split button - Page 161

RetinaJS and LESS : Background image doesn't show on iOS

- by jidma

I am trying to make a background image into a retina image using LESS CSS and RetinaJs: in my index.html file : <html> <head> <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=0, minimum-scale=1.0, maximum-scale=1.0"> <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes"> <meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black"> [...] <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet/less" href="resources/css/retina.less"> <script type="text/javascript" src="resources/js/less-1.3.0.minjs" ></script> [...] </head> <body> [...] <script type="text/javascript" src="resources/js/retina.js"></script> </body> </html> in my retina.less file: .at2x(@path, @w: auto, @h: auto) { background-image: url("@{path}"); @at2x_path: ~`"@{path}".split('.').slice(0, "@{path}".split('.').length - 1).join(".") + "@2x" + "." + "@{path}".split('.')["@{path}".split('.').length - 1]`; @media all and (-webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio : 1.5) { background-image: url("@{at2x_path}"); background-size: @w @h; } } .topMenu { .at2x('../../resources/img/topMenuTitle.png'); } I have both topMenuTitle.png (320px x 40px) and [email protected] (640px x 80px) in the same folder. When test this code: In Firefox i have the normal Background In the XCode iPhone simulator I also have the normal Background In the iPhone device, I don't have any background at all. I'm using GWT if that matters. Any suggestions ? Thanks.

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parse.json of authenticated play request

- by niklassaers

I've set up authentication in my application like this, always allow when a username is supplied and the API-key is 123: object Auth { def IsAuthenticated(block: => String => Request[AnyContent] => Result) = { Security.Authenticated(RetrieveUser, HandleUnauthorized) { user => Action { request => block(user)(request) } } } def RetrieveUser(request: RequestHeader) = { val auth = new String(base64Decode(request.headers.get("AUTHORIZATION").get.replaceFirst("Basic", ""))) val split = auth.split(":") val user = split(0) val pass = split(1) Option(user) } def HandleUnauthorized(request: RequestHeader) = { Results.Forbidden } def APIKey(apiKey: String)(f: => String => Request[AnyContent] => Result) = IsAuthenticated { user => request => if(apiKey == "123") f(user)(request) else Results.Forbidden } } I want then to define a method in my controller (testOut in this case) that uses the request as application/json only. Now, before I added authentication, I'd say "def testOut = Action(parse.json) {...}", but now that I'm using authentication, how can I add parse.json in to the mix and make this work? def testOut = Auth.APIKey("123") { username => implicit request => var props:Map[String, JsValue] = Map[String, JsValue]() request.body match { case JsObject(fields) => { props = fields.toMap } case _ => {} // Ok("received something else: " + request.body + '\n') } if(!props.contains("UUID")) props.+("UUID" -> UniqueIdGenerator.uuid) if (!props.contains("entity")) props.+("entity" -> "unset") props.+("username" -> username) Ok(props.toString) } As a bonus question, why is only UUID added to the props map, not entity and username? Sorry about the noob factor, I'm trying to learn Scala and Play at the same time. :-) Cheers Nik

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Optimization of Function with Dictionary and Zip()

- by eWizardII

Hello, I have the following function: def filetxt(): word_freq = {} lvl1 = [] lvl2 = [] total_t = 0 users = 0 text = [] for l in range(0,500): # Open File if os.path.exists("C:/Twitter/json/user_" + str(l) + ".json") == True: with open("C:/Twitter/json/user_" + str(l) + ".json", "r") as f: text_f = json.load(f) users = users + 1 for i in range(len(text_f)): text.append(text_f[str(i)]['text']) total_t = total_t + 1 else: pass # Filter occ = 0 import string for i in range(len(text)): s = text[i] # Sample string a = re.findall(r'(RT)',s) b = re.findall(r'(@)',s) occ = len(a) + len(b) + occ s = s.encode('utf-8') out = s.translate(string.maketrans("",""), string.punctuation) # Create Wordlist/Dictionary word_list = text[i].lower().split(None) for word in word_list: word_freq[word] = word_freq.get(word, 0) + 1 keys = word_freq.keys() numbo = range(1,len(keys)+1) WList = ', '.join(keys) NList = str(numbo).strip('[]') WList = WList.split(", ") NList = NList.split(", ") W2N = dict(zip(WList, NList)) for k in range (0,len(word_list)): word_list[k] = W2N[word_list[k]] for i in range (0,len(word_list)-1): lvl1.append(word_list[i]) lvl2.append(word_list[i+1]) I have used the profiler to find that it seems the greatest CPU time is spent on the zip() function and the join and split parts of the code, I'm looking to see if there is any way I have overlooked that I could potentially clean up the code to make it more optimized, since the greatest lag seems to be in how I am working with the dictionaries and the zip() function. Any help would be appreciated thanks!

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Read Cookies using Javascript

- by Ajith

I want to create a cookie using php,an also i need to read it using javascript.ie, by using setcookie('mycookie','hello',time()+34000) in php i am creating a cookie in my system.Now,i need to read it using javascript.Is it possible?If anybody knows please give me some idea.Please....help me.I am using javscript as follows ` function Get_Cookie( check_name ) { // first we'll split this cookie up into name/value pairs // note: document.cookie only returns name=value, not the other components var a_all_cookies = document.cookie.split( ';' ); var a_temp_cookie = ''; var cookie_name = ''; var cookie_value = ''; var b_cookie_found = false; // set boolean t/f default f for ( i = 0; i < a_all_cookies.length; i++ ) { // now we'll split apart each name=value pair a_temp_cookie = a_all_cookies[i].split( '=' ); // and trim left/right whitespace while we're at it cookie_name = a_temp_cookie[0].replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, ''); // if the extracted name matches passed check_name if ( cookie_name == check_name ) { b_cookie_found = true; // we need to handle case where cookie has no value but exists (no = sign, that is): if ( a_temp_cookie.length > 1 ) { cookie_value = unescape( a_temp_cookie[1].replace(/^\s+|\s+$/g, '') ); } // note that in cases where cookie is initialized but no value, null is returned return cookie_value; break; } a_temp_cookie = null; cookie_name = ''; } if ( !b_cookie_found ) { return null; } } if (Get_Cookie('__gsb')) { alert('Found'); } `

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Ruby Challenge - efficiently change the last character of every word in a sentence to a capital

- by emson

Hi All I recently was challenged to write some Ruby code to change the last character of every word in a sentence into a capital. Such that the string: "script to convert the last letter of every word to a capital" becomes "scripT tO converT thE lasT letteR oF everY worD tO A capitaL" This was my optimal solution however I'm sure you wizards have much better solutions and I would be really interested to hear them. "script to convert the last letter of every word to a capital".split.map{|w|w<<w.slice!(-1).chr.upcase}.join' ' For those interested as to what is going on here is an explanation. split will split the sentence up into an array, the default delimiter is a space and with Ruby you don't need to use brackets here. map the array from split is passed to map which opens a block and process each word (w) in the array. the block slice!(s) off the last character of the word and converts it to a chr (a character not ASCII code) and then capitalises upcase it. This character is now appended << to the word which is missing the sliced last letter. Finally the array of words is now join together with a ' ' to reform the sentence. Enjoy

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Get active window title in X

- by dutt

I'm trying to get the title of the active window. The application is a background task so if the user has Eclipse open the function returns "Eclipse - blabla", so it's not getting the window title of my own window. I'm developing this in Python 2.6 using PyQt4. My current solution, borrowed and slightly modified from an old answer here at SO, looks like this: def get_active_window_title(): title = '' root_check = '' root = Popen(['xprop', '-root'], stdout=PIPE) if root.stdout != root_check: root_check = root.stdout for i in root.stdout: if '_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW(WINDOW):' in i: id_ = i.split()[4] id_w = Popen(['xprop', '-id', id_], stdout=PIPE) for j in id_w.stdout: if 'WM_ICON_NAME(STRING)' in j: if title != j.split()[2]: return j.split("= ")[1].strip(' \n\"') It works for most windows, but not all. For example it can't find my kopete chat windows, or the name of the application i'm currently developing. My next try looks like this: def get_active_window_title(self): screen = wnck.screen_get_default() if screen == None: return "Could not get screen" window = screen.get_active_window() if window == None: return "Could not get window" title = window.get_name() return title; But for some reason window is always None. Does somebody have a better way of getting the current window title, or how to modify one of my ways, that works for all windows? Edit: In case anybody is wondering this is the way I found that seems to work for all windows. def get_active_window_title(self): root_check = '' root = Popen(['xprop', '-root'], stdout=PIPE) if root.stdout != root_check: root_check = root.stdout for i in root.stdout: if '_NET_ACTIVE_WINDOW(WINDOW):' in i: id_ = i.split()[4] id_w = Popen(['xprop', '-id', id_], stdout=PIPE) id_w.wait() buff = [] for j in id_w.stdout: buff.append(j) for line in buff: match = re.match("WM_NAME$(?P<type>.+)$ = (?P<name>.+)", line) if match != None: type = match.group("type") if type == "STRING" or type == "COMPOUND_TEXT": return match.group("name") return "Active window not found"

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splice() not working on correctly

- by adardesign

I am setting a cookie for each navigation container that is clicked on. It sets an array that is joined and set the cookie value. if its clicked again then its removed from the array. It somehow buggy. It only splices after clicking on other elements. and then it behaves weird. It might be that splice is not the correct method Thanks much. var navLinkToOpen; var setNavCookie = function(value){ var isSet = false; var checkCookies = checkNavCookie() setCookieHelper = checkCookies? checkCookies.split(","): []; for(i in setCookieHelper){ if(value == setCookieHelper[i]){ setCookieHelper.splice(value,1); isSet = true; } } if(!isSet){setCookieHelper.push(value)} setCookieHelper.join(",") document.cookie = "navLinkToOpen"+"="+setCookieHelper; } var checkNavCookie = function(){ var allCookies = document.cookie.split( ';' ); for (i = 0; i < allCookies.length; i++ ){ temp = allCookies[i].split("=") if(temp[0].match("navLinkToOpen")){ var getValue = temp[1] } } return getValue || false } $(document).ready(function() { $("#LeftNav li").has("b").addClass("navHeader").not(":first").siblings("li").hide() $(".navHeader").click(function(){ $(this).toggleClass("collapsed").nextUntil("li:has('b')").slideToggle(300); setNavCookie($('.navHeader').index($(this))) return false }) var testCookies = checkNavCookie(); if(testCookies){ finalArrayValue = testCookies.split(",") for(i in finalArrayValue){ $(".navHeader").eq(finalArrayValue[i]).toggleClass("collapsed").nextUntil(".navHeader").slideToggle (0); } } });

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Multithreading for loop while maintaining order

- by David

I started messing around with multithreading for a CPU intensive batch process I'm running. Essentially I'm trying to condense multiple single page tiffs into single PDF documents. This works fine with a foreach loop or standard iteration but can be very slow for several 100 page documents. I tried the following based on a some examples I found to use multithreading and it has significant performance improvements however it obliterates the page order instead of 1,2,3,4 it will be 1,3,4,2,6,5 on what thread completes first. My question is how would I utilize this technique while maintaining the page order and if I can will it negate the performance benefit of the multithreading? Thank you in advance. PdfDocument doc = new PdfDocument(); string mail = textBox1.Text; string[] split = mail.Split(new string[] { Environment.NewLine }, StringSplitOptions.None); int counter = split.Count(); // Source must be array or IList. var source = Enumerable.Range(0, 100000).ToArray(); // Partition the entire source array. var rangePartitioner = Partitioner.Create(0, counter); double[] results = new double[counter]; // Loop over the partitions in parallel. Parallel.ForEach(rangePartitioner, (range, loopState) => { // Loop over each range element without a delegate invocation. for (int i = range.Item1; i < range.Item2; i++) { f_prime = split[i].Replace(" " , ""); PdfPage page = doc.AddPage(); XGraphics gfx = XGraphics.FromPdfPage(page); XImage image = XImage.FromFile(f_prime); double x = 0; gfx.DrawImage(image, x, 0); } });

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Sorting CouchDB Views By Value

- by Lee Theobald

Hi all, I'm testing out CouchDB to see how it could handle logging some search results. What I'd like to do is produce a view where I can produce the top queries from the results. At the moment I have something like this: Example document portion { "query": "+dangerous +dogs", "hits": "123" } Map function (Not exactly what I need/want but it's good enough for testing) function(doc) { if (doc.query) { var split = doc.query.split(" "); for (var i in split) { emit(split[i], 1); } } } Reduce Function function (key, values, rereduce) { return sum(values); } Now this will get me results in a format where a query term is the key and the count for that term on the right, which is great. But I'd like it ordered by the value, not the key. From the sounds of it, this is not yet possible with CouchDB. So does anyone have any ideas of how I can get a view where I have an ordered version of the query terms & their related counts? I'm very new to CouchDB and I just can't think of how I'd write the functions needed.

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.Net file writing and string splitting issues

- by sagar

I have a requirement where the file should be split using a given character. Default splitting options are CRLF and LF In both these cases I am splitting the line by \r\n and \r respectively. Also I have requirement where any size of file should be processed. (Processing is basically inserting the given string in a file at given position). For this I am reading the file in chunk of 1024 bytes. Then I am applying the string.Split() method. Split() method gives options for ignoring white spaces and none. I have to add back these line break characters to the line. for this I am using a binary writer and I am writing the byte array to the new file. Issue:- 1) When line break is CRLF, and the split option is NONE, while spaces are also added in the splitted array. Second option is given (to ignore white spaces) CRLF works properly. 2)Bit ignoring white space option creates other problems, as I am reading the file byte by byte I can't ignore a white space. 3)When line break characters are other than default(e.g. '|', a null value is prepended to the resulting line. Can anybody give solution to my issues?

