-framework-asp-net-mvc-and-unit-testing-triangle IRepository.cs public interface IRepository : IDisposable where T : class { void Add(T entity); void Update(T entity, int id); T GetById(object key); IQueryable Query(Expression> predicate); IQueryable GetAll(); int SaveChanges(); int SaveChanges(bool validateEntities); } GenericRepository.cs public abstract class GenericRepository : IRepository where T : class { public abstract void Add(T entity); public abstract void Update(T entity, int id); public abstract T GetById(object key); public abstract IQueryable Query(Expression> predicate); public abstract IQueryable GetAll(); public int SaveChanges() { return SaveChanges(true); } public abstract int SaveChanges(bool validateEntities); public abstract void Dispose(); } One of the issues I ran into was trying to do an update. I kept receiving errors so I posted a question on Stack Overflow http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12585664/an-object-with-the-same-key-already-exists-in-the-objectstatemanager-the-object and came up with the following hack. If someone has a better way, please let me know. DbContextRepository.cs public class DbContextRepository : GenericRepository where T : class { protected DbContext Context; protected DbSet DbSet; public DbContextRepository(DbContext context) { if (context == null) throw new ArgumentException("context"); Context = context; DbSet = Context.Set(); } public override void Add(T entity) { if (entity == null) throw new ArgumentException("Cannot add a null entity."); DbSet.Add(entity); } public override void Update(T entity, int id) { if (entity == null) throw new ArgumentException("Cannot update a null entity."); var entry = Context.Entry(entity); if (entry.State == EntityState.Detached) { var attachedEntity = DbSet.Find(id); // Need to have access to key if (attachedEntity != null) { var attachedEntry = Context.Entry(attachedEntity); attachedEntry.CurrentValues.SetValues(entity); } else { entry.State = EntityState.Modified; // This should attach entity } } } public override T GetById(object key) { return DbSet.Find(key); } public override IQueryable Query(Expression> predicate) { return DbSet.Where(predicate); } public override IQueryable GetAll() { return Context.Set(); } public override int SaveChanges(bool validateEntities) { Context.Configuration.ValidateOnSaveEnabled = validateEntities; return Context.SaveChanges(); } #region IDisposable implementation public override void Dispose() { if (Context != null) { Context.Dispose(); GC.SuppressFinalize(this); } } #endregion IDisposable implementation } At this point I am able to start creating individual repositories that are needed and add a Unit of Work.  Stay tuned for the next installment in my path to creating a Repository Pattern against EF5.

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• Some Early Considerations

  - by Chris Massey

  Following on from my previous post, I want to say "thank you" to everyone who has got in touch and got involved – you are pioneers! An update on where we are right now: paper prototypes v1 To be more specific, we’ve picked two of the ideas that seem to have more pros than cons, turned them into Balsamiq mockups, and are getting them fleshed out with realistic content. We’ll initially make these available to the aforementioned pioneers (thank you again), roll in the feedback, and then open up to get more data on what works and what doesn’t. If you’ve got any questions about this (or what we’re working on right now), feel free to ask me in the comments below. I’ve had a few people express an interest in the process we’re going through, and I’m more than happy to share details more frequently as we go along – not least because you, dear reader, will help us stay on target and create something Good. To start with, here’s a quick flashback to bring you all up to speed. A Brief Retrospective As you may already know, we’re creating a new publishing asset specifically focused on providing great content for web developers. We don’t yet know exactly what this thing will look like, or exactly how it will work, but we know we want to create something that is useful different. For my part, I’m seriously excited at the prospect of building a genuinely digital publishing system (as opposed to what most publishing is these days, which is print-style publishing which just happens to be on the web). The main challenge at this point is working out our build-measure-assess loop to speed up our experimental turn-around, and that’ll get better as we run more trials. Of course, there are a few things we’ve been pondering at this early conceptual stage: Do we publishing about heterogeneous technology stacks from day 1, or do we start with ASP.NET (which we’re familiar with) & branch out later? There are challenges with either approach. What publishing "modes" are already being well-handled? For example, the likes of Pluralsight, TekPub, and Treehouse have pretty much nailed video training (debate about price, if you like), and unless we think we can do it faster / better / cheaper (unlikely, for the record), we should leave them to it. Where should we base whatever we create? Should we create a completely new asset under a new name, graft something onto Simple-Talk (like the labs), or just build something directly into Simple-Talk? It sounds trivial, but it does have at least some impact on infrastructure and what how we manage the different types of content we (will) have. Are there any obvious problems or niches that we think could address really well, or should we just throw ideas out and see what readers respond to? What kind of users do we want to provide for? This actually deserves a little bit of unpacking… Why are you here? We currently divide readers into (broadly) the categories: Category 1: I know nothing about X, and I’d like to learn about it. Category 2: I know something about X, but I’d like to learn how to do something specific with it. Category 3: Ah man, I have a problem with X, and I need to fix it now. Now that I think about it, I might also include a 4th class of reader: Category 4: I’m looking for something interesting to engage my brain. These are clearly task-based categorizations, and depending on which task you’re performing when you arrive here, you’re going to need different types of content, or will have specific discovery needs. One of the questions that’s at the back of my mind whenever I consider a new idea is “How many of the categories will this satisfy?” As an example, typical video training is very well suited to categories 1, 2, and 4. StackOverflow is very well suited to category 3, and serves as a sign-posting system to the rest. Clearly it’s not necessary to satisfy every category need to be useful and popular, but being aware of what behavior readers might be exhibiting when they arrive will help us tune our ideas appropriately. < / Flashback > We don’t have clean answers to most of these considerations – they’re things we’re aware of, and each idea we look at is going to be best suited to a different mix of the options I’ve described. Our first experimental loop will be coming full circle in the next few days, so we should start to see how the different possibilities vary between ideas. Free to chime in with questions and suggestions about anything I’ve just brain-dumped, or at any stage as we go along. If you see anything that intrigued or enrages you, or just have an idea you’d like to share, I’d love to hear from you.

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• BizTalk: namespaces

  - by Leonid Ganeline

  BizTalk team did a good job hiding the .NET guts from developers. Developers are working with editors and hardly with .NET code. The Orchestration editor, the Mapper, the Schema editor, the Pipeline editor, all these editors hide what is going on with artifacts created and deployed. Working with the BizTalk artifacts year after year brings us some knowledge which could help to understand more about the .NET guts. I would like to highlight the .NET namespaces. What they are, how they influence our everyday tasks in the BizTalk application development. What is it? Most of the BizTalk artifacts are compiled into the NET classes. Not all of them… but I will show you later. Classes are placed inside the namespaces. I will not describe here why we need namespaces and what is it. I assume you all know about it more then me. Here I would like to emphasize that almost each BizTalk artifact is implemented as a .NET class within a .NET namespace. Where to see the namespaces in development? The namespaces are inconsistently spread across the artifact parameters. Let’s start with namespace placement in development. Then we go with namespaces in deployment and operations. I am using pictures from the BizTalk Server 2013 Beta and the Visual Studio 2012 but there was no changes regarding the namespaces starting from the BizTalk 2006. Default namespace When a new BizTalk project is created, the default namespace is set up the same as a name of a project. This namespace would be used for all new BizTalk artifacts added to this project. Orchestrations When we select a green or a red markers (the Begin and End orchestration shapes) we will see the orchestration Properties window. We also can click anywhere on the space between Port Surfaces to see this window.   Schemas The only way to see the NET namespace for map is selecting the schema file name into the Solution Explorer. Notes: We can also see the Type Name parameter. It is a name of the correspondent .NET class. We can also see the Fully Qualified Name parameter. We cannot see the schema namespace when selecting any node on the schema editor surface. Only selecting a schema file name gives us a namespace parameter. If we select a <Schema> node we can get the Target Namespace parameter of the schema. This is NOT the .NET namespace! It is an XML namespace. See this XML namespace inside the XML schema, it is shown as a special targetNamespace attribute Here this XML namespace appears inside the XML document itself. It is shown as a special xmlns attribute.   Maps It is similar to the schemas. The only way to see the NET namespace for map is selecting a map file name into the Solution Explorer. Pipelines It is similar to the schemas. The only way to see the NET namespace for pipeline is selecting a pipeline file name into the Solution Explorer. z Ports, Policies and Tracking Profiles The Send and Receive Ports, the Policies and the BAM Tracking Profiles do not create the .NET classes and they do not have the associated .NET namespaces. How to copy artifacts? Since the new versions of the BizTalk Server are going to production I am spending more and more time redesigning and refactoring the BizTalk applications. It is good to know how the refactoring process copes with the .NET namespaces. Let see what is going on with the namespaces when we copy the artifacts from one project to another. Here is an example: I am going to group the artifacts under the project folders. So, I have created a Group folder, have run the Add / Existing Item.. command and have chosen all artifacts in the project root. The artifact copies were created in the Group folder: What was happened with the namespaces of the artifacts? As you can see, the folder name, the “Group”, was added to the namespace. It is great! When I added a folder, I have added one more level in the name hierarchy and the namespace change just reflexes this hierarchy change.  The same namespace adjustment happens when we copy the BizTalk artifacts between the projects. But there is an issue with the namespace of an orchestration. It was not changed. The namespaces of the schemas, maps, pipelines are changed but not the orchestration namespace. I have to change the orchestration namespace manually. Now another example: I am creating a new Project folder and moving the artifacts there from the project root by drag and drop. We will mention the artifact namespaces are not changed. Another example: I am copying the artifacts from the project root by (drag and drop) + Ctrl. We will mention the artifact namespaces are changed. It works exactly as it was with the Add / Existing Item.. command. Conclusion: The namespace parameter is put inconsistently in different places for different artifacts Moving artifacts changes the namespaces of the schemas, maps, pipelines but not the orchestrations.

