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  • How to rotate html5 canvas as page background?

    - by Sebastian P.R. Gingter
    Hi, I want to achieve the following: Image a white sheet of paper on a black desk. Then rotate the paper a little bit to the left (like, 25 degrees). Now you still have the black desk, and a rotated white box on it. In this rotated white box I want to place non-rotated normal html content like text, tables, div's etc. I already have a problem at the very first step: rotating a rectangle. This is my code so far: <html> <head> <script> function draw() { var canvas=document.getElementById("myCanvas"); var c=canvas.getContext("2d"); c.fillStyle = '#00'; c.fillRect(100, 100, 100, 100); c.rotate(20); c.fillStyle = '#ff0000'; c.fillRect(150, 150, 10, 10); } </script> </head> <body onload="draw()"> <canvas id="myCanvas" width="500" height="500"></canvas> </body> </html> With this, I see only a normal black box. Nothing else. I assume there should be a red, rotated box too, but there's nothing. What is the best approach to reach this and to have it as a (scaling) background for my web page?

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  • Oracle SOA Governance EMEA Workshop for Partners & System Integrators: Nov 5-7th | Madrid, Spain

    - by Lionel Dubreuil
    The EMEA Fusion Middleware Product Management team is delighted to announce an exciting and a much-awaited workshop on our market-leading SOA Governance offering. Oracle SOA Governance solution is Oracle Fusion Middleware's strategic approach to governing SOA. Whether just embarking on an SOA program, or expanding from project or pilot to broader deployment, the Oracle SOA Governance solution closes the loop on measuring SOA success from project inception through to realization, and providing the proof of ROI on SOA. Would your prospects and customers like to: Align their SOA Vision and Execution Improve Decision Making Effectively Manage Business and Technology Change Enable Control Foster Enterprise-wide Collaboration Reduce Development Costs Track their SOA Investments and Returns Demonstrate business value and ROI of SOA This FREE hands-on workshop is dedicated to EMEA Partners & System Integrators (SIs). It'll be delivered by Oracle HQ Product Management and will primarily focus on : SOA Governance as a Strategy and Methodology Hands-on with Oracle Enterprise Repository (OER) and Oracle Service Registry (OSR) When, how and whom to position our SOA Governance offerings Our SOA Governance Rapid Start Service Hands-on sessions for the most popular customer use cases Seats are limited, book now - you cannot afford to miss this training! If you're interested please contact Yogesh Sontakke: [email protected].

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  • Amazon AMIs and Oracle VM templates

    - by llaszews
    I have worked with Oracle VM templates and most recently with Amazon Machine Images (AMI). The similarities in the functionality and capabilities they provide are striking. Just take a look a the definitions: An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) is a special type of pre-configured operating system and virtual application software which is used to create a virtual machine within the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It serves as the basic unit of deployment for services delivered using EC2. AWS AMIs Oracle VM Templates provide an innovative approach to deploying a fully configured software stack by offering pre-installed and pre-configured software images. Use of Oracle VM Templates eliminates the installation and configuration costs, and reduces the ongoing maintenance costs helping organizations achieve faster time to market and lower cost of operations. Oracle VM Templates Other things they have in common: 1. Both have 35 Oracle images or templates: AWS AMI pre-built images Oracle pre-built VM Templates 2. Both allow to build your own images or templates: A. OVM template builder - OVM Template Builder - Oracle VM Template Builder, an open source, graphical utility that makes it easy to use Oracle Enterprise Linux “Just enough OS” (JeOS)–based scripts for developing pre-packaged virtual machines for Oracle VM. B. AMI 'builder' - AMI builder However, AWS has the added feature/benefit of adding your own AMI to the AWS AMI catalog: AMI - Adding to the AWS AMI catalog Another plus with AWS and AMI is there are hundreds of MySQL AMIs (AWS MySQL AMIs ). A benefit of Oracle VM templates is they can run on any public or private cloud environment, not just AWS EC2. However, with Oracle VM templates they first need to be images as AMIs before they can run in the AWS cloud.

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  • Personalized Pricing

    - by David Dorf
    In past postings I've spent a fair amount of time talking about targeted promotions.  Using a complete view of the customer that includes purchase history, location history, and psychographics gleaned from social media, we can select the offer with the greatest chance of redemption.  This is done to influence shopping behavior, which might be introducing the consumer to a new product line, increasing their basket size, increasing frequency of purchases, etc. Safeway seems to be taking a slightly different approach with their personalized pricing.  In additional to offering electronic coupons and club card offers, they are also providing a personalized price for certain items based on purchase history.  So when Sally want to shop at Safeway, she first checks the "Just for U" website for three types of deals.  She starts by selecting manufacturer coupons to load into her loyalty card, then she checks the Club Card for offers like "buy one get one free." The third step is the interesting one.  Safeway will set a particular lower price for Sally good for 90 days on items she buys often.  Clearly this isn't enforcing a new behavior but rather instilling loyalty.  I would love to know exactly how they are determining the personalized price.  Of course bargain hunters can still stack the three offers so they can, for example, get their $4.99 Oatmeal for $0.72. I like this particular question and answer from their website's FAQ: My offers are not that great. Can I tell you what offers I need? That's a good idea. That functionality is not currently available, but we appreciate your input and are constantly improving our just for U program. Stay tuned for exciting enhancements! I suppose if Safeway is tracking all the purchases, they can easily determine whether the customer if profitable.  As long as the customer stays profitable, why not let them determine a few offers themselves?  Food for thought.