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Our Look at Opera 10.50 Web Browser

- by Asian Angel

Everyone has been talking about the newest version of Opera recently but perhaps you have not looked at it too closely yet. Today we will take a look at 10.50 and let you see what this “new browser” is all about. The New Engines Carakan JavaScript Engine: Runs web applications up to 7 times faster than its predecessor Futhark Vega Graphics Library: Enables super fast and smooth graphics on everything from tab switching to webpage animation Presto 2.5: Provides support for HTML5, CSS2.1 and the latest CSS3 standards A Look at the Features Available If you have installed or used older versions of Opera before then the default look after a clean install will probably seem rather different. The main differences in appearance are mainly located within the “glass border” areas of the browser. The “Speed Dial” setup looks and works just as well as in previous versions. You can set a favorite wallpaper or image as your background and choose the number of “dials” using the “Configure Speed Dial Command”. One of the “standout” differences is the “O Button”. All of the menus have been condensed into this single access point but it only takes a few moments to find what you are looking for. If you have used the style before in earlier versions of Opera some of the items have been moved around. For those who prefer the “Menu Bar” that can be easily restored using the “Show Menu Bar Command”. If desired you can actually “extend” the “Tab Bar” downwards to display thumbnails of your open tabs. Just use your mouse to grab the bottom of the “Tab Bar” and adjust it to suit your personal needs. The only problem with this feature is that it will quickly use up a good sized portion of your available UI and browser window space. The “Password Manager” is ready to access when needed…the background for the button will turn a shiny metallic blue when you open a webpage that you have “Login Information” saved for. One of the new features is a small “Recycle Bin Button” in the upper right corner. Clicking on this will display a list of recently closed tabs letting you have easy access to any tabs that you may have accidentally closed. This is definitely a great feature to have as an easy access button. For those who were used to how the “Zoom Feature” looked before it has a new “look” to it. Instead of the pop-up menu-type listing of “view sizes” present before you now have a slider button that you can use to adjust the zooming level. For our default setup here the “Sidebar Panels” available were: “Bookmarks, Widgets, Unite, Notes, Downloads, History, & Panels”. Additional panels such as “Links, Windows, Search, Info, etc.” are available if you want and/or need them (accessible using the “Panels Plus Sign Button”). The “Opera Link Button” makes it easy for you to synchronize your “Speed Dial, Bookmarks, Personal Bar, Custom Searches, History & Notes”. Note: “Opera Link” requires an account and can be signed up for using the link provided below. Want to share files with your family and friends? “Unite” allows you to do that and more. With “Unite” you can: “Stream Music, Show Photo Galleries, Share Files and/or Folders, & host webpages directly from your browser”. We have a more in-depth look at “Unite” in our article here. Note: Use of “Unite” requires an Opera account. Got a slow internet connection? “Opera Turbo” can help with that by running the web traffic through their “compression servers” to speed up your web browsing. Keep in mind that “Opera Turbo” will not engage if you are accessing a secure website (i.e. your bank’s website) thus preserving your security. Note: “Opera Turbo” can be set up to automatically detect slow internet connections (i.e. crowded Wi-Fi in a cafe). Opera has a built-in “Private Browsing Mode” now for those who prefer anonymous browsing and want to keep the “history records clean” on their computer. To access it go to “Tabs and windows” and select “New private tab” or “New private window” as desired. When you open your new “Private Tab or Window” you will see the following message with details on how Opera will handle browsing information and a large “door hanger symbol”. Notice that the one tab is locked into “Private Browsing Mode” while the others are still working in “Regular Browsing Mode”. Very nice! A miniature version of the “door hanger symbol” will be present on any tab that is locked into “Private Browsing Mode”. If you are using Windows 7 then you will love how things look from your “Taskbar”. Here you can see four very nice looking thumbnails for the tabs that we had open. All that you have to do is click on the desired thumbnail… The “Context Menu” looks just as lovely as the thumbnails and definitely has some terrific functionality built into it. Add Enhanced Aero Capability If you love “Aero” and want more for your new Opera install then we have the perfect theme for you. The theme’s name is Z1-AV69 and once you have downloaded it you will need to place it in the “Skins Subfolder” in Opera’s “Program Files Folder”. Note: For our example we used version 1.10 but version 2.00 is now available (link provided below). Once you have restarted Opera, go to the “O Menu” and select “Appearance”. When the “Appearance Window” opens click on “Z1-Glass Skin” and then click “OK”. All of a sudden you will have more “Aero Goodness” to enjoy. Compare this screenshot with the one at the top of this article…the only part that is not transparent now is the browser window area itself. Want even more “Aero Goodness”? Right click on the “Tab Bar” and set “Tab Bar Placement” to “Left”. Note: You can achieve the same effect by setting the “Tab Bar Placement” to “Right”. With the “Speed Dial” visible you will be able to see your wallpaper with ease. While this is obviously not for everyone it does make for a great visual trick. Portable Versions Perhaps you need this wonderful new version of Opera to go with you wherever you do during the day. Not a problem…just visit the Opera USB website to choose a version that works best for you. You can select from “Zip or Exe” setup files and if needed update an older portable version using a “Zipped Update Files Package”. If you are updating an older version keep in mind that you will need to delete the old “OperaUSB.exe. File” due to changes with the new setup files. During our tests updating older portable versions went well for the most part but we did experience a few “odd UI quirks” here and there…so we recommend setting up a clean install if possible. Conclusion The new 10.50 release is a pleasure to use and is a recommended install for your system. Whether you are considering trying Opera for the first time or have been using it for a bit we think that you will pleased with everything that the 10.50 release has to offer. For those who would like to add User Scripts to Opera be certain to look at our how-to article here. Links Download Opera 10.50 for your location (Windows) Get the latest Snapshot versions for Linux & Mac Sign up for an Opera Link account View In-Depth detail on Opera 10.50’s features Download the Z1-AV69 Aero Theme Download Portable Opera 10.50 Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Set the Speed Dial as the Opera Startup PageSet Up User Scripts in Opera BrowserScan Files for Viruses Before You Download With Dr.WebTurn Your Computer into a File, Music, and Web Server with Opera UniteSet the Default Browser on Ubuntu From the Command Line TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 PCmover Professional Make your Joomla & Drupal Sites Mobile with OSMOBI Integrate Twitter and Delicious and Make Life Easier Design Your Web Pages Using the Golden Ratio Worldwide Growth of the Internet How to Find Your Mac Address Use My TextTools to Edit and Organize Text

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Remote Desktop to Your Azure Virtual Machine

- by Shaun

The Windows Azure Team had just published their new development portal this week and the SDK 1.3. Within this new release there are a lot of cool feature available. The one I’m looking forward to is Remote Desktop Access to your running Windows Azure Virtual Machine. Configuration Remote Desktop Access It would be very simple to make the azure service enable the remote desktop access. First of all let’s create a new windows azure project from the Visual Studio. In this example I just created a normal MVC 2 web role without any modifications. Then we right-click the azure project node in the solution explorer window and select “Publish”. Then let’s select the “Deploy your Windows Azure project to Windows Azure” on the top radio button. And then select the credential, deployment service/slot, storage and label as susal. You must have the Management API Certificates uploaded to your Windows Azure account, and install the certification on you machine before in order to use this one-click deployment feature. If you are familiar with this dialog you will notice that there’s a linkage named “Configure Remote Desktop connections”. Here is where you need to make this service enable the remote desktop feature. After clicked this link we will set the configuration of the remote desktop access authorization information. There are 4 steps we need to do to configure our access. Certificates: We need either create or select a certificate file in order to encypt the access cerdenticals. In this example I will use the certificate file for my Management API. Username: The remote desktop user name to access the virtual machine. Password: The password for the access. Expiration: The access cerdentals would be expired after 1 month by default but we can amend here. After that we clicked the OK button to back to the publish dialog. The next step is to back to the new windows azure portal and navigate to the hosted services list. I created a new hosted service and upload the certificate file onto this service. The user name and password access to the azure machine must be encrypted from the local machine, and then send to the windows azure platform, then decrypted on the azure side by the same file. This is why we need to upload the certificate file onto azure. We navigated to the “Hosted Services, Storage Accounts & CDN"” from the left panel and created a new hosted service named “SDK13” and selected the “Certificates” node. Then we clicked the “Add Certificates” button. Then we select the local certificate file and the password to install it into this azure service. The final step would be back to our Visual Studio and in the pulish dialog just click the OK button. The Visual Studio will upload our package and the configuration into our service with the remote desktop settings. Remote Desktop Access to Azure Virtual Machine All things had been done, let’s have a look back on the Windows Azure Development Portal. If I selected the web role that I had just published we can see on the toolbar there’s a section named “Remote Access”. In this section the Enable checkbox had been checked which means this role has the Remote Desktop Access feature enabled. If we want to modify the access cerdentals we can simply click the Configure button. Then we can update the user name, password, certificates and the expiration date. Let’s select the instance node under the web role. In this case I just created one instance for demo. We can see that when we selected the instance node, the Connect button turned enabled. After clicked this button there will be a RDP file downloaded. This is a Remote Desctop configuration file that we can use to access to our azure virtual machine. Let’s download it to our local machine and execute. We input the user name and password we specified when we published our application to azure and then click OK. There might be some certificates warning dislog appeared. This is because the certificates we use to encryption is not signed by a trusted provider. Just select OK in these cases as we know the certificate is safty to us. Finally, the virtual machine of Windows Azure appeared. A Quick Look into the Azure Virtual Machine Let’s just have a very quick look into our virtual machine. There are 3 disks available for us: C, D and E. Disk C: Store the local resource, diagnosis information, etc. Disk D: System disk which contains the OS, IIS, .NET Frameworks, etc. Disk E: Sotre our application code. The IIS which hosting our webiste on Azure. The IP configuration of the azure virtual machine. Summary In this post I covered one of the new feature of the Azure SDK 1.3 – Remote Desktop Access. We can set the access per service and all of the instances of this service could be accessed through the remote desktop tool. With this feature we can deep into the virtual machines of our instances to see the inner information such as the system event, IIS log, system information, etc. But we should pay attention to modify the system settings. 2 reasons from what I know for now: 1. If we have more than one instances against our service we should ensure that all system settings we modifed are applied to all instances/virtual machines. Otherwise, as the machines are under the azure load balance proxy our application process may doesn’t work due to the defferent settings between the instances. 2. When the virtual machine encounted some problem and need to be translated to another physical machine all settings we made would be disappeared. Hope this helps, Shaun All documents and related graphics, codes are provided "AS IS" without warranty of any kind. Copyright © Shaun Ziyan Xu. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons License.

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Customize the Five Windows Folder Templates

- by Mark Virtue

Are you’re particular about the way Windows Explorer presents each folder’s contents? Here we show you how to take advantage of Explorer’s built-in templates, which cuts down the time it takes to do customizations. Note: The techniques in this article apply to Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7. When opening a folder for the first time in Windows Explorer, we are presented with a standard default view of the files and folders in that folder. It may be that the items are presented are perfectly fine, but on the other hand, we may want to customize the view. The aspects of it that we can customize are the following: The display type (list view, details, tiles, thumbnails, etc) Which columns are displayed, and in which order The widths of the visible columns The order in which the files and folders are sorted Any file groupings Thankfully, Windows offers us a shortcut. A particular folder’s settings can be used as a “template” for other, similar folders. In fact, we can store up to five separate sets of folder presentation configurations. Once we save the settings for a particular template, that template can then be applied to other folders. Customize Your First Folder We’ll start by setting up the first of our templates – the default one. Once we create this template and apply it, the vast majority of the folders in our file system will change to match it, so it’s important that we set it up very carefully. The first step in creating and applying the template is to customize one folder with the settings that all the rest will have. Choose a folder that is typical of the folders that you wish to have this default template. Select it in Windows Explorer. To ensure that it is a suitable candidate, right-click the folder name and select Properties, then go to the Customize tab. Ensure that this folder is marked as General Items. If it is not, either choose a different folder or select General Items from the list. Click OK. Now we’re ready to customize our first folder. Changing the way one single folder is presented is straightforward. We start with the folder’s display type. Click the Change your view button in the top-right corner of every Explorer window. Each time you click the button, the folder’s view cycles to the next view type. Alternatively you can click the little down-arrow next to the button to see all the display types at once, and select the one you want. Click the view you want, or drag the slider next to the one you want. If you have chosen Details, then the next thing you may wish to change is which columns are displayed, and the order of these. To choose which columns are displayed, simply right-click on any column heading. A list of the columns currently being display appears. Simply uncheck a column if you don’t want it displayed, and check the columns that you want displayed. If you want some information displayed about your files that is not listed here, then click the More… button for a full list of file attributes. There’s a lot of them! To change the order of the columns that are currently being displayed, simply click on a column heading and drag it to where you think it should be. To change the width of a column, click the line that represents the right-hand edge of the column and drag it left or right. To sort by a column, click once on that column. To reverse the sort-order, click that same column again. To change the groupings of the files in the folder, right-click in a blank area of the folder, select Group by, and select the appropriate column. Apply This Default Template to All Similar Folders Once you have the folder exactly the way you want it, we now use this folder as our default template for most of the folders in our file system. To do this, ensure that you are still in the folder you just customized, and then, from the Organize menu in Explorer, click on Folder and search options. Then select the View tab and click the Apply to Folders button. After you’ve clicked OK, visit some of the other folders in your file system. You should see that most have taken on these new settings. What we’ve just done, in effect, is we have customized the General Items template. This is one of five templates that Windows Explorer uses to display folder contents. The five templates are called (in Windows 7): General Items Documents Pictures Music Videos When a folder is opened, Windows Explorer examines the contents to see if it can automatically determine which folder template to use to display the folder contents. If it is not obvious that the folder contents falls into any of the last four templates, then Windows Explorer chooses the General Items template. That’s why most of the folders in your file system are shown using the General Items template. Changing the Other Four Templates If you want to adjust the other four templates, the process is very similar to what we’ve just done. If you wanted to change the “Music” template, for example, the steps would be as follows: Select a folder that contains music items Apply the existing Music template to the folder (even if it doesn’t look like you want it to) Customize the folder to your personal preferences Apply the new template to all “Music” folders A fifth step would be: When you open a folder that contains music items but is not automatically displayed using the Music template, you manually select the Music template for that folder. First, select a folder that contains music items. It will probably be displayed using the existing Music template: Next, ensure that it is using the Music template. If it’s not, then manually select the Music template. Next, customize the folder to suit your personal preferences (here we’ve added a couple of columns, and sorted by Artist). Now we can set this view to be our Music template. Choose Organize, then the View tab, and click the Apply to Folders button. Note: The only folders that will inherit these settings are the ones that are currently (or will soon be) using the Music template. Now, if you have any folder that contains music items, and you want it to inherit all of these settings, then right-click the folder name, choose Properties, and select that this folder should use the Music template. You can also cehck the box entitled Also apply this template to all subfolders if you want to save yourself even more time with all the sub-folders. Conclusion It’s neat to be able to set up templates for your folder views like this. It’s a shame that Microsoft didn’t take the concept just a little further and allow you to create as many templates as you want. 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How to Use the Signature Editor in Outlook 2013