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• The sign of a true manager is delegation (C# style)

  - by MarkPearl

  Today I thought I would write a bit about delegates in C#. Up till recently I have managed to side step any real understanding of what delegates do and why they are useful – I mean, I know roughly what they do and have used them a lot, but I have never really got down dirty with them and mucked about. Recently however with my renewed interest in Silverlight delegates came up again as a possible solution to a particular problem, and suddenly I found myself opening a bland little console application to just see exactly how far I could take delegates with my limited knowledge. So, let’s first look at the MSDN definition of delegates… A delegate declaration defines a reference type that can be used to encapsulate a method with a specific signature. A delegate instance encapsulates a static or an instance method. Delegates are roughly similar to function pointers in C++; however, delegates are type-safe and secure. Well, don’t you love MSDN for such a useful definition. I must give it credit though… later on it really explains it a bit better by saying “A delegate lets you pass a function as a parameter. The type safety of delegates requires the function you pass as a delegate to have the same signature as the delegate declaration.” A little more reading up on delegates mentions that delegates are similar to interfaces in that they enable the separation of specification and implementation. A delegate declares a single method, while an interface declares a group of methods. So enough reading - lets look at some code and see a basic example of a delegate… Let’s assume we have a console application with a simple delegate declared called AdjustValue like below… class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(int val); static void Main(string[] args) { } } In a sense, all we have said is that we will be creating one or more methods that follow the same pattern as AdjustValue – i.e. they will take one input value of type int and return an integer. We could then expand our code to have various methods that match the structure of our delegate AdjustValue (remember the structure is int xxx (int xxx)) class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(int val); private static int Dbl(int val) { return val * 2; } private static int AlwaysOne(int val) { return 1; } static void Main(string[] args) { } }  Above I have expanded my project to have two methods, one called Dbl and the other AlwaysOne. Dbl always returns double the input val and AlwaysOne always returns 1. I could now declare a variable and assign it to be one of those functions, like the following… class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(int val); private static int Dbl(int val) { return val * 2; } private static int AlwaysOne(int val) { return 1; } static void Main(string[] args) { AdjustValue myDelegate; myDelegate = Dbl; Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(1).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); } } In this instance I have declared an instance of the AdjustValue delegate called myDelegate; I have then told myDelegate to point to the method Dbl, and then called myDelegate(1). What would the result be? Yes, in this instance it would be exactly the same as me calling the following code… static void Main(string[] args) { Console.WriteLine(Dbl(1).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); }   So why all the extra work for delegates when we could just do what we did above and call the method directly? Well… that separation of specification to implementation comes to mind. So, this all seems pretty simple. Let’s take a slightly more complicated variation to the console application. Assume that my project is the same as the one previously except that my main method is adjusted as follows… static void Main(string[] args) { AdjustValue myDelegate; myDelegate = Dbl; myDelegate = AlwaysOne; Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(1).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); } What would happen in this scenario? Quite simply “1” would be written to the console, the reason being that myDelegate was last pointing to the AlwaysOne method before it was called. Make sense? In a way, the myDelegate is a variable method that can be swapped and changed when needed. Let’s make the code a little more confusing by using a delegate in the declaration of another delegate as shown below… class Program { private delegate int AdjustValue(InputValue val); private delegate int InputValue(); private static int Dbl(InputValue val) { return val()*2; } private static int GetInputVal() { Console.WriteLine("Enter a whole number : "); return Convert.ToInt32(Console.ReadLine()); } static void Main(string[] args) { AdjustValue myDelegate; myDelegate = Dbl; Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(GetInputVal).ToString()); Console.ReadLine(); } }   Now it gets really interesting because it looks like we have passed a method into a function in the main method by declaring… Console.WriteLine(myDelegate(GetInputVal).ToString()); So, what it the output? Well, try take a guess on what will happen – then copy the code and see if you got it right. Well that brings me to the end of this short explanation of Delegates. Hopefully it made sense!

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• No More NCrunch For Me

  - by Steve Wilkes

  When I opened up Visual Studio this morning, I was greeted with this little popup: NCrunch is a Visual Studio add-in which runs your tests while you work so you know if and when you've broken anything, as well as providing coverage indicators in the IDE and coverage metrics on demand. It recently went commercial (which I thought was fair enough), and time is running out for the free version I've been using for the last couple of months. From my experiences using NCrunch I'm going to let it expire, and go about my business without it. Here's why. Before I start, let me say that I think NCrunch is a good product, which is to say it's had a positive impact on my programming. I've used it to help test-drive a library I'm making right from the start of the project, and especially at the beginning it was very useful to have it run all my tests whenever I made a change. The first problem is that while that was cool to start with, it’s recently become a bit of a chore. Problems Running Tests NCrunch has two 'engine modes' in which it can run tests for you - it can run all your tests when you make a change, or it can figure out which tests were impacted and only run those. Unfortunately, it became clear pretty early on that that second option (which is marked as 'experimental') wasn't really working for me, so I had to have it run everything. With a smallish number of tests and while I was adding new features that was great, but I've now got 445 tests (still not exactly loads) and am more in a 'clean and tidy' mode where I know that a change I'm making will probably only affect a particular subset of the tests. With that in mind it's a bit of a drag sitting there after I make a change and having to wait for NCrunch to run everything. I could disable it and manually run the tests I know are impacted, but then what's the point of having NCrunch? If the 'impacted only' engine mode worked well this problem would go away, but that's not what I found. Secondly, what's wrong with this picture? I've got 445 tests, and NCrunch has queued 455 tests to run. So it's queued duplicate tests - in this quickly-screenshotted case 10, but I've seen the total queue get up over 600. If I'm already itchy waiting for it to run all my tests against a change I know only affects a few, I'm even itchier waiting for it to run a lot of them twice. Problems With Code Coverage NCrunch marks each line of code with a dot to say if it's covered by tests - a black dot says the line isn't covered, a red dot says it's covered but at least one of the covering tests is failing, and a green dot means all the covering tests pass. It also calculates coverage statistics for you. Unfortunately, there's a couple of flaws in the coverage. Firstly, it doesn't support ExcludeFromCodeCoverage attributes. This feature has been requested and I expect will be included in a later release, but right now it doesn't. So this: ...is counted as a non-covered line, and drags your coverage statistics down. Hmph. As well as that, coverage of certain types of code is missed. This: ...is definitely covered. I am 100% absolutely certain it is, by several tests. NCrunch doesn't pick it up, down go my coverage statistics. I've had NCrunch find genuinely uncovered code which I've been able to remove, and that's great, but what's the coverage percentage on this project? Umm... I don't know. Conclusion None of these are major, tool-crippling problems, and I expect NCrunch to get much better in future releases. The current version has some great features, like this: ...that's a line of code with a failing test covering it, and NCrunch can run that failing test and take me to that line exquisitely easily. That's awesome! I'd happily pay for a tool that can do that. But here's the thing: NCrunch (currently) costs $159 (about £100) for a personal licence and $289 (about £180) for a commercial one. I'm not sure which one I'd need as my project is a personal one which I'm intending to open-source, but I'm a professional, self-employed developer, but in any case - that seems like a lot of money for an imperfect tool. If it did everything it's advertised to do more or less perfectly I'd consider it, but it doesn't. So no more NCrunch for me.