- by Lori Kaufman

The Signature Editor in Outlook 2013 allows you to create a custom signature from text, graphics, or business cards. We will show you how to use the various features of the Signature Editor to customize your signatures. To open the Signature Editor, click the File tab and select Options on the left side of the Account Information screen. Then, click Mail on the left side of the Options dialog box and click the Signatures button. For more details, refer to one of the articles mentioned above. Changing the font for your signature is pretty self-explanatory. Select the text for which you want to change the font and select the desired font from the drop-down list. You can also set the justification (left, center, right) for each line of text separately. The drop-down list that reads Automatic by default allows you to change the color of the selected text. Click OK to accept your changes and close the Signatures and Stationery dialog box. To see your signature in an email, click Mail on the Navigation Bar. Click New Email on the Home tab. The Message window displays and your default signature is inserted into the body of the email. NOTE: You shouldn’t use fonts that are not common in your signatures. In order for the recipient to see your signature as you intended, the font you choose also needs to be installed on the recipient’s computer. If the font is not installed, the recipient would see a different font, the wrong characters, or even placeholder characters, which are empty square boxes. Close the Message window using the File tab or the X button in the upper, right corner of the Message window. You can save it as a draft if you want, but it’s not necessary. If you decide to use a font that is not common, a better way to do so would be to create a signature as an image, or logo. Create your image or logo in an image editing program making it the exact size you want to use in your signature. Save the image in a file size as small as possible. The .jpg format works well for pictures, the .png format works well for detailed graphics, and the .gif format works well for simple graphics. The .gif format generally produces the smallest files. To insert an image in your signature, open the Signatures and Stationery dialog box again. Either delete the text currently in the editor, if any, or create a new signature. Then, click the image button on the editor’s toolbar. On the Insert Picture dialog box, navigate to the location of your image, select the file, and click Insert. If you want to insert an image from the web, you must enter the full URL for the image in the File name edit box (instead of the local image filename). For example, http://www.somedomain.com/images/signaturepic.gif. If you want to link to the image at the specified URL, you must also select Link to File from the Insert drop-down list to maintain the URL reference. The image is inserted into the Edit signature box. Click OK to accept your changes and close the Signatures and Stationery dialog box. Create a new email message again. You’ll notice the image you inserted into the signature displays in the body of the message. Close the Message window using the File tab or the X button in the upper, right corner of the Message window. You may want to put a link to a webpage or an email link in your signature. To do this, open the Signatures and Stationery dialog box again. Enter the text to display for the link, highlight the text, and click the Hyperlink button on the editor’s toolbar. On the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, select the type of link from the list on the left and enter the webpage, email, or other type of address in the Address edit box. You can change the text that will display in the signature for the link in the Text to display edit box. Click OK to accept your changes and close the dialog box. The link displays in the editor with the default blue, underlined text. Click OK to accept your changes and close the Signatures and Stationery dialog box. Here’s an example of an email message with a link in the signature. Close the Message window using the File tab or the X button in the upper, right corner of the Message window. You can also insert your contact information into your signature as a Business Card. To do so, click Business Card on the editor’s toolbar. On the Insert Business Card dialog box, select the contact you want to insert as a Business Card. Select a size for the Business Card image from the Size drop-down list. Click OK. The Business Card image displays in the Signature Editor. Click OK to accept your changes and close the Signatures and Stationery dialog box. When you insert a Business Card into your signature, the Business Card image displays in the body of the email message and a .vcf file containing your contact information is attached to the email. This .vcf file can be imported into programs like Outlook that support this format. Close the Message window using the File tab or the X button in the upper, right corner of the Message window. You can also insert your Business Card into your signature without the image or without the .vcf file attached. If you want to provide recipients your contact info in a .vcf file, but don’t want to attach it to every email, you can upload the .vcf file to a location on the internet and add a link to the file, such as “Get my vCard,” in your signature. NOTE: If you want to edit your business card, such as applying a different template to it, you must select a different View other than People for your Contacts folder so you can open the full contact editing window.

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Silverlight MEF – Download On Demand

- by PeterTweed

Take the Slalom Challenge at www.slalomchallenge.com! A common challenge with building complex applications in Silverlight is the initial download size of the xap file. MEF enables us to build composable applications that allows us to build complex composite applications. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a mechanism to spilt out components into different Silverlight applications in separate xap files and download the separate xap file only if needed? MEF gives us the ability to do this. This post will cover the basics needed to build such a composite application split between different silerlight applications and download the referenced silverlight application only when needed. Steps: 1. Create a Silverlight 4 application 2. Add references to the following assemblies: System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll System.ComponentModel.Composition.Initialization.dll 3. Add a new Silverlight 4 application called ExternalSilverlightApplication to the solution that was created in step 1. Ensure the new application is hosted in the web application for the solution and choose to not create a test page for the new application. 4. Delete the App.xaml and MainPage.xaml files – they aren’t needed. 5. Add references to the following assemblies in the ExternalSilverlightApplication project: System.ComponentModel.Composition.dll System.ComponentModel.Composition.Initialization.dll 6. Ensure the two references above have their Copy Local values set to false. As we will have these two assmblies in the original Silverlight application, we will have no need to include them in the built ExternalSilverlightApplication build. 7. Add a new user control called LeftControl to the ExternalSilverlightApplication project. 8. Replace the LayoutRoot Grid with the following xaml: <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Beige" Margin="40" > <Button Content="Left Content" Margin="30"></Button> </Grid> 9. Add the following statement to the top of the LeftControl.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 10. Add the following attribute to the LeftControl class [Export(typeof(LeftControl))] This attribute tells MEF that the type LeftControl will be exported – i.e. made available for other applications to import and compose into the application. 11. Add a new user control called RightControl to the ExternalSilverlightApplication project. 12. Replace the LayoutRoot Grid with the following xaml: <Grid x:Name="LayoutRoot" Background="Green" Margin="40" > <TextBlock Margin="40" Foreground="White" Text="Right Control" FontSize="16" VerticalAlignment="Center" HorizontalAlignment="Center" ></TextBlock> </Grid> 13. Add the following statement to the top of the RightControl.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 14. Add the following attribute to the RightControl class [Export(typeof(RightControl))] 15. In your original Silverlight project add a reference to the ExternalSilverlightApplication project. 16. Change the reference to the ExternalSilverlightApplication project to have it’s Copy Local value = false. This will ensure that the referenced ExternalSilverlightApplication Silverlight application is not included in the original Silverlight application package when it it built. The ExternalSilverlightApplication Silverlight application therefore has to be downloaded on demand by the original Silverlight application for it’s controls to be used. 1. In your original Silverlight project add the following xaml to the LayoutRoot Grid in MainPage.xaml: <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="65*" /> <RowDefinition Height="235*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Button Name="LoaderButton" Content="Download External Controls" Click="Button_Click"></Button> <StackPanel Grid.Row="1" Orientation="Horizontal" HorizontalAlignment="Center" > <Border Name="LeftContent" Background="Red" BorderBrush="Gray" CornerRadius="20"></Border> <Border Name="RightContent" Background="Red" BorderBrush="Gray" CornerRadius="20"></Border> </StackPanel> The borders will hold the controls that will be downlaoded, imported and composed via MEF when the button is clicked. 2. Add the following statement to the top of the MainPage.xaml.cs file using System.ComponentModel.Composition; 3. Add the following properties to the MainPage class: [Import(typeof(LeftControl))] public LeftControl LeftUserControl { get; set; } [Import(typeof(RightControl))] public RightControl RightUserControl { get; set; } This defines properties accepting LeftControl and RightControl types. The attrributes are used to tell MEF the discovered type that should be applied to the property when composition occurs. 17. Add the following event handler for the button click to the MainPage.xaml.cs file: private void Button_Click(object sender, RoutedEventArgs e) { DeploymentCatalog deploymentCatalog = new DeploymentCatalog("ExternalSilverlightApplication.xap"); CompositionHost.Initialize(deploymentCatalog); deploymentCatalog.DownloadCompleted += (s, i) => { if (i.Error == null) { CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports(this); LeftContent.Child = LeftUserControl; RightContent.Child = RightUserControl; LoaderButton.IsEnabled = false; } }; deploymentCatalog.DownloadAsync(); } This is where the magic happens! The deploymentCatalog object is pointed to the ExternalSilverlightApplication.xap file. It is then associated with the CompositionHost initialization. As the download will be asynchronous, an eventhandler is created for the DownloadCompleted event. The deploymentCatalog object is then told to start the asynchronous download. The event handler that executes when the download is completed uses the CompositionInitializer.SatisfyImports() function to tell MEF to satisfy the Imports for the current class. It is at this point that the LeftUserControl and RightUserControl properties are initialized with composed objects from the downloaded ExternalSilverlightApplication.xap package. 18. Run the application click the Download External Controls button and see the controls defined in the ExternalSilverlightApplication application loaded into the original Silverlight application. Congratulations! You have implemented download on demand capabilities for composite applications using the MEF DeploymentCatalog class. You are now able to segment your applications into separate xap file for deployment.

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Modern/Metro Internet Explorer: What were they thinking???

- by Rick Strahl

As I installed Windows 8.1 last week I decided that I really should take a closer look at Internet Explorer in the Modern/Metro environment again. Right away I ran into two issues that are real head scratchers to me.Modern Split Windows don't resize Viewport but Zoom OutThis one falls in the "WTF, really?" department: It looks like Modern Internet Explorer's Modern doesn't resize the browser window as every other browser (including IE 11 on the desktop) does, but rather tries to adjust the zoom to the width of the browser. This means that if you use the Modern IE browser and you split the display between IE and another application, IE will be zoomed out, with text becoming much, much smaller, rather than resizing the browser viewport and adjusting the pixel width as you would when a browser window is typically resized.Here's what I'm talking about in a couple of pictures. First here's the full screen Internet Explorer version (this shot is resized down since it's full screen at 1080p, click to see the full image):This brings up the first issue which is: On the desktop who wants to browse a site full screen? Most sites aren't fully optimized for 1080p widescreen experience and frankly most content that wide just looks weird. Even in typical 10" resolutions of 1280 width it's weird to look at things this way. At least this issue can be worked around with @media queries and either constraining the view, or adding additional content to make use of the extra space. Still running a desktop browser full screen is not optimal on a desktop machine - ever.Regardless, this view, while oversized, is what I expect: Everything is rendered in the right ratios, with font-size and the responsive design styling properly respected.But now look what happens when you split the desktop windows and show half desktop and have modern IE (this screen shot is not resized but cropped - this is actual size content as you can see in the cropped Twitter window on the right half of the screen):What's happening here is that IE is zooming out of the content to make it fit into the smaller width, shrinking the content rather than resizing the viewport's pixel width. In effect it looks like the pixel width stays at 1080px and the viewport expands out height-wise in response resulting in some crazy long portrait view.There goes responsive design - out the window literally. If you've built your site using @media queries and fixed viewport sizes, Internet Explorer completely screws you in this split view. On my 1080p monitor, the site shown at a little under half width becomes completely unreadable as the fonts are too small and break up. As you go into split view and you resize the window handle the content of the browser gets smaller and smaller (and effectively longer and longer on the bottom) effectively throwing off any responsive layout to the point of un-readability even on a big display, let alone a small tablet screen.What could POSSIBLY be the benefit of this screwed up behavior? I checked around a bit trying different pages in this shrunk down view. Other than the Microsoft home page, every page I went to was nearly unreadable at a quarter width. The only page I found that worked 'normally' was the Microsoft home page which undoubtedly is optimized just for Internet Explorer specifically.Bottom Address Bar opaquely overlays ContentAnother problematic feature for me is the browser address bar on the bottom. Modern IE shows the status bar opaquely on the bottom, overlaying the content area of the Web Page - until you click on the page. Until you do though, the address bar overlays the bottom content solidly. And not just a little bit but by good sizable chunk.In the application from the screen shot above I have an application toolbar on the bottom and the IE Address bar completely hides that bottom toolbar when the page is first loaded, until the user clicks into the content at which point the address bar shrinks down to a fat border style bar with a … on it. Toolbars on the bottom are pretty common these days, especially for mobile optimized applications, so I'd say this is a common use case. But even if you don't have toolbars on the bottom maybe there's other fixed content on the bottom of the page that is vital to display. While other browsers often also show address bars and then later hide them, these other browsers tend to resize the viewport when the address bar status changes, so the content can respond to the size change. Not so with Modern IE. The address bar overlays content and stays visible until content is clicked. No resize notification or viewport height change is sent to the browser.So basically Internet Explorer is telling me: "Our toolbar is more important than your content!" - AND gives me no chance to re-act to that behavior. The result on this page/application is that the user sees no actionable operations until he or she clicks into the content area, which is terrible from a UI perspective as the user has no idea what options are available on initial load.It's doubly confounding in that IE is running in full screen mode and has an the entire height of the screen at its disposal - there's plenty of real estate available to not require this sort of hiding of content in the first place. Heck, even Windows Phone with its more constrained size doesn't hide content - in fact the address bar on Windows Phone 8 is always visible.What were they thinking?Every time I use anything in the Modern Metro interface in Windows 8/8.1 I get angry. I can pretty much ignore Metro/Modern for my everyday usage, but unfortunately with Internet Explorer in the modern shell I have to live with, because there will be users using it to access my sites. I think it's inexcusable by Microsoft to build such a crappy shell around the browser that impacts the actual usability of Web content. In both of the cases above I can only scratch my head at what could have possibly motivated anybody designing the UI for the browser to make these screwed up choices, that manipulate the content in a totally unmaintainable way.© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2013Posted in Windows HTML5 Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document,"script","twitter-wjs"); (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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MapReduce in DryadLINQ and PLINQ

- by JoshReuben

MapReduce See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mapreduce The MapReduce pattern aims to handle large-scale computations across a cluster of servers, often involving massive amounts of data. "The computation takes a set of input key/value pairs, and produces a set of output key/value pairs. The developer expresses the computation as two Func delegates: Map and Reduce. Map - takes a single input pair and produces a set of intermediate key/value pairs. The MapReduce function groups results by key and passes them to the Reduce function. Reduce - accepts an intermediate key I and a set of values for that key. It merges together these values to form a possibly smaller set of values. Typically just zero or one output value is produced per Reduce invocation. The intermediate values are supplied to the user's Reduce function via an iterator." the canonical MapReduce example: counting word frequency in a text file. MapReduce using DryadLINQ see http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/dryadlinq/ and http://connect.microsoft.com/Dryad DryadLINQ provides a simple and straightforward way to implement MapReduce operations. This The implementation has two primary components: A Pair structure, which serves as a data container. A MapReduce method, which counts word frequency and returns the top five words. The Pair Structure - Pair has two properties: Word is a string that holds a word or key. Count is an int that holds the word count. The structure also overrides ToString to simplify printing the results. The following example shows the Pair implementation. public struct Pair { private string word; private int count; public Pair(string w, int c) { word = w; count = c; } public int Count { get { return count; } } public string Word { get { return word; } } public override string ToString() { return word + ":" + count.ToString(); } } The MapReduce function that gets the results. the input data could be partitioned and distributed across the cluster. 1. Creates a DryadTable<LineRecord> object, inputTable, to represent the lines of input text. For partitioned data, use GetPartitionedTable<T> instead of GetTable<T> and pass the method a metadata file. 2. Applies the SelectMany operator to inputTable to transform the collection of lines into collection of words. The String.Split method converts the line into a collection of words. SelectMany concatenates the collections created by Split into a single IQueryable<string> collection named words, which represents all the words in the file. 3. Performs the Map part of the operation by applying GroupBy to the words object. The GroupBy operation groups elements with the same key, which is defined by the selector delegate. This creates a higher order collection, whose elements are groups. In this case, the delegate is an identity function, so the key is the word itself and the operation creates a groups collection that consists of groups of identical words. 4. Performs the Reduce part of the operation by applying Select to groups. This operation reduces the groups of words from Step 3 to an IQueryable<Pair> collection named counts that represents the unique words in the file and how many instances there are of each word. Each key value in groups represents a unique word, so Select creates one Pair object for each unique word. IGrouping.Count returns the number of items in the group, so each Pair object's Count member is set to the number of instances of the word. 5. Applies OrderByDescending to counts. This operation sorts the input collection in descending order of frequency and creates an ordered collection named ordered. 6. Applies Take to ordered to create an IQueryable<Pair> collection named top, which contains the 100 most common words in the input file, and their frequency. Test then uses the Pair object's ToString implementation to print the top one hundred words, and their frequency. public static IQueryable<Pair> MapReduce( string directory, string fileName, int k) { DryadDataContext ddc = new DryadDataContext("file://" + directory); DryadTable<LineRecord> inputTable = ddc.GetTable<LineRecord>(fileName); IQueryable<string> words = inputTable.SelectMany(x => x.line.Split(' ')); IQueryable<IGrouping<string, string>> groups = words.GroupBy(x => x); IQueryable<Pair> counts = groups.Select(x => new Pair(x.Key, x.Count())); IQueryable<Pair> ordered = counts.OrderByDescending(x => x.Count); IQueryable<Pair> top = ordered.Take(k); return top; } To Test: IQueryable<Pair> results = MapReduce(@"c:\DryadData\input", "TestFile.txt", 100); foreach (Pair words in results) Debug.Print(words.ToString()); Note: DryadLINQ applications can use a more compact way to represent the query: return inputTable .SelectMany(x => x.line.Split(' ')) .GroupBy(x => x) .Select(x => new Pair(x.Key, x.Count())) .OrderByDescending(x => x.Count) .Take(k); MapReduce using PLINQ The pattern is relevant even for a single multi-core machine, however. We can write our own PLINQ MapReduce in a few lines. the Map function takes a single input value and returns a set of mapped values àLINQ's SelectMany operator. These are then grouped according to an intermediate key à LINQ GroupBy operator. The Reduce function takes each intermediate key and a set of values for that key, and produces any number of outputs per key à LINQ SelectMany again. We can put all of this together to implement MapReduce in PLINQ that returns a ParallelQuery<T> public static ParallelQuery<TResult> MapReduce<TSource, TMapped, TKey, TResult>( this ParallelQuery<TSource> source, Func<TSource, IEnumerable<TMapped>> map, Func<TMapped, TKey> keySelector, Func<IGrouping<TKey, TMapped>, IEnumerable<TResult>> reduce) { return source .SelectMany(map) .GroupBy(keySelector) .SelectMany(reduce); } the map function takes in an input document and outputs all of the words in that document. The grouping phase groups all of the identical words together, such that the reduce phase can then count the words in each group and output a word/count pair for each grouping: var files = Directory.EnumerateFiles(dirPath, "*.txt").AsParallel(); var counts = files.MapReduce( path => File.ReadLines(path).SelectMany(line => line.Split(delimiters)), word => word, group => new[] { new KeyValuePair<string, int>(group.Key, group.Count()) });

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Are you reporting Visual Studio 2012 issues to Microsoft correctly?

- by Tarun Arora

Issues you may run into while using Visual Studio need to be reported to the Microsoft Product Team via the Microsoft connect site. The Microsoft team then tries to reproduce the issue using the details provided by you. If the information you provide isn’t sufficient to reproduce the issue the team tries to contact you for specifics, this not only increases the cycle time to resolution but the lack of communication also results in issues not being resolved. So, when I report an issue one part of me tells me to include as much detail about the issue as I can clubbing screen shots, repo steps, system information, visual studio version information,… the other half tells me this is so time consuming, leave it for now and come back to fill all these details later. Reporting a bug but not including the supporting information is an invitation to excuses like … Microsoft has absolutely changed this experience for VS 2012. The Microsoft Visual Studio Feedback tool is designed to simplify the process of providing feedback and reporting issues to Microsoft that you may encounter while using Microsoft Visual Studio 2012. Note – The Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback client currently only works for VS 2012 and not any other versions of Visual Studio. Setting up the Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback client Open Visual Studio, from the Tools menu select Extension and Updates. In the Extension and Updates window, click Online from the left pane and search using the text ‘feedback’, download and Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback Tool by following the instructions from the wizard. Note - Restarting Visual Studio after the install is a must! How to report a bug for Visual Studio 2012? Click on the Help menu and choose Report a Bug You should see an icon Microsoft Visual Studio 2012 Feedback Tool come up in the system tray icon area You’ll need to accept the Privacy statement. You have the option of reporting the feedback as private or public. Microsoft works with several Partners, MVP’s and Vendors who get access to early bits of Microsoft products for valuation. This is where it becomes essential to report the feedback privately. I would choose the Public option otherwise. After all if it’s out there in the public, others can discover and add to it easily. You now have the option to report a new issue or add to an existing issue. Should you choose to add to an existing issue you should have the feedback ID of the issue available. This can be obtained from the Microsoft Connect site. For now I am going to focus on reporting a new feedback privately. Filling out the feedback details You will notice that VsInfo.xml and DxDiagOutput.txt are automatically attached as you enter this screen (more on that later). Feedback Type Choose the feedback type from (Performance, Hang, Crash, Other) Note – The record button will only be enabled once you have enabled once you have chosen the feedback type, Bug-repro recording is not available for Windows Server 2008. Effective Title and Description Enter a title that helps us differentiate the bug when it appears in a list, so that we can group it with any related bugs, assign it to a developer more effectively, and resolve it more quickly. Example: Imagine that you are submitting a bug because you tried to install Service Pack 1 and got a message that Visual Studio is not installed even though it is. Helpful: Installed Visual Studio version not detected during Service Pack 1 setup. Not helpful: Service Pack 1 problem. Tip: Write the problem description first, and then distil it to create a title. Example Description: Helpful: When I run Service Pack 1 Setup, I get the message "No Visual Studio version is detected" even though I have Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and Visual C++ 2010 Express installed on my machine. Even though I uninstalled both editions, and then first reinstalled Ultimate and then Express, I still get the message. Record: Becoming a first class citizen Often a repro report is invaluable to describe and decipher the issue. Please use this feature to send actionable feedback. The record repro feature works differently depending on the feedback type you selected. Please find below details for each recording option. You can start recording simply by selecting a feedback type, and clicking on the “Record” button. When "Performance" is the bug type: When the Microsoft Visual Studio trace recorder starts, perform the actions that show the performance problem you want to report and then click on the "Stop Recording" button as soon as you experience the performance problem. Because the tool optimizes trace collection, you can run it for as long as it takes to show the problem, up to two hours. Note that, you need to stop recording as soon as the performance issue occurs, because the tool captures only the last couple minutes of your actions to optimize the trace collection. After you stop the recording, the tool takes up to two minutes to assemble the data and attach an ETLTrace.zip file to your bug report. The data includes information about Windows events and the Visual Studio code path. Note that, running the Microsoft Visual Studio trace recorder requires elevated user privilege. When "Crash" is the bug type: When the dialog box appears, select the running Visual Studio instance for which you want to show the steps that cause a crash. When the crash occurs, click on the "Stop Record" button. After you do this, two files are attached to your bug report - an AutomaticCrashDump.zip file that contains information about the crash and a ReproSteps.zip file that shows the repro steps. Repro steps are captured by Windows Problem Steps Recorder. Note that, you can pause the recording, and resume later, or for a specific step, you can add additional comments. When "Hang" is the bug type: The process for recording the steps that cause a hang resembles the one for crashes. The difference is, you can even collect a dump file after the VS hangs; start the VSFT either from the system tray or by starting a new instance of VS, select "Hang" as feedback type and click on the "Record" button. You will be prompted which VS to collect dump about, select the VS instance that hanged. VSFT collects a dump file regarding the hang, called MiniDump.zip, and attaches to your bug report. When "Other" is the bug type: When the problem step recorder starts, perform the actions that show the issue you want to report and then choose the "Stop” button. You can pause the recording, and resume later, or for a specific step, you can add additional comments. Once you’re done, ReproSteps.zip is added to your bug report. Pre-attached files It is essential for Microsoft to know what version of the the product are you currently using and what is the current configuration of your system. Note – The total size of all attachments in a bug report cannot exceed 2 GB, and every uncompressed attachment must be smaller than 512 MB. We recommend that you assemble all of your attachments, compress them together into a .zip file, and then attach the .zip file. Taking a screenshot Associate a screen shot by clicking the Take screenshot button, choose either the entire desktop, the specific monitor (useful if you are working in a multi monitor configuration) or the specific window in question. And finally … click Submit If you need further help, more details can be found here. You can view your feedback online by using the following URL “">https://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/SearchResults.aspx?SearchQuery=<feedbackId>” Happy bug logging

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WPF: ContentPresenter changing Foreground unexpectedly depending on where styles are located

- by VLTII

Hi, I'm having an issue with the ContentPresenter behaving unexpectedly based on whether the styles are located in the Window.Resources or in a ResourceDictionary. Specifically, I'm setting the Foreground of the default TextBlock to Black, then setting the Foreground value in my default button style to White. If the styles exits on the page like this, they work fine: <Window xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Microsoft_Windows_Themes="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Themes;assembly=PresentationFramework.Aero" x:Class="TestBed.MainWindow" x:Name="Window" Title="MainWindow" Width="640" Height="480"> <Window.Resources> <Style TargetType="{x:Type TextBlock}"> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Black" /> </Style> <Style x:Key="ButtonFocusVisual"> <Setter Property="Control.Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate> <Rectangle Stroke="Black" StrokeDashArray="1 2" StrokeThickness="1" Margin="2" SnapsToDevicePixels="true"/> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> <LinearGradientBrush x:Key="ButtonNormalBackground" EndPoint="0,1" StartPoint="0,0"> <GradientStop Color="#F3F3F3" Offset="0"/> <GradientStop Color="#EBEBEB" Offset="0.5"/> <GradientStop Color="#DDDDDD" Offset="0.5"/> <GradientStop Color="#CDCDCD" Offset="1"/> </LinearGradientBrush> <SolidColorBrush x:Key="ButtonNormalBorder" Color="#FF707070"/> <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> <Setter Property="FocusVisualStyle" Value="{StaticResource ButtonFocusVisual}"/> <Setter Property="Background" Value="{StaticResource ButtonNormalBackground}"/> <Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="{StaticResource ButtonNormalBorder}"/> <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="1"/> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="White"/> <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="VerticalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="Padding" Value="1"/> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> <Microsoft_Windows_Themes:ButtonChrome x:Name="Chrome" SnapsToDevicePixels="true" Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" RenderDefaulted="{TemplateBinding IsDefaulted}" RenderMouseOver="{TemplateBinding IsMouseOver}" RenderPressed="{TemplateBinding IsPressed}"> <ContentPresenter HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" Margin="{TemplateBinding Padding}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}" SnapsToDevicePixels="{TemplateBinding SnapsToDevicePixels}" RecognizesAccessKey="True"/> </Microsoft_Windows_Themes:ButtonChrome> <ControlTemplate.Triggers> <Trigger Property="IsKeyboardFocused" Value="true"> <Setter Property="RenderDefaulted" TargetName="Chrome" Value="true"/> </Trigger> <Trigger Property="ToggleButton.IsChecked" Value="true"> <Setter Property="RenderPressed" TargetName="Chrome" Value="true"/> </Trigger> <Trigger Property="IsEnabled" Value="false"> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="#ADADAD"/> </Trigger> </ControlTemplate.Triggers> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </Window.Resources> <StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <Button Content="Button" /> </StackPanel> </Window> But if I move those same styles over to a ResourceDictionary, the Foreground of the button switches to black. Updated MainWindow: <Window xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Microsoft_Windows_Themes="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Themes;assembly=PresentationFramework.Aero" x:Class="TestBed.MainWindow" x:Name="Window" Title="MainWindow" Width="640" Height="480"> <StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <Button Content="Button" /> </StackPanel> </Window> ResourceDictionary: <ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Microsoft_Windows_Themes="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Themes;assembly=PresentationFramework.Aero" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d"> <Style TargetType="{x:Type TextBlock}"> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Black" /> </Style> <Style x:Key="ButtonFocusVisual"> <Setter Property="Control.Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate> <Rectangle Stroke="Black" StrokeDashArray="1 2" StrokeThickness="1" Margin="2" SnapsToDevicePixels="true"/> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> <LinearGradientBrush x:Key="ButtonNormalBackground" EndPoint="0,1" StartPoint="0,0"> <GradientStop Color="#F3F3F3" Offset="0"/> <GradientStop Color="#EBEBEB" Offset="0.5"/> <GradientStop Color="#DDDDDD" Offset="0.5"/> <GradientStop Color="#CDCDCD" Offset="1"/> </LinearGradientBrush> <SolidColorBrush x:Key="ButtonNormalBorder" Color="#FF707070"/> <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> <Setter Property="FocusVisualStyle" Value="{StaticResource ButtonFocusVisual}"/> <Setter Property="Background" Value="{StaticResource ButtonNormalBackground}"/> <Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="{StaticResource ButtonNormalBorder}"/> <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="1"/> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="White"/> <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="VerticalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="Padding" Value="1"/> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> <Microsoft_Windows_Themes:ButtonChrome x:Name="Chrome" SnapsToDevicePixels="true" Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" RenderDefaulted="{TemplateBinding IsDefaulted}" RenderMouseOver="{TemplateBinding IsMouseOver}" RenderPressed="{TemplateBinding IsPressed}"> <ContentPresenter HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" Margin="{TemplateBinding Padding}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}" SnapsToDevicePixels="{TemplateBinding SnapsToDevicePixels}" RecognizesAccessKey="True"/> </Microsoft_Windows_Themes:ButtonChrome> <ControlTemplate.Triggers> <Trigger Property="IsKeyboardFocused" Value="true"> <Setter Property="RenderDefaulted" TargetName="Chrome" Value="true"/> </Trigger> <Trigger Property="ToggleButton.IsChecked" Value="true"> <Setter Property="RenderPressed" TargetName="Chrome" Value="true"/> </Trigger> <Trigger Property="IsEnabled" Value="false"> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="#ADADAD"/> </Trigger> </ControlTemplate.Triggers> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </ResourceDictionary> And my App.xaml because someone will ask for it: <Application xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" x:Class="TestBed.App" StartupUri="MainWindow.xaml"> <Application.Resources>  <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <ResourceDictionary Source="ResourceDictionary.xaml"/> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application> Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