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• Constrained A* problem

  - by Ragekit

  I've got a little problem with an A* algorithm that I need to Constrained a little bit. Basically : I use an A* to find the shortest path between 2 randomly placed room in 3D space, and then build a corridor between them. The problem I found is that sometimes it makes chimney like corridors that are not ideal, so I constrict the A* so that if the last movement was up or down, you go sideways. Everything is fine, but in some corner cases, it fails to find a path (when there is obviously one). Like here between the blue and red dot : (i'm in unity btw, but i don't think it matters) Here is the code of the actual A* (a bit long, and some redundency) while(current != goal) { //add stair up / stair down foreach(Node<GridUnit> test in current.Neighbors) { if(!test.Data.empty && test != goal) continue; //bug at arrival; if(test == goal && penul !=null) { Vector3 currentDiff = current.Data.bounds.center - test.Data.bounds.center; if(!Mathf.Approximately(currentDiff.y,0)) { //wanna drop on the last if(!coplanar(test.Data.bounds.center,current.Data.bounds.center,current.Data.parentUnit.bounds.center,to.Data.bounds.center)) { continue; } else { if(Mathf.Approximately(to.Data.bounds.center.x, current.Data.parentUnit.bounds.center.x) && Mathf.Approximately(to.Data.bounds.center.z, current.Data.parentUnit.bounds.center.z)) { continue; } } } } if(current.Data.parentUnit != null) { Vector3 previousDiff = current.Data.parentUnit.bounds.center - current.Data.bounds.center; Vector3 currentDiff = current.Data.bounds.center - test.Data.bounds.center; if(!Mathf.Approximately(previousDiff.y,0)) { if(!Mathf.Approximately(currentDiff.y,0)) { //you wanna drop now : continue; } if(current.Data.parentUnit.parentUnit != null) { if(!coplanar(test.Data.bounds.center,current.Data.bounds.center,current.Data.parentUnit.bounds.center,current.Data.parentUnit.parentUnit.bounds.center)) { continue; }else { if(Mathf.Approximately(test.Data.bounds.center.x, current.Data.parentUnit.parentUnit.bounds.center.x) && Mathf.Approximately(test.Data.bounds.center.z, current.Data.parentUnit.parentUnit.bounds.center.z)) { continue; } } } } } g = current.Data.g + HEURISTIC(current.Data,test.Data); h = HEURISTIC(test.Data,goal.Data); f = g + h; if(open.Contains(test) || closed.Contains(test)) { if(test.Data.f > f) { //found a shorter path going passing through that point test.Data.f = f; test.Data.g = g; test.Data.h = h; test.Data.parentUnit = current.Data; } } else { //jamais rencontré test.Data.f = f; test.Data.h = h; test.Data.g = g; test.Data.parentUnit = current.Data; open.Add(test); } } closed.Add (current); if(open.Count == 0) { Debug.Log("nothingfound"); //nothing more to test no path found, stay to from; List<GridUnit> r = new List<GridUnit>(); r.Add(from.Data); return r; } //sort open from small to biggest travel cost open.Sort(delegate(Node<GridUnit> x, Node<GridUnit> y) { return (int)(x.Data.f-y.Data.f); }); //get the smallest travel cost node; Node<GridUnit> smallest = open[0]; current = smallest; open.RemoveAt(0); } //build the path going backward; List<GridUnit> ret = new List<GridUnit>(); if(penul != null) { ret.Insert(0,to.Data); } GridUnit cur = goal.Data; ret.Insert(0,cur); do{ cur = cur.parentUnit; ret.Insert(0,cur); } while(cur != from.Data); return ret; You see at the start of the foreach i constrict the A* like i said. If you have any insight it would be cool. Thanks

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• Windows 8 for productivity?

  - by Charles Young

  At long last I’ve started using Windows 8.  I boot from a VHD on which I have installed Office, Visio, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc.  For a week, now, I’ve been happily writing code and documents and using Visio and PowerPoint.  I am, very much, a ‘productivity’ user rather than a content consumer.   I spend my days flitting between countless windows and browser tabs displayed across dual monitors.  I need to access a lot of different functionality and information in as fluid a fashion as possible. With that in mind, and like so many others, I was worried about Windows 8.  The Metro interface is primarily about content consumption on touch-enabled screens, and not really geared for people like me sitting in front of an 8-core non-touch laptop and an additional Samsung monitor.  I still use a mouse, not my finger.  And I create more than I consume. Clearly, Windows 8 won’t be viable for people like me unless Metro keeps out of my hair when using productivity and development tools.  With this in mind, I had long expected Microsoft to provide some mechanism for switching Metro off.  There was a registry hack in last year’s Developer Preview, but this capability has been removed.   That’s brave.  So, how have things worked out so far? Well, I am really quite surprised.  When I played with the Developer Preview last year, it was clear that Metro was unfinished and didn’t play well enough with the desktop.  Obviously I expected things to improve, but the context switching from desktop to full-screen seemed a heavy burden to place on users.  That sense of abrupt change hasn’t entirely gone away (how could it), but after a few days, I can’t say that I find it burdensome or irritating.   I’ve got used very quickly to ‘gesturing’ with my mouse at the bottom or top right corners of the screen to move between applications, using the Windows key to toggle the Start screen and generally finding my way around.   I am surprised at how effective the Start screen is, given the rather basic grouping features it provides.  Of course, I had to take control of it and sort things the way I want.  If anything, though, the Start screen provides a better navigation and application launcher tool than the old Start menu. What I didn’t expect was the way that Metro enhances the productivity story.  As I write this, I’ve got my desktop open with a maximised Word window.  However, the desktop extends only across about 85% of the width of my screen.  On the left hand side, I have a column that displays the new Metro email client.  This is currently showing me a list of emails for my main work account.  I can flip easily between different accounts and read my email within that same column.  As I work on documents, I want to be able to monitor my inbox with a quick glance. The desktop, of course, has its own snap feature.  I could run the desktop full screen and bring up Outlook and Word side by side.  However, this doesn’t begin to approach the convenience of snapping the Metro email client.  Consider that when I snap a window on the desktop, it initially takes up 50% of the screen.  Outlook doesn’t really know anything about snap, and doesn’t adjust to make effective use of the limited screen estate.  Even at 50% screen width, it is difficult to use, so forget about trying to use it in a Metro fashion. In any case, I am left with the prospect of having to manually adjust everything to view my email effectively alongside Word.  Worse, there is nothing stopping another window from overlapping and obscuring my email.  It becomes a struggle to keep sight of email as it arrives.  Of course, there is always ‘toast’ to notify me when things arrive, but if Outlook is obscured, this just feels intrusive. The beauty of the Metro snap feature is that my email reader now exists outside of my desktop.   The Metro app has been crafted to work well in the fixed width column as well as in full-screen.  It cannot be obscured by overlapping windows.  I still get notifications if I wish.  More importantly, it is clear that careful attention has been given to how things work when moving between applications when ‘snapped’.  If I decide, say to flick over to the Metro newsreader to catch up with current affairs, my desktop, rather than my email client, obligingly makes way for the reader.  With a simple gesture and click, or alternatively by pressing Windows-Tab, my desktop reappears. Another pleasant surprise is the way Windows 8 handles dual monitors.  It’s not just the fact that both screens now display the desktop task bar.  It’s that I can so easily move between Metro and the desktop on either screen.  I can only have Metro on one screen at a time which makes entire sense given the ‘full-screen’ nature of Metro apps.  Using dual monitors feels smoother and easier than previous versions of Windows. Overall then, I’m enjoying the Windows 8 improvements.  Strangely, for all the hype (“Windows reimagined”, etc.), my perception as a ‘productivity’ user is more one of evolution than revolution.  It all feels very familiar, but just better.

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• 2012&ndash;The End Of The World Review

  - by Tim Murphy

  The end of the world must be coming.  Not because the Mayan calendar says so, but because Microsoft is innovating more than Apple.  It has been a crazy year, with pundits declaring not that the end of the world is coming, but that the end of Microsoft is coming.  Let’s take a look at what 2012 has brought us. The beginning of year is a blur.  I managed to get to TechEd in June which was the first time that I got to take a deep dive into Windows 8 and many other things that had been announced in 2011.  The promise I saw in these products was really encouraging.  The thought of being able to run Windows 8 from a thumb drive or have Hyper-V native to the OS told me that at least for developers good things were coming. I finally got my feet wet with Windows 8 with the developer preview just prior to the RTM.  While the initial experience was a bit of a culture shock I quickly grew to love it.  The media still seems to hold little love for the “reimagined” platform, but I think that once people spend some time with it they will enjoy the experience and what the FUD mongers say will fade into the background.  With the launch of the OS we finally got a look at the Surface.  I think this is a bold entry into the tablet market.  While I wish it was a little more affordable I am already starting to see them in the wild being used by non-techies. I was waiting for Windows Phone 8 at least as much as Windows 8, probably more.  The new hardware, better marketing and new OS features I think are going to finally push us to the point of having a real presence in the smartphone market.  I am seeing a number of iPhone users picking up a Nokia Lumia 920 and getting rid of their brand new iPhone 5.  The only real debacle that I saw around the launch was when they held back the SDK from general developers. Shortly after the launch events came Build 2012.  I was extremely disappointed that I didn’t make it to this year’s Build.  Even if they weren’t handing out Surface and Lumia devices I think the atmosphere and content were something that really needed to be experience in person.  Hopefully there will be a Build next year and it’s schedule will be announced soon.  As you would expect Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 development were the mainstay of the conference, but improvements in Azure also played a key role.  This movement of services to the cloud will continue and we need to understand where it best fits into the solutions we build. Lower on the radar this year were Office 2013, SQL Server 2012, and Windows Server 2012.  Their glory stolen by the consumer OS and hardware announcements, these new releases are no less important.  Companies will see significant improvements in performance and capabilities if they upgrade.  At TechEd they had shown some of the new features of Windows Server 2012 around hardware integration and Hyper-V performance which absolutely blew me away.  It is our job to bring these important improvements to our company’s attention so that they can be leveraged. Personally, the consulting business in 2012 was the busiest it has been in a long time.  More companies were ready to attack new projects after several years of putting them on the back burner.  I also worked to bring back momentum to the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Both the community and clients are excited about the new technologies that have come out in 2012 and now it is time to deliver. What does 2013 have in store.  I don’t see it be quite as exciting as 2012.  Microsoft will be releasing the Surface Pro in January and it seems that we will see more frequent OS update for Windows.  There are rumors that we may see a Surface phone in 2013.  It has also been announced that there will finally be a rework of the XBox next fall.  The new year will also be a time for us in the development community to take advantage of these new tools and devices.  After all, it is what we build on top of these platforms that will attract more consumers and corporations to using them. Just as I am 99.999% sure that the world is not going to end this year, I am also sure that Microsoft will move on and that most of this negative backlash from the media is actually fear and jealousy.  In the end I think we have a promising year ahead of us. del.icio.us Tags: Microsoft,Pundits,Mayans,Windows 8,Windows Phone 8,Surface

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• The Dreaded Startup Repair Loop on Win 7