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Problem with my whiteboard application

- by swift

I have to develop a whiteboard application in which both the local user and the remote user should be able to draw simultaneously, is this possible? If possible then any logic? I have already developed a code but in which i am not able to do this, when the remote user starts drawing the shape which i am drawing is being replaced by his shape and co-ordinates. This problem is only when both draw simultaneously. any idea guys? Here is my code class Paper extends JPanel implements MouseListener,MouseMotionListener,ActionListener { static BufferedImage image; int bpressed; Color color; Point start; Point end; Point mp; Button elipse=new Button("elipse"); Button rectangle=new Button("rect"); Button line=new Button("line"); Button empty=new Button(""); JButton save=new JButton("Save"); JButton erase=new JButton("Erase"); String selected; int ex,ey;//eraser DatagramSocket dataSocket; JButton button = new JButton("test"); Client client; Point p=new Point(); int w,h; public Paper(DatagramSocket dataSocket) { this.dataSocket=dataSocket; client=new Client(dataSocket); System.out.println("paper"); setBackground(Color.white); addMouseListener(this); addMouseMotionListener(this); color = Color.black; setBorder(BorderFactory.createLineBorder(Color.black)); //save.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(100,20)); save.setMaximumSize(new Dimension(75,27)); erase.setMaximumSize(new Dimension(75,27)); } public void paintComponent(Graphics g) { try { g.drawImage(image, 0, 0, this); Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)g; g2.setPaint(Color.black); if(selected==("elipse")) g2.drawOval(start.x, start.y,(end.x-start.x),(end.y-start.y)); else if(selected==("rect")) g2.drawRect(start.x, start.y, (end.x-start.x),(end.y-start.y)); else if(selected==("line")) g2.drawLine(start.x,start.y,end.x,end.y); } catch(Exception e) {} } //Function to draw the shape on image public void draw() { Graphics2D g2 = image.createGraphics(); g2.setPaint(color); if(selected=="line") g2.drawLine(start.x, start.y, end.x, end.y); if(selected=="elipse") g2.drawOval(start.x, start.y, (end.x-start.x),(end.y-start.y)); if(selected=="rect") g2.drawRect(start.x, start.y, (end.x-start.x),(end.y-start.y)); repaint(); g2.dispose(); start=null; } //To add the point to the board which is broadcasted by the server public synchronized void addPoint(Point ps,String varname,String shape,String event) { try { if(end==null) end = new Point(); if(start==null) start = new Point(); if(shape.equals("elipse")) selected="elipse"; else if(shape.equals("line")) selected="line"; else if(shape.equals("rect")) selected="rect"; else if(shape.equals("erase")) { selected="erase"; erase(); } if(end!=null && start!=null) { if(varname.equals("end")) end=ps; if(varname.equals("mp")) mp=ps; if(varname.equals("start")) start=ps; if(event.equals("drag")) repaint(); else if(event.equals("release")) draw(); } } catch(Exception e) { e.printStackTrace(); } } //To set the size of the image public void setWidth(int x,int y) { System.out.println("("+x+","+y+")"); w=x; h=y; image = new BufferedImage(w, h, BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB); Graphics2D g2 = image.createGraphics(); g2.setPaint(Color.white); g2.fillRect(0,0,w,h); g2.dispose(); } //Function which provides the erase functionality public void erase() { Graphics2D pic=(Graphics2D) image.getGraphics(); pic.setPaint(Color.white); pic.fillRect(start.x, start.y, 10, 10); } //Function to add buttons into the panel, calling this function returns a panel public JPanel addButtons() { JPanel buttonpanel=new JPanel(); JPanel row1=new JPanel(); JPanel row2=new JPanel(); JPanel row3=new JPanel(); JPanel row4=new JPanel(); buttonpanel.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(80,80)); //buttonpanel.setMinimumSize(new Dimension(150,150)); row1.setLayout(new BoxLayout(row1,BoxLayout.X_AXIS)); row1.setPreferredSize(new Dimension(150,150)); row2.setLayout(new BoxLayout(row2,BoxLayout.X_AXIS)); row3.setLayout(new BoxLayout(row3,BoxLayout.X_AXIS)); row4.setLayout(new BoxLayout(row4,BoxLayout.X_AXIS)); buttonpanel.setLayout(new BoxLayout(buttonpanel,BoxLayout.Y_AXIS)); elipse.addActionListener(this); rectangle.addActionListener(this); line.addActionListener( this); save.addActionListener( this); erase.addActionListener( this); buttonpanel.add(Box.createRigidArea(new Dimension(10,10))); row1.add(elipse); row1.add(Box.createRigidArea(new Dimension(5,0))); row1.add(rectangle); buttonpanel.add(row1); buttonpanel.add(Box.createRigidArea(new Dimension(10,10))); row2.add(line); row2.add(Box.createRigidArea(new Dimension(5,0))); row2.add(empty); buttonpanel.add(row2); buttonpanel.add(Box.createRigidArea(new Dimension(10,10))); row3.add(save); buttonpanel.add(row3); buttonpanel.add(Box.createRigidArea(new Dimension(10,10))); row4.add(erase); buttonpanel.add(row4); return buttonpanel; } //To save the image drawn public void save() { try { ByteArrayOutputStream bos = new ByteArrayOutputStream(); JPEGImageEncoder encoder = JPEGCodec.createJPEGEncoder(bos); JFileChooser fc = new JFileChooser(); fc.showSaveDialog(this); encoder.encode(image); byte[] jpgData = bos.toByteArray(); FileOutputStream fos = new FileOutputStream(fc.getSelectedFile()+".jpeg"); fos.write(jpgData); fos.close(); //add replce confirmation here } catch (IOException e) { System.out.println(e); } } public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } @Override public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent arg0) { } public void mouseExited(MouseEvent arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) { if(selected=="line"||selected=="erase") { start=e.getPoint(); client.broadcast(start,"start", selected,"press"); } else if(selected=="elipse"||selected=="rect") { mp = e.getPoint(); client.broadcast(mp,"mp", selected,"press"); } } public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e) { if(start!=null) { if(selected=="line") { end=e.getPoint(); client.broadcast(end,"end", selected,"release"); } else if(selected=="elipse"||selected=="rect") { end.x = Math.max(mp.x,e.getX()); end.y = Math.max(mp.y,e.getY()); client.broadcast(end,"end", selected,"release"); } draw(); } //start=null; } public void mouseDragged(MouseEvent e) { if(end==null) end = new Point(); if(start==null) start = new Point(); if(selected=="line") { end=e.getPoint(); client.broadcast(end,"end", selected,"drag"); } else if(selected=="erase") { start=e.getPoint(); erase(); client.broadcast(start,"start", selected,"drag"); } else if(selected=="elipse"||selected=="rect") { start.x = Math.min(mp.x,e.getX()); start.y = Math.min(mp.y,e.getY()); end.x = Math.max(mp.x,e.getX()); end.y = Math.max(mp.y,e.getY()); client.broadcast(start,"start", selected,"drag"); client.broadcast(end,"end", selected,"drag"); } repaint(); } @Override public void mouseMoved(MouseEvent arg0) { // TODO Auto-generated method stub } public void actionPerformed(ActionEvent e) { if(e.getSource()==elipse) selected="elipse"; if(e.getSource()==line) selected="line"; if(e.getSource()==rectangle) selected="rect"; if(e.getSource()==save) save(); if(e.getSource()==erase) { selected="erase"; erase(); } } } class Button extends JButton { String name; public Button(String name) { this.name=name; Dimension buttonSize = new Dimension(35,35); setMaximumSize(buttonSize); } public void paintComponent(Graphics g) { super.paintComponent(g); Graphics2D g2 = (Graphics2D)g; g2.setRenderingHint(RenderingHints.KEY_ANTIALIASING, RenderingHints.VALUE_ANTIALIAS_ON); //g2.setStroke(new BasicStroke(1.2f)); if (name == "line") g.drawLine(5,5,30,30); if (name == "elipse") g.drawOval(5,7,25,20); if (name== "rect") g.drawRect(5,5,25,23); } }

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ContentPresenter changing Foreground unexpectedly depending on where styles are located

- by VLTII

Hi, I'm having an issue with the ContentPresenter behaving unexpectedly based on whether the styles are located in the Window.Resources or in a ResourceDictionary. Specifically, I'm setting the Foreground of the default TextBlock to Black, then setting the Foreground value in my default button style to White. If the styles exits on the page like this, they work fine: <Window xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Microsoft_Windows_Themes="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Themes;assembly=PresentationFramework.Aero" x:Class="TestBed.MainWindow" x:Name="Window" Title="MainWindow" Width="640" Height="480"> <Window.Resources> <Style TargetType="{x:Type TextBlock}"> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Black" /> </Style> <Style x:Key="ButtonFocusVisual"> <Setter Property="Control.Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate> <Rectangle Stroke="Black" StrokeDashArray="1 2" StrokeThickness="1" Margin="2" SnapsToDevicePixels="true"/> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> <LinearGradientBrush x:Key="ButtonNormalBackground" EndPoint="0,1" StartPoint="0,0"> <GradientStop Color="#F3F3F3" Offset="0"/> <GradientStop Color="#EBEBEB" Offset="0.5"/> <GradientStop Color="#DDDDDD" Offset="0.5"/> <GradientStop Color="#CDCDCD" Offset="1"/> </LinearGradientBrush> <SolidColorBrush x:Key="ButtonNormalBorder" Color="#FF707070"/> <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> <Setter Property="FocusVisualStyle" Value="{StaticResource ButtonFocusVisual}"/> <Setter Property="Background" Value="{StaticResource ButtonNormalBackground}"/> <Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="{StaticResource ButtonNormalBorder}"/> <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="1"/> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="White"/> <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="VerticalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="Padding" Value="1"/> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> <Microsoft_Windows_Themes:ButtonChrome x:Name="Chrome" SnapsToDevicePixels="true" Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" RenderDefaulted="{TemplateBinding IsDefaulted}" RenderMouseOver="{TemplateBinding IsMouseOver}" RenderPressed="{TemplateBinding IsPressed}"> <ContentPresenter HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" Margin="{TemplateBinding Padding}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}" SnapsToDevicePixels="{TemplateBinding SnapsToDevicePixels}" RecognizesAccessKey="True"/> </Microsoft_Windows_Themes:ButtonChrome> <ControlTemplate.Triggers> <Trigger Property="IsKeyboardFocused" Value="true"> <Setter Property="RenderDefaulted" TargetName="Chrome" Value="true"/> </Trigger> <Trigger Property="ToggleButton.IsChecked" Value="true"> <Setter Property="RenderPressed" TargetName="Chrome" Value="true"/> </Trigger> <Trigger Property="IsEnabled" Value="false"> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="#ADADAD"/> </Trigger> </ControlTemplate.Triggers> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </Window.Resources> <StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <Button Content="Button" /> </StackPanel> </Window> But if I move those same styles over to a ResourceDictionary, the Foreground of the button switches to black. Updated MainWindow: <Window xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Microsoft_Windows_Themes="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Themes;assembly=PresentationFramework.Aero" x:Class="TestBed.MainWindow" x:Name="Window" Title="MainWindow" Width="640" Height="480"> <StackPanel x:Name="LayoutRoot"> <Button Content="Button" /> </StackPanel> </Window> ResourceDictionary: <ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:Microsoft_Windows_Themes="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Windows.Themes;assembly=PresentationFramework.Aero" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d"> <Style TargetType="{x:Type TextBlock}"> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="Black" /> </Style> <Style x:Key="ButtonFocusVisual"> <Setter Property="Control.Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate> <Rectangle Stroke="Black" StrokeDashArray="1 2" StrokeThickness="1" Margin="2" SnapsToDevicePixels="true"/> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> <LinearGradientBrush x:Key="ButtonNormalBackground" EndPoint="0,1" StartPoint="0,0"> <GradientStop Color="#F3F3F3" Offset="0"/> <GradientStop Color="#EBEBEB" Offset="0.5"/> <GradientStop Color="#DDDDDD" Offset="0.5"/> <GradientStop Color="#CDCDCD" Offset="1"/> </LinearGradientBrush> <SolidColorBrush x:Key="ButtonNormalBorder" Color="#FF707070"/> <Style TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> <Setter Property="FocusVisualStyle" Value="{StaticResource ButtonFocusVisual}"/> <Setter Property="Background" Value="{StaticResource ButtonNormalBackground}"/> <Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="{StaticResource ButtonNormalBorder}"/> <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="1"/> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="White"/> <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="VerticalContentAlignment" Value="Center"/> <Setter Property="Padding" Value="1"/> <Setter Property="Template"> <Setter.Value> <ControlTemplate TargetType="{x:Type Button}"> <Microsoft_Windows_Themes:ButtonChrome x:Name="Chrome" SnapsToDevicePixels="true" Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" RenderDefaulted="{TemplateBinding IsDefaulted}" RenderMouseOver="{TemplateBinding IsMouseOver}" RenderPressed="{TemplateBinding IsPressed}"> <ContentPresenter HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" Margin="{TemplateBinding Padding}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}" SnapsToDevicePixels="{TemplateBinding SnapsToDevicePixels}" RecognizesAccessKey="True"/> </Microsoft_Windows_Themes:ButtonChrome> <ControlTemplate.Triggers> <Trigger Property="IsKeyboardFocused" Value="true"> <Setter Property="RenderDefaulted" TargetName="Chrome" Value="true"/> </Trigger> <Trigger Property="ToggleButton.IsChecked" Value="true"> <Setter Property="RenderPressed" TargetName="Chrome" Value="true"/> </Trigger> <Trigger Property="IsEnabled" Value="false"> <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="#ADADAD"/> </Trigger> </ControlTemplate.Triggers> </ControlTemplate> </Setter.Value> </Setter> </Style> </ResourceDictionary> And my App.xaml because someone will ask for it: <Application xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" x:Class="TestBed.App" StartupUri="MainWindow.xaml"> <Application.Resources>  <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <ResourceDictionary Source="ResourceDictionary.xaml"/> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application> Any help would be greatly appreciated :)

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Cnoverting application to MVC architecture