  - by HighAltitudeCoder

  For most people, upgrading to Windows 7 has been a relatively painless process.  Not me.  I am in the unlucky 1% or less who had a somewhat less pleasant experience.  First, I cloned my entire onto a larger (and much faster) solid state hard drive, only experiencing minimal problems. Then, I bought the Retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate, took a deep breath and... oh yeah, I almost forgot - BACK UP THE COMPUTER.  The next morning I upgraded to Win 7 and everything seemed fine, until... I rebooted the system, the nice Windows 7 launch graphics come up, it's about to launch and AWWW, are you kidding me?!?!  Back to the BIOS splash screen?  Next comes the sequence of failure - attempt repair - unable to repair - do you want to wipe your hard drive decisions. Because I purchased the retail version, a number is provided where I could call Microsoft Tech support.  When I did, they instructed me to click "Install" from my installation CD, which did not work.  When I tried the "Upgrade" option, it reaches an impasse, telling you that yoiu have a newer version of Win 7, and thus cannot Upgrade.  If you choose "Install" you willl lose everything... files, programs, EVERYTHING.  Or at least this is what it tells you.  I was not willing to take the risk. To make things worse, I had installed a new antivirus software application before I realized my system was unstable (Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security), and this was causing additional problems. One interesting thing, and the only saving grace as it turns out, was that my system WOULD successfully reboot into the OS if I chose to restart it, rather than shut it down.  If I chose to shut down, I would have to go through the loop again until I was given the option to restart. As it turned out, I needed to update my BIOS.  I assumed that since I had updated my BIOS a long time ago to settings that were stable under Windows Vista Ultimate x64, I incorrectly expected Win 7 to adopt the same settings and didn't expect there to be any problems.  WRONG. My BIOS had a setting to halt the boot cycle if various kinds of errors were detected.  Windows Vista didn't care about this, but forget it under Windows 7.  I turned immediately corrected that BIOS setting.  Next, there were the two separate BIOS settings: enable USB mouse and enable USB keyboard.  The only sequence of events that would work were to start my reboot process over from stratch with a hard-wired non-usb keyboard and mouse.  Whent the system booted under these settings, it doesn't detect any errors due to either the mouse or keyboard, and actually booted for the first time in a long while (let me tell ya, that's an amazing experience after fiddling with settings for two entire weekends!) Next step: leave your old mouse and keyboard connected, but also connect your other two devices (mouse, keyboard) that use USB connections.  During the boot cycle, the operating system will not fail due to missing requirements during startup, and it will then pick up the new drivers necessary to use your new hardware. If you think you are in the clear here, you are wrong.  The next VERY IMPORTANT step is to remember to change your settings in the BIOS upon next startup.  Specifically, yoiu will need ot change your BIOS to enable USB mouse and enable USB keyboard input.  If you don't, Windows will detect an incompatibility upon the next startup, and you will be stuck once again in the endless cycle of reboot/Startup Repair/reboot/Startup Repair, without ever reaching a successful boot. Here's the thing - the BIOS and the drivers registered in Win 7 need to match.  If they don't, you're going to lose another weekend worrying and fiddling, all the while wondering if you've permanently damaged your hard drive beyond repair. (Sigh).  In the end, things worked out.  I must note that it is saddening to see how many posts there are out there that recommend just doing a clean install, as if it's the only option.  How many countless poor souls have lost their data, their backups, their pictures and videos, all for nothing other than the fact that the person giving advice just didn't know what to do at that point? My advice to you, try having a look at your BIOS settings first and making sure Win 7 can find your BIOS settings, and also disabling in your BIOS anything that might halt your system boot-up process if it encounters errors.

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• Determining the angle to fire a shot when target and shooter moves, and bullet moves with shooter velocity added in

  - by Azaral

  I saw this question: Predicting enemy position in order to have an object lead its target and followed the link in the answer to stack overflow. In the stack overflow page I used the 2nd answer, the one that is a large mathematical derivation. My situation is a little different though. My first question though is will the answer provided in the stack overflow page even work to begin with, assuming the original circumstances of moving target and stationary shooter. My situation is a little different than that situation. My target moves, the shooter moves, and the bullets from the shooter start off with the velocities in x and y added to the bullets' x and y velocities. If you are sliding to the right, the bullets will remain in front of you as you move so as long as your velocity remains constant. What I'm trying to do is to get the enemy to be able to determine where they need to shoot in order to hit the player. Unless the player and enemy is stationary, the velocity from the ship adding to the velocity of the bullets will cause a miss. I'd rather like to prevent that. I used the formula in the stack overflow answer and did what I thought were the appropriate adjustments. I've been banging at this for the last four hours and I just can't make it click. It is probably something really simple and boneheaded that I am missing (that seems to be a lot of my problems lately). Here is the solution presented from the stack overflow answer: It boils down to solving a quadratic equation of the form: a * sqr(x) + b * x + c == 0 Note that by sqr I mean square, as opposed to square root. Use the following values: a := sqr(target.velocityX) + sqr(target.velocityY) - sqr(projectile_speed) b := 2 * (target.velocityX * (target.startX - cannon.X) + target.velocityY * (target.startY - cannon.Y)) c := sqr(target.startX - cannon.X) + sqr(target.startY - cannon.Y) Now we can look at the discriminant to determine if we have a possible solution. disc := sqr(b) - 4 * a * c If the discriminant is less than 0, forget about hitting your target -- your projectile can never get there in time. Otherwise, look at two candidate solutions: t1 := (-b + sqrt(disc)) / (2 * a) t2 := (-b - sqrt(disc)) / (2 * a) Note that if disc == 0 then t1 and t2 are equal. If there are no other considerations such as intervening obstacles, simply choose the smaller positive value. (Negative t values would require firing backward in time to use!) Substitute the chosen t value back into the target's position equations to get the coordinates of the leading point you should be aiming at: aim.X := t * target.velocityX + target.startX aim.Y := t * target.velocityY + target.startY Here is my code, after being corrected by Sam Hocevar (thank you again for your help!). It still doesn't work. For some reason it never enters the section of code inside the if(disc = 0) (obviously because it is always less than zero but...). However, if I plug the numbers from my game log on the enemy and player positions and velocities it outputs a valid firing solution. I have looked at the code side by side a couple of times now and I can't find any differences. There has got to be something simple I'm missing here. If someone else could look at this code and determine what is going on here I'd appreciate it. I know it's not going through that section because if it were, shouldShoot would become true and the enemy would be blasting away at the player. This section calls the function in question, CalculateShootHeading() if(shouldMove) { UseEngines(); } x += xVelocity; y += yVelocity; CalculateShootHeading(); if(shouldShoot) { ShootWeapons(); } UpdateWeapons(); This is CalculateShootHeading(). This is inside the enemy class so x and y are the enemy's x and y and the same with velocity. One output from my game log gives Player X = 2108, Player Y = -180.956, Player X velocity = 10.9949, Player Y Velocity = -6.26017, Enemy X = 1988.31, Enemy Y = -339.051, Enemy X velocity = 1.81666, Enemy Y velocity = -9.67762, 0 enemy projectiles. The output from the console tester is Bullet position = 2210.49, -239.313 and Player Position = 2210.49, -239.313. This doesn't make any sense. The only thing that could be different is the code or the input into my function in the game and I've checked that and I don't think that it is wrong as it's updated before this and never changed. float const bulletSpeed = 30.f; float const dx = playerX - x; float const dy = playerY - y; float const vx = playerXVelocity - xVelocity; float const vy = playerYVelocity - yVelocity; float const a = vx * vx + vy * vy - bulletSpeed * bulletSpeed; float const b = 2.f * (vx * dx + vy * dy); float const c = dx * dx + dy * dy; float const disc = b * b - 4.f * a * c; shouldShoot = false; if (disc >= 0.f) { float t0 = (-b - std::sqrt(disc)) / (2.f * a); float t1 = (-b + std::sqrt(disc)) / (2.f * a); if (t0 < 0.f || (t1 < t0 && t1 >= 0.f)) { t0 = t1; } if (t0 >= 0.f) { float shootx = vx + dx / t0; float shooty = vy + dy / t0; heading = std::atan2(shooty, shootx) * RAD2DEGREE; } shouldShoot = true; }

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• Local LINQtoSQL Database For Your Windows Phone 7 Application