- by terence6

I'm practicing writing MVC applications. I have a Mastermind game, that I would like to rewrite as MVC app. I have divided my code to parts, but instead of working game I'm getting empty Frame and an error in "public void paint( Graphics g )". Error comes from calling this method in my view with null argument. But how to overcome this ? MVC was quite simple with swing but awt and it's paint methods are much more complicated. Code of working app : http://paste.pocoo.org/show/224982/ App divided to MVC : Main : public class Main { public static void main(String[] args){ Model model = new Model(); View view = new View("Mastermind", 400, 590, model); Controller controller = new Controller(model, view); view.setVisible(true); } } Controller : import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; public class Controller implements MouseListener, ActionListener { private Model model; private View view; public Controller(Model m, View v){ model = m; view = v; view.addWindowListener( new WindowAdapter(){ public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e){ System.exit(0); } }); view.addMouseListener(this); } public void actionPerformed( ActionEvent e ) { if(e.getSource() == view.checkAnswer){ if(model.isRowFull){ model.check(); } } } public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) { Point mouse = new Point(); mouse = e.getPoint(); if (model.isPlaying){ if (mouse.x > 350) { int button = 1 + (int)((mouse.y - 32) / 50); if ((button >= 1) && (button <= 5)){ model.fillHole(button); } } } } public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) {} public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e){} public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent e) {} public void mouseExited(MouseEvent e) {} } View : import java.awt.*; import javax.swing.*; import java.awt.event.*; public class View extends Frame implements ActionListener { Model model; JButton checkAnswer; private JPanel button; static final int HIT_X[] = {270,290,310,290,310}, HIT_Y[] = {506,496,496,516,516}; public View(String name, int w, int h, Model m){ model = m; setTitle( name ); setSize( w,h ); setResizable( false ); this.setLayout(new BorderLayout()); button = new JPanel(); button.setSize( new Dimension(400, 100)); button.setVisible(true); checkAnswer = new JButton("Check"); checkAnswer.addActionListener(this); checkAnswer.setSize( new Dimension(200, 30)); button.add( checkAnswer ); this.add( button, BorderLayout.SOUTH); button.setVisible(true); for ( int i=0; i < model.SCORE; i++ ){ for ( int j = 0; j < model.LINE; j++ ){ model.pins[i][j] = new Pin(20,0); model.pins[i][j].setPosition(j*50+30,510-i*50); model.pins[i+model.SCORE][j] = new Pin(8,0); model.pins[i+model.SCORE][j].setPosition(HIT_X[j],HIT_Y[j]-i*50); } } for ( int i=0; i < model.LINE; i++ ){ model.pins[model.OPTIONS][i] = new Pin( 20, i+2 ); model.pins[model.OPTIONS][i].setPosition( 370,i * 50 + 56); } model.combination(); model.paint(null); } public void actionPerformed( ActionEvent e ) { } } Model: import java.awt.*; public class Model extends Frame{ static final int LINE = 5, SCORE = 10, OPTIONS = 20; Pin pins[][] = new Pin[21][LINE]; int combination[] = new int[LINE]; int curPin = 0; int turn = 1; int repaintPin; boolean isUpdate = true, isPlaying = true, isRowFull = false; public Model(){ } void fillHole(int color) { pins[turn-1][curPin].setColor(color+1); repaintPins( turn ); curPin = (curPin+1) % LINE; if (curPin == 0){ isRowFull = true; } } public void paint( Graphics g ) { g.setColor( new Color(238, 238, 238)); g.fillRect( 0,0,400,590); for ( int i=0; i < pins.length; i++ ) { pins[i][0].paint(g); pins[i][1].paint(g); pins[i][2].paint(g); pins[i][3].paint(g); pins[i][4].paint(g); } } public void update( Graphics g ) { if ( isUpdate ) { paint(g); } else { isUpdate = true; pins[repaintPin-1][0].paint(g); pins[repaintPin-1][1].paint(g); pins[repaintPin-1][2].paint(g); pins[repaintPin-1][3].paint(g); pins[repaintPin-1][4].paint(g); } } void repaintPins( int pin ) { repaintPin = pin; isUpdate = false; repaint(); } void check() { int junkPegs[] = new int[LINE], junkCode[] = new int[LINE]; int pegCount = 0, pico = 0; for ( int i = 0; i < LINE; i++ ) { junkPegs[i] = pins[turn-1][i].getColor(); junkCode[i] = combination[i]; } for ( int i = 0; i < LINE; i++ ){ if (junkPegs[i]==junkCode[i]) { pins[turn+SCORE][pegCount].setColor(1); pegCount++; pico++; junkPegs[i] = 98; junkCode[i] = 99; } } for ( int i = 0; i < LINE; i++ ){ for ( int j = 0; j < LINE; j++ ) if (junkPegs[i]==junkCode[j]) { pins[turn+SCORE][pegCount].setColor(2); pegCount++; junkPegs[i] = 98; junkCode[j] = 99; j = LINE; } } repaintPins( turn+SCORE ); if ( pico == LINE ){ isPlaying = false; } else if ( turn >= 10 ){ isPlaying = false; } else{ curPin = 0; isRowFull = false; turn++; } } void combination() { for ( int i = 0; i < LINE; i++ ){ combination[i] = 1 + (int)(Math.random()*5); System.out.print(i+","); } } } class Pin{ private int color, X, Y, radius; private static final Color COLORS[] = { Color.black, Color.white, Color.red, Color.yellow, Color.green, Color.blue, new Color(7, 254, 250)}; public Pin(){ X = 0; Y = 0; radius = 0; color = 0; } public Pin( int r,int c ){ X = 0; Y = 0; radius = r; color = c; } public void paint( Graphics g ){ int x = X-radius; int y = Y-radius; if (color > 0){ g.setColor( COLORS[color]); g.fillOval( x,y,2*radius,2*radius ); } else{ g.setColor( new Color(238, 238, 238) ); g.drawOval( x,y,2*radius-1,2*radius-1 ); } g.setColor( Color.black ); g.drawOval( x,y,2*radius,2*radius ); } public void setPosition( int x,int y ){ this.X = x ; this.Y = y ; } public void setColor( int c ){ color = c; } public int getColor() { return color; } } Any clues on how to overcome this would be great. Have I divided my code improperly ?

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Converting application to MVC architecture

- by terence6

I'm practicing writing MVC applications. I have a Mastermind game, that I would like to rewrite as MVC app. I have divided my code to parts, but instead of working game I'm getting empty Frame and an error in "public void paint( Graphics g )". Error comes from calling this method in my view with null argument. But how to overcome this ? MVC was quite simple with swing but awt and it's paint methods are much more complicated. Code of working app : http://paste.pocoo.org/show/224982/ App divided to MVC : Main : public class Main { public static void main(String[] args){ Model model = new Model(); View view = new View("Mastermind", 400, 590, model); Controller controller = new Controller(model, view); view.setVisible(true); } } Controller : import java.awt.*; import java.awt.event.*; public class Controller implements MouseListener, ActionListener { private Model model; private View view; public Controller(Model m, View v){ model = m; view = v; view.addWindowListener( new WindowAdapter(){ public void windowClosing(WindowEvent e){ System.exit(0); } }); view.addMouseListener(this); } public void actionPerformed( ActionEvent e ) { if(e.getSource() == view.checkAnswer){ if(model.isRowFull){ model.check(); } } } public void mousePressed(MouseEvent e) { Point mouse = new Point(); mouse = e.getPoint(); if (model.isPlaying){ if (mouse.x > 350) { int button = 1 + (int)((mouse.y - 32) / 50); if ((button >= 1) && (button <= 5)){ model.fillHole(button); } } } } public void mouseClicked(MouseEvent e) {} public void mouseReleased(MouseEvent e){} public void mouseEntered(MouseEvent e) {} public void mouseExited(MouseEvent e) {} } View : import java.awt.*; import javax.swing.*; import java.awt.event.*; public class View extends Frame implements ActionListener { Model model; JButton checkAnswer; private JPanel button; static final int HIT_X[] = {270,290,310,290,310}, HIT_Y[] = {506,496,496,516,516}; public View(String name, int w, int h, Model m){ model = m; setTitle( name ); setSize( w,h ); setResizable( false ); this.setLayout(new BorderLayout()); button = new JPanel(); button.setSize( new Dimension(400, 100)); button.setVisible(true); checkAnswer = new JButton("Check"); checkAnswer.addActionListener(this); checkAnswer.setSize( new Dimension(200, 30)); button.add( checkAnswer ); this.add( button, BorderLayout.SOUTH); button.setVisible(true); for ( int i=0; i < model.SCORE; i++ ){ for ( int j = 0; j < model.LINE; j++ ){ model.pins[i][j] = new Pin(20,0); model.pins[i][j].setPosition(j*50+30,510-i*50); model.pins[i+model.SCORE][j] = new Pin(8,0); model.pins[i+model.SCORE][j].setPosition(HIT_X[j],HIT_Y[j]-i*50); } } for ( int i=0; i < model.LINE; i++ ){ model.pins[model.OPTIONS][i] = new Pin( 20, i+2 ); model.pins[model.OPTIONS][i].setPosition( 370,i * 50 + 56); } model.combination(); model.paint(null); } public void actionPerformed( ActionEvent e ) { } } Model: import java.awt.*; public class Model extends Frame{ static final int LINE = 5, SCORE = 10, OPTIONS = 20; Pin pins[][] = new Pin[21][LINE]; int combination[] = new int[LINE]; int curPin = 0; int turn = 1; int repaintPin; boolean isUpdate = true, isPlaying = true, isRowFull = false; public Model(){ } void fillHole(int color) { pins[turn-1][curPin].setColor(color+1); repaintPins( turn ); curPin = (curPin+1) % LINE; if (curPin == 0){ isRowFull = true; } } public void paint( Graphics g ) { g.setColor( new Color(238, 238, 238)); g.fillRect( 0,0,400,590); for ( int i=0; i < pins.length; i++ ) { pins[i][0].paint(g); pins[i][1].paint(g); pins[i][2].paint(g); pins[i][3].paint(g); pins[i][4].paint(g); } } public void update( Graphics g ) { if ( isUpdate ) { paint(g); } else { isUpdate = true; pins[repaintPin-1][0].paint(g); pins[repaintPin-1][1].paint(g); pins[repaintPin-1][2].paint(g); pins[repaintPin-1][3].paint(g); pins[repaintPin-1][4].paint(g); } } void repaintPins( int pin ) { repaintPin = pin; isUpdate = false; repaint(); } void check() { int junkPegs[] = new int[LINE], junkCode[] = new int[LINE]; int pegCount = 0, pico = 0; for ( int i = 0; i < LINE; i++ ) { junkPegs[i] = pins[turn-1][i].getColor(); junkCode[i] = combination[i]; } for ( int i = 0; i < LINE; i++ ){ if (junkPegs[i]==junkCode[i]) { pins[turn+SCORE][pegCount].setColor(1); pegCount++; pico++; junkPegs[i] = 98; junkCode[i] = 99; } } for ( int i = 0; i < LINE; i++ ){ for ( int j = 0; j < LINE; j++ ) if (junkPegs[i]==junkCode[j]) { pins[turn+SCORE][pegCount].setColor(2); pegCount++; junkPegs[i] = 98; junkCode[j] = 99; j = LINE; } } repaintPins( turn+SCORE ); if ( pico == LINE ){ isPlaying = false; } else if ( turn >= 10 ){ isPlaying = false; } else{ curPin = 0; isRowFull = false; turn++; } } void combination() { for ( int i = 0; i < LINE; i++ ){ combination[i] = 1 + (int)(Math.random()*5); System.out.print(i+","); } } } class Pin{ private int color, X, Y, radius; private static final Color COLORS[] = { Color.black, Color.white, Color.red, Color.yellow, Color.green, Color.blue, new Color(7, 254, 250)}; public Pin(){ X = 0; Y = 0; radius = 0; color = 0; } public Pin( int r,int c ){ X = 0; Y = 0; radius = r; color = c; } public void paint( Graphics g ){ int x = X-radius; int y = Y-radius; if (color > 0){ g.setColor( COLORS[color]); g.fillOval( x,y,2*radius,2*radius ); } else{ g.setColor( new Color(238, 238, 238) ); g.drawOval( x,y,2*radius-1,2*radius-1 ); } g.setColor( Color.black ); g.drawOval( x,y,2*radius,2*radius ); } public void setPosition( int x,int y ){ this.X = x ; this.Y = y ; } public void setColor( int c ){ color = c; } public int getColor() { return color; } } Any clues on how to overcome this would be great. Have I divided my code improperly ?