  - by Tim Murphy

  There aren’t many applications that are of value without having some for of data store.  In Windows Phone development we have a few options.  You can store text directly to isolated storage.  You can also use a number of third party libraries to create or mimic databases in isolated storage.  With Mango we gained the ability to have a native .NET database approach which uses LINQ to SQL.  In this article I will try to bring together the components needed to implement this last type of data store and fill in some of the blanks that I think other articles have left out. Defining A Database The first things you are going to need to do is define classes that represent your tables and a data context class that is used as the overall database definition.  The table class consists of column definitions as you would expect.  They can have relationships and constraints as with any relational DBMS.  Below is an example of a table definition. First you will need to add some assembly references to the code file. using System.ComponentModel;using System.Data.Linq;using System.Data.Linq.Mapping; You can then add the table class and its associated columns.  It needs to implement INotifyPropertyChanged and INotifyPropertyChanging.  Each level of the class needs to be decorated with the attribute appropriate for that part of the definition.  Where the class represents the table the properties represent the columns.  In this example you will see that the column is marked as a primary key and not nullable with a an auto generated value. You will also notice that the in the column property’s set method It uses the NotifyPropertyChanging and NotifyPropertyChanged methods in order to make sure that the proper events are fired. [Table]public class MyTable: INotifyPropertyChanged, INotifyPropertyChanging{ public event PropertyChangedEventHandler PropertyChanged; private void NotifyPropertyChanged(string propertyName) { if(PropertyChanged != null) { PropertyChanged(this, new PropertyChangedEventArgs(propertyName)); } } public event PropertyChangingEventHandler PropertyChanging; private void NotifyPropertyChanging(string propertyName) { if(PropertyChanging != null) { PropertyChanging(this, new PropertyChangingEventArgs(propertyName)); } } private int _TableKey; [Column(IsPrimaryKey = true, IsDbGenerated = true, DbType = "INT NOT NULL Identity", CanBeNull = false, AutoSync = AutoSync.OnInsert)] public int TableKey { get { return _TableKey; } set { NotifyPropertyChanging("TableKey"); _TableKey = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("TableKey"); } } The last part of the database definition that needs to be created is the data context.  This is a simple class that takes an isolated storage location connection string its constructor and then instantiates tables as public properties. public class MyDataContext: DataContext{ public MyDataContext(string connectionString): base(connectionString) { MyRecords = this.GetTable<MyTable>(); } public Table<MyTable> MyRecords;} Creating A New Database Instance Now that we have a database definition it is time to create an instance of the data context within our Windows Phone app.  When your app fires up it should check if the database already exists and create an instance if it does not.  I would suggest that this be part of the constructor of your ViewModel. db = new MyDataContext(connectionString);if(!db.DatabaseExists()){ db.CreateDatabase();} The next thing you have to know is how the connection string for isolated storage should be constructed.  The main sticking point I have found is that the database cannot be created unless the file mode is read/write.  You may have different connection strings but the initial one needs to be similar to the following. string connString = "Data Source = 'isostore:/MyApp.sdf'; File Mode = read write"; Using you database Now that you have done all the up front work it is time to put the database to use.  To make your life a little easier and keep proper separation between your view and your viewmodel you should add a couple of methods to the viewmodel.  These will do the CRUD work of your application.  What you will notice is that the SubmitChanges method is the secret sauce in all of the methods that change data. private myDataContext myDb;private ObservableCollection<MyTable> _viewRecords;public ObservableCollection<MyTable> ViewRecords{ get { return _viewRecords; } set { _viewRecords = value; NotifyPropertyChanged("ViewRecords"); }}public void LoadMedstarDbData(){ var tempItems = from MyTable myRecord in myDb.LocalScans select myRecord; ViewRecords = new ObservableCollection<MyTable>(tempItems);}public void SaveChangesToDb(){ myDb.SubmitChanges();}public void AddMyTableItem(MyTable newScan){ myDb.LocalScans.InsertOnSubmit(newScan); myDb.SubmitChanges();}public void DeleteMyTableItem(MyTable newScan){ myDb.LocalScans.DeleteOnSubmit(newScan); myDb.SubmitChanges();} Updating existing database What happens when you need to change the structure of your database?  Unfortunately you have to add code to your application that checks the version of the database which over time will create some pollution in your codes base.  On the other hand it does give you control of the update.  In this example you will see the DatabaseSchemaUpdater in action.  Assuming we added a “Notes” field to the MyTable structure, the following code will check if the database is the latest version and add the field if it isn’t. if(!myDb.DatabaseExists()){ myDb.CreateDatabase();}else{ DatabaseSchemaUpdater dbUdater = myDb.CreateDatabaseSchemaUpdater(); if(dbUdater.DatabaseSchemaVersion < 2) { dbUdater.AddColumn<MyTable>("Notes"); dbUdater.DatabaseSchemaVersion = 2; dbUdater.Execute(); }} Summary This approach does take a fairly large amount of work, but I think the end product is robust and very native for .NET developers.  It turns out to be worth the investment. del.icio.us Tags: Windows Phone,Windows Phone 7,LINQ to SQL,LINQ,Database,Isolated Storage

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• How to move a rectangle properly?

  - by bodycountPP

  I recently started to learn OpenGL. Right now I finished the first chapter of the "OpenGL SuperBible". There were two examples. The first had the complete code and showed how to draw a simple triangle. The second example is supposed to show how to move a rectangle using SpecialKeys. The only code provided for this example was the SpecialKeys method. I still tried to implement it but I had two problems. In the previous example I declared and instaciated vVerts in the SetupRC() method. Now as it is also used in the SpecialKeys() method, I moved the declaration and instantiation to the top of the code. Is this proper c++ practice? I copied the part where vertex positions are recalculated from the book, but I had to pick the vertices for the rectangle on my own. So now every time I press a key for the first time the rectangle's upper left vertex is moved to (-0,5:-0.5). This ok because of GLfloat blockX = vVerts[0]; //Upper left X GLfloat blockY = vVerts[7]; // Upper left Y But I also think that this is the reason why my rectangle is shifted in the beginning. After the first time a key was pressed everything works just fine. Here is my complete code I hope you can help me on those two points. GLBatch squareBatch; GLShaderManager shaderManager; //Load up a triangle GLfloat vVerts[] = {-0.5f,0.5f,0.0f, 0.5f,0.5f,0.0f, 0.5f,-0.5f,0.0f, -0.5f,-0.5f,0.0f}; //Window has changed size, or has just been created. //We need to use the window dimensions to set the viewport and the projection matrix. void ChangeSize(int w, int h) { glViewport(0,0,w,h); } //Called to draw the scene. void RenderScene(void) { //Clear the window with the current clearing color glClear(GL_COLOR_BUFFER_BIT|GL_DEPTH_BUFFER_BIT|GL_STENCIL_BUFFER_BIT); GLfloat vRed[] = {1.0f,0.0f,0.0f,1.0f}; shaderManager.UseStockShader(GLT_SHADER_IDENTITY,vRed); squareBatch.Draw(); //perform the buffer swap to display the back buffer glutSwapBuffers(); } //This function does any needed initialization on the rendering context. //This is the first opportunity to do any OpenGL related Tasks. void SetupRC() { //Blue Background glClearColor(0.0f,0.0f,1.0f,1.0f); shaderManager.InitializeStockShaders(); squareBatch.Begin(GL_QUADS,4); squareBatch.CopyVertexData3f(vVerts); squareBatch.End(); } //Respond to arrow keys by moving the camera frame of reference void SpecialKeys(int key,int x,int y) { GLfloat stepSize = 0.025f; GLfloat blockSize = 0.5f; GLfloat blockX = vVerts[0]; //Upper left X GLfloat blockY = vVerts[7]; // Upper left Y if(key == GLUT_KEY_UP) { blockY += stepSize; } if(key == GLUT_KEY_DOWN){blockY -= stepSize;} if(key == GLUT_KEY_LEFT){blockX -= stepSize;} if(key == GLUT_KEY_RIGHT){blockX += stepSize;} //Recalculate vertex positions vVerts[0] = blockX; vVerts[1] = blockY - blockSize*2; vVerts[3] = blockX + blockSize * 2; vVerts[4] = blockY - blockSize *2; vVerts[6] = blockX+blockSize*2; vVerts[7] = blockY; vVerts[9] = blockX; vVerts[10] = blockY; squareBatch.CopyVertexData3f(vVerts); glutPostRedisplay(); } //Main entry point for GLUT based programs int main(int argc, char** argv) { //Sets the working directory. Not really needed gltSetWorkingDirectory(argv[0]); //Passes along the command-line parameters and initializes the GLUT library. glutInit(&argc,argv); //Tells the GLUT library what type of display mode to use, when creating the window. //Double buffered window, RGBA-Color mode,depth-buffer as part of our display, stencil buffer also available glutInitDisplayMode(GLUT_DOUBLE|GLUT_RGBA|GLUT_DEPTH|GLUT_STENCIL); //Window size glutInitWindowSize(800,600); glutCreateWindow("MoveRect"); glutReshapeFunc(ChangeSize); glutDisplayFunc(RenderScene); glutSpecialFunc(SpecialKeys); //initialize GLEW library GLenum err = glewInit(); //Check that nothing goes wrong with the driver initialization before we try and do any rendering. if(GLEW_OK != err) { fprintf(stderr,"Glew Error: %s\n",glewGetErrorString); return 1; } SetupRC(); glutMainLoop(); return 0; }

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• Deadlock Analysis in NetBeans 8