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Getting Started Building Windows 8 Store Apps with XAML/C#

- by dwahlin

Technology is fun isn’t it? As soon as you think you’ve figured out where things are heading a new technology comes onto the scene, changes things up, and offers new opportunities. One of the new technologies I’ve been spending quite a bit of time with lately is Windows 8 store applications. I posted my thoughts about Windows 8 during the BUILD conference in 2011 and still feel excited about the opportunity there. Time will tell how well it ends up being accepted by consumers but I’m hopeful that it’ll take off. I currently have two Windows 8 store application concepts I’m working on with one being built in XAML/C# and another in HTML/JavaScript. I really like that Microsoft supports both options since it caters to a variety of developers and makes it easy to get started regardless if you’re a desktop developer or Web developer. Here’s a quick look at how the technologies are organized in Windows 8: In this post I’ll focus on the basics of Windows 8 store XAML/C# apps by looking at features, files, and code provided by Visual Studio projects. To get started building these types of apps you’ll definitely need to have some knowledge of XAML and C#. Let’s get started by looking at the Windows 8 store project types available in Visual Studio 2012. Windows 8 Store XAML/C# Project Types When you open Visual Studio 2012 you’ll see a new entry under C# named Windows Store. It includes 6 different project types as shown next. The Blank App project provides initial starter code and a single page whereas the Grid App and Split App templates provide quite a bit more code as well as multiple pages for your application. The other projects available can be be used to create a class library project that runs in Windows 8 store apps, a WinRT component such as a custom control, and a unit test library project respectively. If you’re building an application that displays data in groups using the “tile” concept then the Grid App or Split App project templates are a good place to start. An example of the initial screens generated by each project is shown next: Grid App Split View App When a user clicks a tile in a Grid App they can view details about the tile data. With a Split View app groups/categories are shown and when the user clicks on a group they can see a list of all the different items and then drill-down into them: For the remainder of this post I’ll focus on functionality provided by the Blank App project since it provides a simple way to get started learning the fundamentals of building Windows 8 store apps. Blank App Project Walkthrough The Blank App project is a great place to start since it’s simple and lets you focus on the basics. In this post I’ll focus on what it provides you out of the box and cover additional details in future posts. Once you have the basics down you can move to the other project types if you need the functionality they provide. The Blank App project template does exactly what it says – you get an empty project with a few starter files added to help get you going. This is a good option if you’ll be building an app that doesn’t fit into the grid layout view that you see a lot of Windows 8 store apps following (such as on the Windows 8 start screen). I ended up starting with the Blank App project template for the app I’m currently working on since I’m not displaying data/image tiles (something the Grid App project does well) or drilling down into lists of data (functionality that the Split App project provides). The Blank App project provides images for the tiles and splash screen (you’ll definitely want to change these), a StandardStyles.xaml resource dictionary that includes a lot of helpful styles such as buttons for the AppBar (a special type of menu in Windows 8 store apps), an App.xaml file, and the app’s main page which is named MainPage.xaml. It also adds a Package.appxmanifest that is used to define functionality that your app requires, app information used in the store, plus more. The App.xaml, App.xaml.cs and StandardStyles.xaml Files The App.xaml file handles loading a resource dictionary named StandardStyles.xaml which has several key styles used throughout the application: <Application x:Class="BlankApp.App" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:local="using:BlankApp"> <Application.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries>  <ResourceDictionary Source="Common/StandardStyles.xaml"/> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application> StandardStyles.xaml has style definitions for different text styles and AppBar buttons. If you scroll down toward the middle of the file you’ll see that many AppBar button styles are included such as one for an edit icon. Button styles like this can be used to quickly and easily add icons/buttons into your application without having to be an expert in design. <Style x:Key="EditAppBarButtonStyle" TargetType="ButtonBase" BasedOn="{StaticResource AppBarButtonStyle}"> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.AutomationId" Value="EditAppBarButton"/> <Setter Property="AutomationProperties.Name" Value="Edit"/> <Setter Property="Content" Value=""/> </Style> Switching over to App.xaml.cs, it includes some code to help get you started. An OnLaunched() method is added to handle creating a Frame that child pages such as MainPage.xaml can be loaded into. The Frame has the same overall purpose as the one found in WPF and Silverlight applications - it’s used to navigate between pages in an application. /// <summary> /// Invoked when the application is launched normally by the end user. Other entry points /// will be used when the application is launched to open a specific file, to display /// search results, and so forth. /// </summary> /// <param name="args">Details about the launch request and process.</param> protected override void OnLaunched(LaunchActivatedEventArgs args) { Frame rootFrame = Window.Current.Content as Frame; // Do not repeat app initialization when the Window already has content, // just ensure that the window is active if (rootFrame == null) { // Create a Frame to act as the navigation context and navigate to the first page rootFrame = new Frame(); if (args.PreviousExecutionState == ApplicationExecutionState.Terminated) { //TODO: Load state from previously suspended application } // Place the frame in the current Window Window.Current.Content = rootFrame; } if (rootFrame.Content == null) { // When the navigation stack isn't restored navigate to the first page, // configuring the new page by passing required information as a navigation // parameter if (!rootFrame.Navigate(typeof(MainPage), args.Arguments)) { throw new Exception("Failed to create initial page"); } } // Ensure the current window is active Window.Current.Activate(); } Notice that in addition to creating a Frame the code also checks to see if the app was previously terminated so that you can load any state/data that the user may need when the app is launched again. If you’re new to the lifecycle of Windows 8 store apps the following image shows how an app can be running, suspended, and terminated. If the user switches from an app they’re running the app will be suspended in memory. The app may stay suspended or may be terminated depending on how much memory the OS thinks it needs so it’s important to save state in case the application is ultimately terminated and has to be started fresh. Although I won’t cover saving application state here, additional information can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/apps/xaml/hh465099.aspx. Another method in App.xaml.cs named OnSuspending() is also included in App.xaml.cs that can be used to store state as the user switches to another application: /// <summary> /// Invoked when application execution is being suspended. Application state is saved /// without knowing whether the application will be terminated or resumed with the contents /// of memory still intact. /// </summary> /// <param name="sender">The source of the suspend request.</param> /// <param name="e">Details about the suspend request.</param> private void OnSuspending(object sender, SuspendingEventArgs e) { var deferral = e.SuspendingOperation.GetDeferral(); //TODO: Save application state and stop any background activity deferral.Complete(); } The MainPage.xaml and MainPage.xaml.cs Files The Blank App project adds a file named MainPage.xaml that acts as the initial screen for the application. It doesn’t include anything aside from an empty <Grid> XAML element in it. The code-behind class named MainPage.xaml.cs includes a constructor as well as a method named OnNavigatedTo() that is called once the page is displayed in the frame. /// <summary> /// An empty page that can be used on its own or navigated to within a Frame. /// </summary> public sealed partial class MainPage : Page { public MainPage() { this.InitializeComponent(); } /// <summary> /// Invoked when this page is about to be displayed in a Frame. /// </summary> /// <param name="e">Event data that describes how this page was reached. The Parameter /// property is typically used to configure the page.</param> protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e) { } } If you’re experienced with XAML you can switch to Design mode and start dragging and dropping XAML controls from the ToolBox in Visual Studio. If you prefer to type XAML you can do that as well in the XAML editor or while in split mode. Many of the controls available in WPF and Silverlight are included such as Canvas, Grid, StackPanel, and Border for layout. Standard input controls are also included such as TextBox, CheckBox, PasswordBox, RadioButton, ComboBox, ListBox, and more. MediaElement is available for rendering video or playing audio files. Some of the “common” XAML controls included out of the box are shown next: Although XAML/C# Windows 8 store apps don’t include all of the functionality available in Silverlight 5, the core functionality required to build store apps is there with additional functionality available in open source projects such as Callisto (started by Microsoft’s Tim Heuer), Q42.WinRT, and others. Standard XAML data binding can be used to bind C# objects to controls, converters can be used to manipulate data during the data binding process, and custom styles and templates can be applied to controls to modify them. Although Visual Studio 2012 doesn’t support visually creating styles or templates, Expression Blend 5 handles that very well. To get started building the initial screen of a Windows 8 app you can start adding controls as mentioned earlier. Simply place them inside of the <Grid> element that’s included. You can arrange controls in a stacked manner using the StackPanel control, add a border around controls using the Border control, arrange controls in columns and rows using the Grid control, or absolutely position controls using the Canvas control. One of the controls that may be new to you is the AppBar. It can be used to add menu/toolbar functionality into a store app and keep the app clean and focused. You can place an AppBar at the top or bottom of the screen. A user on a touch device can swipe up to display the bottom AppBar or right-click when using a mouse. An example of defining an AppBar that contains an Edit button is shown next. The EditAppBarButtonStyle is available in the StandardStyles.xaml file mentioned earlier. <Page.BottomAppBar> <AppBar x:Name="ApplicationAppBar" Padding="10,0,10,0" AutomationProperties.Name="Bottom App Bar"> <Grid> <StackPanel x:Name="RightPanel" Orientation="Horizontal" Grid.Column="1" HorizontalAlignment="Right"> <Button x:Name="Edit" Style="{StaticResource EditAppBarButtonStyle}" Tag="Edit" /> </StackPanel> </Grid> </AppBar> </Page.BottomAppBar> Like standard XAML controls, the <Button> control in the AppBar can be wired to an event handler method in the MainPage.Xaml.cs file or even bound to a ViewModel object using “commanding” if your app follows the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern (check out the MVVM Light package available through NuGet if you’re using MVVM with Windows 8 store apps). The AppBar can be used to navigate to different screens, show and hide controls, display dialogs, show settings screens, and more. The Package.appxmanifest File The Package.appxmanifest file contains configuration details about your Windows 8 store app. By double-clicking it in Visual Studio you can define the splash screen image, small and wide logo images used for tiles on the start screen, orientation information, and more. You can also define what capabilities the app has such as if it uses the Internet, supports geolocation functionality, requires a microphone or webcam, etc. App declarations such as background processes, file picker functionality, and sharing can also be defined Finally, information about how the app is packaged for deployment to the store can also be defined. Summary If you already have some experience working with XAML technologies you’ll find that getting started building Windows 8 applications is pretty straightforward. Many of the controls available in Silverlight and WPF are available making it easy to get started without having to relearn a lot of new technologies. In the next post in this series I’ll discuss additional features that can be used in your Windows 8 store apps.

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Windows Azure: Import/Export Hard Drives, VM ACLs, Web Sockets, Remote Debugging, Continuous Delivery, New Relic, Billing Alerts and More