  - by Geertjan

  Lock contention profiling is very important in multi-core environments. Lock contention occurs when a thread tries to acquire a lock while another thread is holding it, forcing it to wait. Lock contentions result in deadlocks. Multi-core environments have even more threads to deal with, causing an increased likelihood of lock contentions. In NetBeans 8, the NetBeans Profiler has new support for displaying detailed information about lock contention, i.e., the relationship between the threads that are locked. After all, whenever there's a deadlock, in any aspect of interaction, e.g., a political deadlock, it helps to be able to point to the responsible party or, at least, the order in which events happened resulting in the deadlock. As an example, let's take the handy Deadlock sample code from the Java Tutorial and look at the tools in NetBeans IDE for identifying and analyzing the code. The description of the deadlock is nice: Alphonse and Gaston are friends, and great believers in courtesy. A strict rule of courtesy is that when you bow to a friend, you must remain bowed until your friend has a chance to return the bow. Unfortunately, this rule does not account for the possibility that two friends might bow to each other at the same time. To help identify who bowed first or, at least, the order in which bowing took place, right-click the file and choose "Profile File". In the Profile Task Manager, make the choices below: When you have clicked Run, the Threads window shows the two threads are blocked, i.e., the red "Monitor" lines tell you that the related threads are blocked while trying to enter a synchronized method or block: But which thread is holding the lock? Which one is blocked by the other? The above visualization does not answer these questions. New in NetBeans 8 is that you can analyze the deadlock in the new Lock Contention window to determine which of the threads is responsible for the lock: Here is the code that simulates the lock, very slightly tweaked at the end, where I use "setName" on the threads, so that it's even easier to analyze the threads in the relevant NetBeans tools. Also, I converted the anonymous inner Runnables to lambda expressions. package org.demo; public class Deadlock { static class Friend { private final String name; public Friend(String name) { this.name = name; } public String getName() { return this.name; } public synchronized void bow(Friend bower) { System.out.format("%s: %s" + " has bowed to me!%n", this.name, bower.getName()); bower.bowBack(this); } public synchronized void bowBack(Friend bower) { System.out.format("%s: %s" + " has bowed back to me!%n", this.name, bower.getName()); } } public static void main(String[] args) { final Friend alphonse = new Friend("Alphonse"); final Friend gaston = new Friend("Gaston"); Thread t1 = new Thread(() -> { alphonse.bow(gaston); }); t1.setName("Alphonse bows to Gaston"); t1.start(); Thread t2 = new Thread(() -> { gaston.bow(alphonse); }); t2.setName("Gaston bows to Alphonse"); t2.start(); } } In the above code, it's extremely likely that both threads will block when they attempt to invoke bowBack. Neither block will ever end, because each thread is waiting for the other to exit bow. Note: As you can see, it really helps to use "Thread.setName", everywhere, wherever you're creating a Thread in your code, since the tools in the IDE become a lot more meaningful when you've defined the name of the thread because otherwise the Profiler will be forced to use thread names like "thread-5" and "thread-6", i.e., based on the order of the threads, which is kind of meaningless. (Normally, except in a simple demo scenario like the above, you're not starting the threads in the same class, so you have no idea at all what "thread-5" and "thread-6" mean because you don't know the order in which the threads were started.) Slightly more compact: Thread t1 = new Thread(() -> { alphonse.bow(gaston); },"Alphonse bows to Gaston"); t1.start(); Thread t2 = new Thread(() -> { gaston.bow(alphonse); },"Gaston bows to Alphonse"); t2.start();

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• Can't control connection bit rate using iwconfig with Atheros TL-WN821N (AR7010)

  - by Paul H

  I'm trying to reduce the connection bit rate on my Atheros TP-Link TL-WN821N v3 usb wifi adapter due to frequent instability issues (reported connection speed goes down to 1Mb/s and I have to physically reconnect the adapter to regain a connection). I know this is a common problem with this device, and I have tried everything I can think of to fix it, including using drivers from linux-backports; compiling and installing a custom firmware (following instructions on https://wiki.debian.org/ath9k_htc#fw-free) and (as a last resort) using ndiswrapper. When using ndiswrapper, the wifi adapter is stable and operates in g mode at 54Mb/s (whilst when using the default ath9k_htc module, the adapter connects in n mode and the bit rate fluctuates constantly). Unfortunately, with this setup I have to run my processor using only one core, since using SMP with ndiswrapper causes a kernel oops on my system. So I want to lock my bit rate to 54Mb/s (or less, if need be) for connection stability, using the ath9k_htc module. I've tried 'sudo iwconfig wlan0 rate 54M'; the command runs with no error but when I check the bit rate with 'sudo iwlist wlan0 bitrate' the command returns: wlan0 unknown bit-rate information. Current Bit Rate:78 Mb/s Any ideas? Here's some info (hopefully relevant) on my setup: Xubuntu (12.04.3) 64bit (kernel 3.2.0-55.85-generic) using Network Manager. My Router is from Virgin Media, the VMDG480. lshw -C network : *-network description: Wireless interface physical id: 1 bus info: usb@1:4 logical name: wlan0 serial: 74:ea:3a:8f:16:b6 capabilities: ethernet physical wireless configuration: broadcast=yes driver=ath9k_htc driverversion=3.2.0-55 firmware=1.3 ip=192.168.0.9 link=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bgn lsusb -v: Bus 001 Device 003: ID 0cf3:7015 Atheros Communications, Inc. TP-Link TL-WN821N v3 802.11n [Atheros AR7010+AR9287] Device Descriptor: bLength 18 bDescriptorType 1 bcdUSB 2.00 bDeviceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class bDeviceSubClass 255 Vendor Specific Subclass bDeviceProtocol 255 Vendor Specific Protocol bMaxPacketSize0 64 idVendor 0x0cf3 Atheros Communications, Inc. idProduct 0x7015 TP-Link TL-WN821N v3 802.11n [Atheros AR7010+AR9287] bcdDevice 2.02 iManufacturer 16 ATHEROS iProduct 32 UB95 iSerial 48 12345 bNumConfigurations 1 Configuration Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 2 wTotalLength 60 bNumInterfaces 1 bConfigurationValue 1 iConfiguration 0 bmAttributes 0x80 (Bus Powered) MaxPower 500mA Interface Descriptor: bLength 9 bDescriptorType 4 bInterfaceNumber 0 bAlternateSetting 0 bNumEndpoints 6 bInterfaceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class bInterfaceSubClass 0 bInterfaceProtocol 0 iInterface 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x01 EP 1 OUT bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes bInterval 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x82 EP 2 IN bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes bInterval 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x83 EP 3 IN bmAttributes 3 Transfer Type Interrupt Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes bInterval 1 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x04 EP 4 OUT bmAttributes 3 Transfer Type Interrupt Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0040 1x 64 bytes bInterval 1 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x05 EP 5 OUT bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes bInterval 0 Endpoint Descriptor: bLength 7 bDescriptorType 5 bEndpointAddress 0x06 EP 6 OUT bmAttributes 2 Transfer Type Bulk Synch Type None Usage Type Data wMaxPacketSize 0x0200 1x 512 bytes bInterval 0 Device Qualifier (for other device speed): bLength 10 bDescriptorType 6 bcdUSB 2.00 bDeviceClass 255 Vendor Specific Class bDeviceSubClass 255 Vendor Specific Subclass bDeviceProtocol 255 Vendor Specific Protocol bMaxPacketSize0 64 bNumConfigurations 1 Device Status: 0x0000 (Bus Powered) iwlist wlan0 scanning: wlan0 Scan completed : Cell 01 - Address: C4:3D:C7:3A:1F:5D Channel:1 Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1) Quality=37/70 Signal level=-73 dBm Encryption key:on ESSID:"my essid" Bit Rates:1 Mb/s; 2 Mb/s; 5.5 Mb/s; 11 Mb/s; 18 Mb/s 24 Mb/s; 36 Mb/s; 54 Mb/s Bit Rates:6 Mb/s; 9 Mb/s; 12 Mb/s; 48 Mb/s Mode:Master Extra:tsf=00000070cca77186 Extra: Last beacon: 5588ms ago IE: Unknown: 0007756E69636F726E IE: Unknown: 010882848B962430486C IE: Unknown: 030101 IE: Unknown: 2A0100 IE: Unknown: 2F0100 IE: IEEE 802.11i/WPA2 Version 1 Group Cipher : TKIP Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: Unknown: 32040C121860 IE: Unknown: 2D1AFC181BFFFF000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: 3D1601080400000000000000000000000000000000000000 IE: Unknown: DD7E0050F204104A0001101044000102103B00010310470010F99C335D7BAC57FB00137DFA79600220102100074E657467656172102300074E6574676561721024000631323334353610420007303030303030311054000800060050F20400011011000743473331303144100800022008103C0001011049000600372A000120 IE: Unknown: DD090010180203F02C0000 IE: WPA Version 1 Group Cipher : TKIP Pairwise Ciphers (2) : CCMP TKIP Authentication Suites (1) : PSK IE: Unknown: DD180050F2020101800003A4000027A4000042435E0062322F00 iwconfig: lo no wireless extensions. wlan0 IEEE 802.11bgn ESSID:"my essid" Mode:Managed Frequency:2.412 GHz Access Point: C4:3D:C7:3A:1F:5D Bit Rate=78 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm Retry long limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off Power Management:off Link Quality=36/70 Signal level=-74 dBm Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0 Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0,

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• The architecture and technologies to use for a secure, fast, reliable and easily scalable web application