- by ScottGu

Two weeks ago we released a giant set of improvements to Windows Azure, as well as a significant update of the Windows Azure SDK. This morning we released another massive set of enhancements to Windows Azure. Today’s new capabilities include: Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to your Storage Accounts HDInsight: General Availability of our Hadoop Service in the cloud Virtual Machines: New VM Gallery, ACL support for VIPs Web Sites: WebSocket and Remote Debugging Support Notification Hubs: Segmented customer push notification support with tag expressions TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics Billing: New Billing Alert Service that sends emails notifications when your bill hits a threshold you define All of these improvements are now available to use immediately (note that some features are still in preview). Below are more details about them. Storage: Import/Export Hard Disk Drives to Windows Azure I am excited to announce the preview of our new Windows Azure Import/Export Service! The Windows Azure Import/Export Service enables you to move large amounts of on-premises data into and out of your Windows Azure Storage accounts. It does this by enabling you to securely ship hard disk drives directly to our Windows Azure data centers. Once we receive the drives we’ll automatically transfer the data to or from your Windows Azure Storage account. This enables you to import or export massive amounts of data more quickly and cost effectively (and not be constrained by available network bandwidth). Encrypted Transport Our Import/Export service provides built-in support for BitLocker disk encryption – which enables you to securely encrypt data on the hard drives before you send it, and not have to worry about it being compromised even if the disk is lost/stolen in transit (since the content on the transported hard drives is completely encrypted and you are the only one who has the key to it). The drive preparation tool we are shipping today makes setting up bitlocker encryption on these hard drives easy. How to Import/Export your first Hard Drive of Data You can read our Getting Started Guide to learn more about how to begin using the import/export service. You can create import and export jobs via the Windows Azure Management Portal as well as programmatically using our Server Management APIs. It is really easy to create a new import or export job using the Windows Azure Management Portal. Simply navigate to a Windows Azure storage account, and then click the new Import/Export tab now available within it (note: if you don’t have this tab make sure to sign-up for the Import/Export preview): Then click the “Create Import Job” or “Create Export Job” commands at the bottom of it. This will launch a wizard that easily walks you through the steps required: For more comprehensive information about Import/Export, refer to Windows Azure Storage team blog. You can also send questions and comments to the [email protected] email address. We think you’ll find this new service makes it much easier to move data into and out of Windows Azure, and it will dramatically cut down the network bandwidth required when working on large data migration projects. We hope you like it. HDInsight: 100% Compatible Hadoop Service in the Cloud Last week we announced the general availability release of Windows Azure HDInsight. HDInsight is a 100% compatible Hadoop service that allows you to easily provision and manage Hadoop clusters for big data processing in Windows Azure. This release is now live in production, backed by an enterprise SLA, supported 24x7 by Microsoft Support, and is ready to use for production scenarios. HDInsight allows you to use Apache Hadoop tools, such as Pig and Hive, to process large amounts of data in Windows Azure Blob Storage. Because data is stored in Windows Azure Blob Storage, you can choose to dynamically create Hadoop clusters only when you need them, and then shut them down when they are no longer required (since you pay only for the time the Hadoop cluster instances are running this provides a super cost effective way to use them). You can create Hadoop clusters using either the Windows Azure Management Portal (see below) or using our PowerShell and Cross Platform Command line tools: The import/export hard drive support that came out today is a perfect companion service to use with HDInsight – the combination allows you to easily ingest, process and optionally export a limitless amount of data. We’ve also integrated HDInsight with our Business Intelligence tools, so users can leverage familiar tools like Excel in order to analyze the output of jobs. You can find out more about how to get started with HDInsight here. Virtual Machines: VM Gallery Enhancements Today’s update of Windows Azure brings with it a new Virtual Machine gallery that you can use to create new VMs in the cloud. You can launch the gallery by doing New->Compute->Virtual Machine->From Gallery within the Windows Azure Management Portal: The new Virtual Machine Gallery includes some nice enhancements that make it even easier to use: Search: You can now easily search and filter images using the search box in the top-right of the dialog. For example, simply type “SQL” and we’ll filter to show those images in the gallery that contain that substring. Category Tree-view: Each month we add more built-in VM images to the gallery. You can continue to browse these using the “All” view within the VM Gallery – or now quickly filter them using the category tree-view on the left-hand side of the dialog. For example, by selecting “Oracle” in the tree-view you can now quickly filter to see the official Oracle supplied images. MSDN and Supported checkboxes: With today’s update we are also introducing filters that makes it easy to filter out types of images that you may not be interested in. The first checkbox is MSDN: using this filter you can exclude any image that is not part of the Windows Azure benefits for MSDN subscribers (which have highly discounted pricing - you can learn more about the MSDN pricing here). The second checkbox is Supported: this filter will exclude any image that contains prerelease software, so you can feel confident that the software you choose to deploy is fully supported by Windows Azure and our partners. Sort options: We sort gallery images by what we think customers are most interested in, but sometimes you might want to sort using different views. So we’re providing some additional sort options, like “Newest,” to customize the image list for what suits you best. Pricing information: We now provide additional pricing information about images and options on how to cost effectively run them directly within the VM Gallery. The above improvements make it even easier to use the VM Gallery and quickly create launch and run Virtual Machines in the cloud. Virtual Machines: ACL Support for VIPs A few months ago we exposed the ability to configure Access Control Lists (ACLs) for Virtual Machines using Windows PowerShell cmdlets and our Service Management API. With today’s release, you can now configure VM ACLs using the Windows Azure Management Portal as well. You can now do this by clicking the new Manage ACL command in the Endpoints tab of a virtual machine instance: This will enable you to configure an ordered list of permit and deny rules to scope the traffic that can access your VM’s network endpoints. For example, if you were on a virtual network, you could limit RDP access to a Windows Azure virtual machine to only a few computers attached to your enterprise. Or if you weren’t on a virtual network you could alternatively limit traffic from public IPs that can access your workloads: Here is the default behaviors for ACLs in Windows Azure: By default (i.e. no rules specified), all traffic is permitted. When using only Permit rules, all other traffic is denied. When using only Deny rules, all other traffic is permitted. When there is a combination of Permit and Deny rules, all other traffic is denied. Lastly, remember that configuring endpoints does not automatically configure them within the VM if it also has firewall rules enabled at the OS level. So if you create an endpoint using the Windows Azure Management Portal, Windows PowerShell, or REST API, be sure to also configure your guest VM firewall appropriately as well. Web Sites: Web Sockets Support With today’s release you can now use Web Sockets with Windows Azure Web Sites. This feature enables you to easily integrate real-time communication scenarios within your web based applications, and is available at no extra charge (it even works with the free tier). Higher level programming libraries like SignalR and socket.io are also now supported with it. You can enable Web Sockets support on a web site by navigating to the Configure tab of a Web Site, and by toggling Web Sockets support to “on”: Once Web Sockets is enabled you can start to integrate some really cool scenarios into your web applications. Check out the new SignalR documentation hub on www.asp.net to learn more about some of the awesome scenarios you can do with it. Web Sites: Remote Debugging Support The Windows Azure SDK 2.2 we released two weeks ago introduced remote debugging support for Windows Azure Cloud Services. With today’s Windows Azure release we are extending this remote debugging support to also work with Windows Azure Web Sites. With live, remote debugging support inside of Visual Studio, you are able to have more visibility than ever before into how your code is operating live in Windows Azure. It is now super easy to attach the debugger and quickly see what is going on with your application in the cloud. Remote Debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 Enabling the remote debugging of a Windows Azure Web Site using VS 2013 is really easy. Start by opening up your web application’s project within Visual Studio. Then navigate to the “Server Explorer” tab within Visual Studio, and click on the deployed web-site you want to debug that is running within Windows Azure using the Windows Azure->Web Sites node in the Server Explorer. Then right-click and choose the “Attach Debugger” option on it: When you do this Visual Studio will remotely attach the debugger to the Web Site running within Windows Azure. The debugger will then stop the web site’s execution when it hits any break points that you have set within your web application’s project inside Visual Studio. For example, below I set a breakpoint on the “ViewBag.Message” assignment statement within the HomeController of the standard ASP.NET MVC project template. When I hit refresh on the “About” page of the web site within the browser, the breakpoint was triggered and I am now able to debug the app remotely using Visual Studio: Note above how we can debug variables (including autos/watchlist/etc), as well as use the Immediate and Command Windows. In the debug session above I used the Immediate Window to explore some of the request object state, as well as to dynamically change the ViewBag.Message property. When we click the the “Continue” button (or press F5) the app will continue execution and the Web Site will render the content back to the browser. This makes it super easy to debug web apps remotely. Tips for Better Debugging To get the best experience while debugging, we recommend publishing your site using the Debug configuration within Visual Studio’s Web Publish dialog. This will ensure that debug symbol information is uploaded to the Web Site which will enable a richer debug experience within Visual Studio. You can find this option on the Web Publish dialog on the Settings tab: When you ultimately deploy/run the application in production we recommend using the “Release” configuration setting – the release configuration is memory optimized and will provide the best production performance. To learn more about diagnosing and debugging Windows Azure Web Sites read our new Troubleshooting Windows Azure Web Sites in Visual Studio guide. Notification Hubs: Segmented Push Notification support with tag expressions In August we announced the General Availability of Windows Azure Notification Hubs - a powerful Mobile Push Notifications service that makes it easy to send high volume push notifications with low latency from any mobile app back-end. Notification hubs can be used with any mobile app back-end (including ones built using our Mobile Services capability) and can also be used with back-ends that run in the cloud as well as on-premises. Beginning with the initial release, Notification Hubs allowed developers to send personalized push notifications to both individual users as well as groups of users by interest, by associating their devices with tags representing the logical target of the notification. For example, by registering all devices of customers interested in a favorite MLB team with a corresponding tag, it is possible to broadcast one message to millions of Boston Red Sox fans and another message to millions of St. Louis Cardinals fans with a single API call respectively. New support for using tag expressions to enable advanced customer segmentation With today’s release we are adding support for even more advanced customer targeting. You can now identify customers that you want to send push notifications to by defining rich tag expressions. With tag expressions, you can now not only broadcast notifications to Boston Red Sox fans, but take that segmenting a step farther and reach more granular segments. This opens up a variety of scenarios, for example: Offers based on multiple preferences—e.g. send a game day vegetarian special to users tagged as both a Boston Red Sox fan AND a vegetarian Push content to multiple segments in a single message—e.g. rain delay information only to users who are tagged as either a Boston Red Sox fan OR a St. Louis Cardinal fan Avoid presenting subsets of a segment with irrelevant content—e.g. season ticket availability reminder to users who are tagged as a Boston Red Sox fan but NOT also a season ticket holder To illustrate with code, consider a restaurant chain app that sends an offer related to a Red Sox vs Cardinals game for users in Boston. Devices can be tagged by your app with location tags (e.g. “Loc:Boston”) and interest tags (e.g. “Follows:RedSox”, “Follows:Cardinals”), and then a notification can be sent by your back-end to “(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston” in order to deliver an offer to all devices in Boston that follow either the RedSox or the Cardinals. This can be done directly in your server backend send logic using the code below: var notification = new WindowsNotification(messagePayload); hub.SendNotificationAsync(notification, "(Follows:RedSox || Follows:Cardinals) && Loc:Boston"); In your expressions you can use all Boolean operators: AND (&&), OR (||), and NOT (!). Some other cool use cases for tag expressions that are now supported include: Social: To “all my group except me” - group:id && !user:id Events: Touchdown event is sent to everybody following either team or any of the players involved in the action: Followteam:A || Followteam:B || followplayer:1 || followplayer:2 … Hours: Send notifications at specific times. E.g. Tag devices with time zone and when it is 12pm in Seattle send to: GMT8 && follows:thaifood Versions and platforms: Send a reminder to people still using your first version for Android - version:1.0 && platform:Android For help on getting started with Notification Hubs, visit the Notification Hub documentation center. Then download the latest NuGet package (or use the Notification Hubs REST APIs directly) to start sending push notifications using tag expressions. They are really powerful and enable a bunch of great new scenarios. TFS & GIT: Continuous Delivery Support for Web Sites + Cloud Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable continuous delivery support with Windows Azure and Team Foundation Services. Team Foundation Services is a cloud based offering from Microsoft that provides integrated source control (with both TFS and Git support), build server, test execution, collaboration tools, and agile planning support. It makes it really easy to setup a team project (complete with automated builds and test runners) in the cloud, and it has really rich integration with Visual Studio. With today’s Windows Azure release it is now really easy to enable continuous delivery support with both TFS and Git based repositories hosted using Team Foundation Services. This enables a workflow where when code is checked in, built successfully on an automated build server, and all tests pass on it – I can automatically have the app deployed on Windows Azure with zero manual intervention or work required. The below screen-shots demonstrate how to quickly setup a continuous delivery workflow to Windows Azure with a Git-based ASP.NET MVC project hosted using Team Foundation Services. Enabling Continuous Delivery to Windows Azure with Team Foundation Services The project I’m going to enable continuous delivery with is a simple ASP.NET MVC project whose source code I’m hosting using Team Foundation Services. I did this by creating a “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” repository there using Git – and then used the new built-in Git tooling support within Visual Studio 2013 to push the source code to it. Below is a screen-shot of the Git repository hosted within Team Foundation Services: I can access the repository within Visual Studio 2013 and easily make commits with it (as well as branch, merge and do other tasks). Using VS 2013 I can also setup automated builds to take place in the cloud using Team Foundation Services every time someone checks in code to the repository: The cool thing about this is that I don’t have to buy or rent my own build server – Team Foundation Services automatically maintains its own build server farm and can automatically queue up a build for me (for free) every time someone checks in code using the above settings. This build server (and automated testing) support now works with both TFS and Git based source control repositories. Connecting a Team Foundation Services project to Windows Azure Once I have a source repository hosted in Team Foundation Services with Automated Builds and Testing set up, I can then go even further and set it up so that it will be automatically deployed to Windows Azure when a source code commit is made to the repository (assuming the Build + Tests pass). Enabling this is now really easy. To set this up with a Windows Azure Web Site simply use the New->Compute->Web Site->Custom Create command inside the Windows Azure Management Portal. This will create a dialog like below. I gave the web site a name and then made sure the “Publish from source control” checkbox was selected: When we click next we’ll be prompted for the location of the source repository. We’ll select “Team Foundation Services”: Once we do this we’ll be prompted for our Team Foundation Services account that our source repository is hosted under (in this case my TFS account is “scottguthrie”): When we click the “Authorize Now” button we’ll be prompted to give Windows Azure permissions to connect to the Team Foundation Services account. Once we do this we’ll be prompted to pick the source repository we want to connect to. Starting with today’s Windows Azure release you can now connect to both TFS and Git based source repositories. This new support allows me to connect to the “SimpleContinuousDeploymentTest” respository we created earlier: Clicking the finish button will then create the Web Site with the continuous delivery hooks setup with Team Foundation Services. Now every time someone pushes source control to the repository in Team Foundation Services, it will kick off an automated build, run all of the unit tests in the solution , and if they pass the app will be automatically deployed to our Web Site in Windows Azure. You can monitor the history and status of these automated deployments using the Deployments tab within the Web Site: This enables a really slick continuous delivery workflow, and enables you to build and deploy apps in a really nice way. Developer Analytics: New Relic support for Web Sites + Mobile Services With today’s Windows Azure release we are making it really easy to enable Developer Analytics and Monitoring support with both Windows Azure Web Site and Windows Azure Mobile Services. We are partnering with New Relic, who provide a great dev analytics and app performance monitoring offering, to enable this - and we have updated the Windows Azure Management Portal to make it really easy to configure. Enabling New Relic with a Windows Azure Web Site Enabling New Relic support with a Windows Azure Web Site is now really easy. Simply navigate to the Configure tab of a Web Site and scroll down to the “developer analytics” section that is now within it: Clicking the “add-on” button will display some additional UI. If you don’t already have a New Relic subscription, you can click the “view windows azure store” button to obtain a subscription (note: New Relic has a perpetually free tier so you can enable it even without paying anything): Clicking the “view windows azure store” button will launch the integrated Windows Azure Store experience we have within the Windows Azure Management Portal. You can use this to browse from a variety of great add-on services – including New Relic: Select “New Relic” within the dialog above, then click the next button, and you’ll be able to choose which type of New Relic subscription you wish to purchase. For this demo we’ll simply select the “Free Standard Version” – which does not cost anything and can be used forever: Once we’ve signed-up for our New Relic subscription and added it to our Windows Azure account, we can go back to the Web Site’s configuration tab and choose to use the New Relic add-on with our Windows Azure Web Site. We can do this by simply selecting it from the “add-on” dropdown (it is automatically populated within it once we have a New Relic subscription in our account): Clicking the “Save” button will then cause the Windows Azure Management Portal to automatically populate all of the needed New Relic configuration settings to our Web Site: Deploying the New Relic Agent as part of a Web Site The final step to enable developer analytics using New Relic is to add the New Relic runtime agent to our web app. We can do this within Visual Studio by right-clicking on our web project and selecting the “Manage NuGet Packages” context menu: This will bring up the NuGet package manager. You can search for “New Relic” within it to find the New Relic agent. Note that there is both a 32-bit and 64-bit edition of it – make sure to install the version that matches how your Web Site is running within Windows Azure (note: you can configure your Web Site to run in either 32-bit or 64-bit mode using the Web Site’s “Configuration” tab within the Windows Azure Management Portal): Once we install the NuGet package we are all set to go. We’ll simply re-publish the web site again to Windows Azure and New Relic will now automatically start monitoring the application Monitoring a Web Site using New Relic Now that the application has developer analytics support with New Relic enabled, we can launch the New Relic monitoring portal to start monitoring the health of it. We can do this by clicking on the “Add Ons” tab in the left-hand side of the Windows Azure Management Portal. Then select the New Relic add-on we signed-up for within it. The Windows Azure Management Portal will provide some default information about the add-on when we do this. Clicking the “Manage” button in the tray at the bottom will launch a new browser tab and single-sign us into the New Relic monitoring portal associated with our account: When we do this a new browser tab will launch with the New Relic admin tool loaded within it: We can now see insights into how our app is performing – without having to have written a single line of monitoring code. The New Relic service provides a ton of great built-in monitoring features allowing us to quickly see: Performance times (including browser rendering speed) for the overall site and individual pages. You can optionally set alert thresholds to trigger if the speed does not meet a threshold you specify. Information about where in the world your customers are hitting the site from (and how performance varies by region) Details on the latency performance of external services your web apps are using (for example: SQL, Storage, Twitter, etc) Error information including call stack details for exceptions that have occurred at runtime SQL Server profiling information – including which queries executed against your database and what their performance was And a whole bunch more… The cool thing about New Relic is that you don’t need to write monitoring code within your application to get all of the above reports (plus a lot more). The New Relic agent automatically enables the CLR profiler within applications and automatically captures the information necessary to identify these. This makes it super easy to get started and immediately have a rich developer analytics view for your solutions with very little effort. If you haven’t tried New Relic out yet with Windows Azure I recommend you do so – I think you’ll find it helps you build even better cloud applications. Following the above steps will help you get started and deliver you a really good application monitoring solution in only minutes. Service Bus: Support for partitioned queues and topics With today’s release, we are enabling support within Service Bus for partitioned queues and topics. Enabling partitioning enables you to achieve a higher message throughput and better availability from your queues and topics. Higher message throughput is achieved by implementing multiple message brokers for each partitioned queue and topic. The multiple messaging stores will also provide higher availability. You can create a partitioned queue or topic by simply checking the Enable Partitioning option in the custom create wizard for a Queue or Topic: Read this article to learn more about partitioned queues and topics and how to take advantage of them today. Billing: New Billing Alert Service Today’s Windows Azure update enables a new Billing Alert Service Preview that enables you to get proactive email notifications when your Windows Azure bill goes above a certain monetary threshold that you configure. This makes it easier to manage your bill and avoid potential surprises at the end of the month. With the Billing Alert Service Preview, you can now create email alerts to monitor and manage your monetary credits or your current bill total. To set up an alert first sign-up for the free Billing Alert Service Preview. Then visit the account management page, click on a subscription you have setup, and then navigate to the new Alerts tab that is available: The alerts tab allows you to setup email alerts that will be sent automatically once a certain threshold is hit. For example, by clicking the “add alert” button above I can setup a rule to send myself email anytime my Windows Azure bill goes above $100 for the month: The Billing Alert Service will evolve to support additional aspects of your bill as well as support multiple forms of alerts such as SMS. Try out the new Billing Alert Service Preview today and give us feedback. Summary Today’s Windows Azure release enables a ton of great new scenarios, and makes building applications hosted in the cloud even easier. If you don’t already have a Windows Azure account, you can sign-up for a free trial and start using all of the above features today. Then visit the Windows Azure Developer Center to learn more about how to build apps with it. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu

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