  - by DSoul

  ^ For actual questions, skip to the lists down below I understand, that his is a vague topic, but please, before you turn the other way and disregard me, hear me out. I am currently doing research for a web application(I don't know if application is the correct word for it, but I will proceed w/ that for now), that one day might need to be everything mentioned in the title. I am bound by nothing. That means that every language, OS and framework is acceptable, but only if it proves it's usefulness. And if you are going to say, that scalability and speed depend on the code I write for this application, then I agree, but I am just trying to find something, that wouldn't stand in my way later on. I have done quite a bit reading on this subject, but I still don't have a clear picture, to what suits my needs, so I come to you, StackOverflow, to give me directions. I know you all must be wondering what I'm building, but I assure you, that it doesn't matter. I have heard of 12 factor app though, if you have any similar guidelines or what is, to suggest the please, go ahead. For the sake of keeping your answers as open as possible, I'm not gonna provide you my experience regarding anything written in this question. ^ Skippers, start here First off - the weights of the requirements are probably something like that (on a scale of 10): Security - 10 Speed - 5 Reliability (concurrency) - 7.5 Scalability - 10 Speed and concurrency are not a top priority, in the sense, that the program can be CPU intensive, and therefore slow, and only accept a not-that-high number of concurrent users, but both of these factors must be improvable by scaling the system Anyway, here are my questions: How many layers should the application have, so it would be future-proof and could best fulfill the aforementioned requirements? For now, what I have in mind is the most common version: Completely separated front end, that might be a web page or an MMI application or even both. Some middle-ware handling communication between the front and the back end. This is probably a server that communicates w/ the front end via HTTP. How the communication w/ the back end should be handled is probably dependent on the back end. The back end. Something that handles data through resources like DB and etc. and does various computations w/ the data. This, as the highest priority part of the software, must be easily spread to multiple computers later on and have no known security holes. I think ideally the middle-ware should send a request to a queue from where one of the back end processes takes this request, chops it up to smaller parts and buts these parts of the request back onto the same queue as the initial request, after what these parts will be then handled by other back end processes. Something *map-reduce*y, so to say. What frameworks, languages and etc. should these layers use? The technologies used here are not that important at this moment, you can ignore this part for now I've been pointed to node.js for this part. Do you guys know any better alternatives, or have any reasons why I should (not) use node.js for this particular job. I actually have no good idea, what to use for this job, there are too many options out there, so please direct me. This part (and the 2. one also, I think) depend a lot on the OS, so suggest any OSs alongside w/ the technologies/frameworks. Initially, all computers (or 1 for starters) hosting the back end are going to be virtual machines. Please do give suggestions to any part of the question, that you feel you have comprehensive knowledge and/or experience of. And also, point out if you feel that any part of the current set-up means an instant (or even distant) failure or if I missed a very important aspect to consider. I'm not looking for a definitive answer for how to achieve my goals, because there certainly isn't one, for I haven't provided you w/ all the required information. I'm just looking for recommendations and directions on what to look into. Also, bare in mind, that this isn't something that I have to get done quickly, to sell and let it be re-written by the new owner (which, I've been told for multiple times, is what I should aim for). I have all the time in the world and I really just want to learn doing something really high-end. Also, excuse me if my language isn't the best, I'm not a native. Anyway. Thanks in advance to anyone, who takes the time to help me out here. PS. When I do seem to come up w/ a good architecture/design for this project, I will certainly make it an open project and keep you guys up to date w/ it's development. As in what you could have told me earlier and etc. For obvious reasons the very same question got closed on SO, but could you guys still help me?.

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• Who could ask for more with LESS CSS? (Part 1 of 3&ndash;Features)

  - by ToStringTheory

  It wasn’t very long ago that I first began to get into CSS precompilers such as SASS (Syntactically Awesome Stylesheets) and LESS (The Dynamic Stylesheet Language) and I had been hooked on the idea since.  When I finally had a new project come up, I leapt at the opportunity to try out one of these languages. Introduction To be honest, I was hesitant at first to add either framework as I didn’t really know much more than what I had read on their homepages, and I didn’t like the idea of adding too much complexity to a project - I couldn’t guarantee I would be the only person to support it in the future. Thankfully, both of these languages just add things into CSS.  You don’t HAVE to know LESS or SASS to do anything, you can still do your old school CSS, and your output will be the same.  However, when you want to start doing more advanced things such as variables, mixins, and color functions, the functionality is all there for you to utilize. From what I had read, SASS has a few more features than LESS, which is why I initially tried to figure out how to incorporate it into a MVC 4 project. However, through my research, I couldn’t find a way to accomplish this without including some bit of the Ruby on Rails framework on the computer running it, and I hated the fact that I had to do that.  Besides SASS, there is little chance of me getting into the RoR framework, at least in the next couple years.  So in the end, I settled with using LESS. Features So, what can LESS (or SASS) do for you?  There are several reasons I have come to love it in the past few weeks. 1 – Constants Using LESS, you can finally declare a constant and use its value across an entire CSS file. The case that most people would be familiar with is colors.  Wanting to declare one or two color variables that comprise the theme of the site, and not have to retype out their specific hex code each time, but rather a variable name.  What’s great about this is that if you end up having to change it, you only have to change it in one place.  An important thing to note is that you aren’t limited to creating constants just for colors, but for strings and measurements as well. 2 – Inheritance This is a cool feature in my mind for simplicity and organization.  Both LESS and SASS allow you to place selectors within other selectors, and when it is compiled, the languages will break the rules out as necessary and keep the inheritance chain you created in the selectors. Example LESS Code: #header {   h1 {     font-size: 26px;     font-weight: bold;   }   p {     font-size: 12px;     a     {       text-decoration: none;       &:hover {         border-width: 1px       }     }   } } Example Compiled CSS: #header h1 {   font-size: 26px;   font-weight: bold; } #header p {   font-size: 12px; } #header p a {   text-decoration: none; } #header p a:hover {   border-width: 1px; } 3 - Mixins Mixins are where languages like this really shine.  The ability to mixin other definitions setup a parametric mixin.  There is really a lot of content in this area, so I would suggest looking at http://lesscss.org for more information.  One of the things I would suggest if you do begin to use LESS is to also grab the mixins.less file from the Twitter Bootstrap project.  This file already has a bunch of predefined mixins for things like border-radius with all of the browser specific prefixes.  This alone is of great use! 4 – Color Functions This is the last thing I wanted to point out as my final post in this series will be utilizing these functions in a more drawn out manner.  Both LESS and SASS provide functions for getting information from a color (R,G,B,H,S,L).  Using these, it is easy to define a primary color, and then darken or lighten it a little for your needs.  Example: Example LESS Code: @base-color: #111; @red:        #842210; #footer {   color: (@base-color + #003300);   border-left:  2px;   border-right: 2px;   border-color: desaturate(@red, 10%); } Example Compiled CSS: #footer {    color: #114411;    border-left:  2px;    border-right: 2px;    border-color: #7d2717; } I have found that these can be very useful and powerful when constructing a site theme. Conclusion I came across LESS and SASS when looking for the best way to implement some type of CSS variables for colors, because I hated having to do a Find and Replace in all of the files using the colors, and in some instances, you couldn’t just find/replace because of the color choices interfering with other colors (color to replace of #000, yet come colors existed like #0002bc).  So in many cases I would end up having to do a Find and manually check each one. In my next post, I am going to cover how I’ve come to set up these items and the structure for the items in the project, as well as the conventions that I have come to start using.  In the final post in the series, I will cover a neat little side project I built in LESS dealing with colors!

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• Copies of GameScene created when called additional times

  - by Orin MacGregor

  I have a game with a level select managed by a SceneManager, which basically just uses ReplaceScene. The first time I load a level everything works fine. On subsequent calls, for example: completing the level and continuing to the next, things blow up. The level loads fine, but when I try to pan the map or try to move the player the game crashes. Debugging through I found that there are multiple occurrences of self and related children like player and mapLayer. As a test, I put this code in my ccTouchesBegan: NSLog(@"test %i", [self retainCount]); The first time a level is loaded, it gives: test 2 The second time I load a level it gives: test 2 test 1 as in it spits out both values by looping through twice, not just appending an output to the last. It continues with this pattern for each subsequent load. So the third time will give 2 1 1. Particular code that causes the game to crash involve calling _tileMap.tileSize because there is a second GameScene with a tileMap that was supposedly destroyed, so it has tileSize and mapSize of 0. I noticed dealloc doesn't really ever get called, so I tried to manage some things with -(void) onExit -(void) onExit { [self unscheduleAllSelectors]; [_player stopAllActions]; //stop any animations just in case. normally handled in ccTouchesEnded [self removeAllChildrenWithCleanup:YES]; } I never replace the GameScene while I'm in a GameScene; if the level is completed it goes to a GameOver scene, or I use a back button that goes to the LevelSelect scene. This is [the relevant parts of] my init, in case something like the adding of children matters: -(id) init { _mapLayer = [CCLayer node]; //load data for level GameData *gameData = [GameDataParser loadData]; int selectedChapter = gameData.selectedChapter; int selectedLevel = gameData.selectedLevel; Levels *chapterLevels = [LevelParser loadLevelsForChapter:selectedChapter]; //loop until we get selected level, then do stuff for (Level *level in chapterLevels.levels) { if (level.number == selectedLevel) { //load the level map _tileMap = [CCTMXTiledMap tiledMapWithTMXFile:level.file]; } } _background = [_tileMap layerNamed:@"Background"]; _foreground = [_tileMap layerNamed:@"Foreground"]; _meta = [_tileMap layerNamed:@"Meta"]; _meta.visible = NO; //initialize Spawn Point object and place player there CCTMXObjectGroup *objects = [_tileMap objectGroupNamed:@"Objects"]; NSAssert(objects != nil, @"'Objects' object group not found"); NSMutableDictionary *spawnPoint = [objects objectNamed:@"SpawnPoint"]; NSAssert(spawnPoint != nil, @"SpawnPoint object not found"); int x = [[spawnPoint valueForKey:@"x"] intValue] / retinaScaling; int y = [[spawnPoint valueForKey:@"y"] intValue] / retinaScaling; //setup animations [[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] addSpriteFramesWithFile:@"MouseRightAnim_24x21.plist"]; CCSpriteBatchNode *spriteSheet = [CCSpriteBatchNode batchNodeWithFile:@"MouseRightAnim_24x21.png"]; [_mapLayer addChild:spriteSheet z:1]; NSMutableArray *rightAnimFrames = [NSMutableArray array]; for(int i = 1; i <= 3; ++i) { [rightAnimFrames addObject: [[CCSpriteFrameCache sharedSpriteFrameCache] spriteFrameByName: [NSString stringWithFormat:@"MouseRight%d_24x21.png", i]]]; } CCAnimation *rightAnim = [CCAnimation animationWithSpriteFrames:rightAnimFrames delay:0.1f]; self.player = [CCSprite spriteWithSpriteFrameName:@"MouseRight2_24x21.png"]; _player.position = ccp(x, y); self.rightAction = [CCRepeatForever actionWithAction:[CCAnimate actionWithAnimation:rightAnim]]; rightAnim.restoreOriginalFrame = NO; [spriteSheet addChild:_player]; //get map size in pixels mapHeight = _tileMap.contentSize.height; mapWidth = _tileMap.contentSize.width; //setup defaults //this value works well for the calculation later, trial and error really distance = 150; lastGoodDistance = 150; mapScale = 1; [self setViewpointCenter:_player.position]; [_mapLayer addChild:_tileMap]; [self addChild:_mapLayer z:-1]; self.isTouchEnabled = YES; } return self; } And here's the SceneManager code for replacing scenes: +(void) goGameScene { CCLayer *gameLayer = [GameScene node]; [SceneManager go:gameLayer:[GameHUD node]]; } //this is what every call looks like besides the GameScene one above +(void) goLevelSelect { [SceneManager go:[LevelSelect node]:nil]; } +(void) go:(CCLayer *)layer: (CCLayer *)hudLayer { CCDirector *director = [CCDirector sharedDirector]; CCScene *newScene = [SceneManager wrap:layer:hudLayer]; if ([director runningScene]) { [director replaceScene:newScene]; } else { [director runWithScene:newScene]; } } +(CCScene *) wrap:(CCLayer *)layer: (CCLayer *)hudLayer { CCScene *newScene = [CCScene node]; [newScene addChild: layer]; if (hudLayer != nil) { [newScene addChild: hudLayer z:1]; } return newScene; } Any ideas why I'm getting these fatal artifacts? I'm hoping this isn't considered too localized since it basically combines 3 tutorials that anyone could end up following. (Ray Wenderlich Animations, Tim Roadley Scene Manager, Pan and Zoom with Tiled Maps.

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• Stumbling Through: Visual Studio 2010 (Part II)

  I would now like to expand a little on what I stumbled through in part I of my Visual Studio 2010 post and touch on a few other features of VS 2010.  Specifically, I want to generate some code based off of an Entity Framework model and tie it up to an actual data source.  Im not going to take the easy way and tie to a SQL Server data source, though, I will tie it to an XML data file instead.  Why?  Well, why not?  This is purely for learning, there are probably much better ways to get strongly-typed classes around XML but it will force us to go down a path less travelled and maybe learn a few things along the way.  Once we get this XML data and the means to interact with it, I will revisit data binding to this data in a WPF form and see if I cant get reading, adding, deleting, and updating working smoothly with minimal code.  To begin, I will use what was learned in the first part of this blog topic and draw out a data model for the MFL (My Football League) - I dont want the NFL to come down and sue me for using their name in this totally football-related article.  The data model looks as follows, with Teams having Players, and Players having a position and statistics for each season they played: Note that when making the associations between these entities, I was given the option to create the foreign key but I only chose to select this option for the association between Player and Position.  The reason for this is that I am picturing the XML that will contain this data to look somewhat like this: <MFL> <Position/> <Position/> <Position/> <Team>     <Player>         <Statistic/>     </Player> </Team> </MFL> Statistic will be under its associated Player node, and Player will be under its associated Team node no need to have an Id to reference it if we know it will always fall under its parent.  Position, however, is more of a lookup value that will not have any hierarchical relationship to the player.  In fact, the Position data itself may be in a completely different xml file (something Id like to play around with), so in any case, a player will need to reference the position by its Id. So now that we have a simple data model laid out, I would like to generate two things based on it:  A class for each entity with properties corresponding to each entity property An IO class with methods to get data for each entity, either all instances, by Id or by parent. Now my experience with code generation in the past has consisted of writing up little apps that use the code dom directly to regenerate code on demand (or using tools like CodeSmith).  Surely, there has got to be a more fun way to do this given that we are using the Entity Framework which already has built-in code generation for SQL Server support.  Lets start with that built-in stuff to give us a base to work off of.  Right click anywhere in the canvas of our model and select Add Code Generation Item: So just adding that code item seemed to do quite a bit towards what I was intending: It apparently generated a class for each entity, but also a whole ton more.  I mean a TON more.  Way too much complicated code was generated now that code is likely to be a black box anyway so it shouldnt matter, but we need to understand how to make this work the way we want it to work, so lets get ready to do some stumbling through that text template (tt) file. When I open the .tt file that was generated, right off the bat I realize there is going to be trouble there is no color coding, no intellisense no nothing!  That is going to make stumbling through more like groping blindly in the dark while handcuffed and hopping on one foot, which was one of the alternate titles I was considering for this blog.  Thankfully, the community comes to my rescue and I wont have to cast my mind back to the glory days of coding in VI (look it up, kids).  Using the Extension Manager (Available under the Tools menu), I did a quick search for tt editor in the Online Gallery and quickly found the Tangible T4 Editor: Downloading and installing this was a breeze, and after doing so I got some color coding and intellisense while editing the tt files.  If you will be doing any customizing of tt files, I highly recommend installing this extension.  Next, well see if that is enough help for us to tweak that tt file to do the kind of code generation that we wantDid 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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• How to make this design closer to proper DDD?

  - by Seralize

  I've read about DDD for days now and need help with this sample design. All the rules of DDD make me very confused to how I'm supposed to build anything at all when domain objects are not allowed to show methods to the application layer; where else to orchestrate behaviour? Repositories are not allowed to be injected into entities and entities themselves must thus work on state. Then an entity needs to know something else from the domain, but other entity objects are not allowed to be injected either? Some of these things makes sense to me but some don't. I've yet to find good examples of how to build a whole feature as every example is about Orders and Products, repeating the other examples over and over. I learn best by reading examples and have tried to build a feature using the information I've gained about DDD this far. I need your help to point out what I do wrong and how to fix it, most preferably with code as "I would not recomment doing X and Y" is very hard to understand in a context where everything is just vaguely defined already. If I can't inject an entity into another it would be easier to see how to do it properly. In my example there are users and moderators. A moderator can ban users, but with a business rule: only 3 per day. I did an attempt at setting up a class diagram to show the relationships (code below): interface iUser { public function getUserId(); public function getUsername(); } class User implements iUser { protected $_id; protected $_username; public function __construct(UserId $user_id, Username $username) { $this->_id = $user_id; $this->_username = $username; } public function getUserId() { return $this->_id; } public function getUsername() { return $this->_username; } } class Moderator extends User { protected $_ban_count; protected $_last_ban_date; public function __construct(UserBanCount $ban_count, SimpleDate $last_ban_date) { $this->_ban_count = $ban_count; $this->_last_ban_date = $last_ban_date; } public function banUser(iUser &$user, iBannedUser &$banned_user) { if (! $this->_isAllowedToBan()) { throw new DomainException('You are not allowed to ban more users today.'); } if (date('d.m.Y') != $this->_last_ban_date->getValue()) { $this->_ban_count = 0; } $this->_ban_count++; $date_banned = date('d.m.Y'); $expiration_date = date('d.m.Y', strtotime('+1 week')); $banned_user->add($user->getUserId(), new SimpleDate($date_banned), new SimpleDate($expiration_date)); } protected function _isAllowedToBan() { if ($this->_ban_count >= 3 AND date('d.m.Y') == $this->_last_ban_date->getValue()) { return false; } return true; } } interface iBannedUser { public function add(UserId $user_id, SimpleDate $date_banned, SimpleDate $expiration_date); public function remove(); } class BannedUser implements iBannedUser { protected $_user_id; protected $_date_banned; protected $_expiration_date; public function __construct(UserId $user_id, SimpleDate $date_banned, SimpleDate $expiration_date) { $this->_user_id = $user_id; $this->_date_banned = $date_banned; $this->_expiration_date = $expiration_date; } public function add(UserId $user_id, SimpleDate $date_banned, SimpleDate $expiration_date) { $this->_user_id = $user_id; $this->_date_banned = $date_banned; $this->_expiration_date = $expiration_date; } public function remove() { $this->_user_id = ''; $this->_date_banned = ''; $this->_expiration_date = ''; } } // Gathers objects $user_repo = new UserRepository(); $evil_user = $user_repo->findById(123); $moderator_repo = new ModeratorRepository(); $moderator = $moderator_repo->findById(1337); $banned_user_factory = new BannedUserFactory(); $banned_user = $banned_user_factory->build(); // Performs ban $moderator->banUser($evil_user, $banned_user); // Saves objects to database $user_repo->store($evil_user); $moderator_repo->store($moderator); $banned_user_repo = new BannedUserRepository(); $banned_user_repo->store($banned_user); Should the User entitity have a 'is_banned' field which can be checked with $user->isBanned();? How to remove a ban? I have no idea.

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