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  • Domain changes required for SSL integration

    - by user131003
    Currently my site supports regular payment options (User is taken to Payment Gateway/PG website). Now I'm trying to implement "seamless" PG integration. I need SSL for this. I'm having a dedicated server with 5 static IPs from Hostgator/HG. options: I take SSL for www.my_domain.com. According to HG, I need to change IP of main site as current IP is not really dedicated as it is being shared by cpanel etc. So They need to bind another dedicated IP to main domain for SSL to work. This would required DNS change for main website and hence cause few hours downtime (which is ok). I've noticed that most of the e-commerce websites are using subdomains like secure.my_domain.com for ssl/https. This sounds like a better approach. But I've got few doubts in this case: a) Would I need to re-register with existing PGs (Paypal, Google Checkout, Authorize.net) if I switch to subdomain? Re-registering is not an option for me. b) Would DNS change be required for www.my_domain.com in this case. This confusion arose because of following reply from HG : "If the sub domain secure.my_domain.com is added to an existing cPanel it will use the IP for that cPanel so as long as it is a Dedicated IP that will be fine. If secure.my_domain.com gets setup as its own cPanel it will need to be assigned to a Dedicated IP which would have a DNS change involved.". Please suggest?

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  • CloudMail

    - by kaleidoscope
    In Web Applications, we often come across requirement of sending and receiving emails through our application. So same can be for the applications hosted on Azure. So Do you want to send email from an application hosted on Azure? CloudMail is one of the possible answers. CloudMail is designed to provide a small, effective and reliable solution for sending email from the Azure platform directly addressing several problems that application developers face. Microsoft does not provide an SMTP Gateway (yet) so the application is forced to connect directly to one hosted somewhere else, on another network. So to implement such functionality one of the possible option is using Free email providers. This might be fine for testing, but do you really want to rely on a free service in production? There can be other issues with this approach like if your chosen SMTP gateway is down or there are connection problems? Again there can be some specific requirement that, you want to send email via a company’s mail server, from inside their firewall. CloudMail solves these problems by providing a small client library that you can use in your solution to send emails from you application and a Windows Service that you run inside your companies network that acts as a relay. Because the send and relay are disconnected there are no lost emails and you can send from your own SMTP Gateway.   CloudMail is in its Beta version and available for download here.   Technorati Tags: Geeta,Azure Email,CloudMail

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  • Obstacle Avoidance steering behavior: how can an entity avoid an obstacle while other forces are acting on the entity?

    - by Prog
    I'm trying to implement the Obstacle Avoidance steering behavior in my 2D game. Currently my approach is to apply a force on the entity, in the direction of the normal of the heading, scaled by a number that gets bigger the closer we are to the obstacle. This is supposed to push the entity to the side and avoid the obstacle that blocks it's way. However, in the same time that my entity tries to avoid an obstacle, it Seeks to a point more or less behind the obstacle (which is the reason it needs to avoid the obstacle in the first place). The Seek algorithm constantly applies a force on the entity that pushes it (more or less) in the direction of the obstacle, while the Obstacle Avoidance algorithm constantly applies a force that pushes the entity away (more accurately, to the side) of the obstacle. The result is that sometimes the entity succesfully avoids the obstacle, and sometimes it collides with it, depending on the strength of the avoidance force I'm applying. How can I make sure that a force will succeed in steering the entity in some direction, while other forces are currently acting on the entity? (And while still looking natural). I can't allow entities to collide with obstacles when realistically they should be able to easily avoid them, doesn't matter what they're currently doing. Also, the Obstacle Avoidance algorithm is made exactly for the case where another force is acting on the entity. Otherwise it wouldn't be moving and there would be no need to avoid anything. So maybe I'm missing something. Thanks

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  • session management: verifying a user's log-in state

    - by good_computer
    I am storing sessions in my database. Everytime a user logs in, I create a new row corresponding to the new session, generate a new session id and send it as a cookie to the browser. My session data looks something like this: { 'user_id': 1234 'user_name': 'Sam' ... } When a request comes, I check whether a cookie with a session id is sent. If it is, I fetch session data from my database (or memcache) corresponding to that session id. When the user logs out, I remove the session data from my database (and memcache), and delete the cookie from the user's browser too. Notice that in my session data, I don't have something like logged_in: true. This is because if I find a session record in the database (or memcache) I deduce that the user is logged in, and if there is no session record found, the user is not logged in. My question is: is this the right approach? Should I have a logged_in key in my session data? Is there any possibility that a session record may be present on the server where the corresponding user is actually NOT logged in? Are there any security implications in having or not having such a key?

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  • Why, in WPF, do we set an object to Stretch via its Alignment properties instead of Width/Height?

    - by Jonathan Hobbs
    In WPF's XAML, we can tell an element to fill its container like this: <Button HorizontalAlignment="Stretch" VerticalAlignment="Stretch" /> Why is it that when we set an element to Stretch, we do it via the HorizontalAlignment and VerticalAlignment properties? Why did the WPF design team decide to take this approach over having Width="Stretch" and Height="Stretch"? I presume it was a calculated decision, and I'm curious about the reasoning. CSS, among other technologies, follows the convention that stretching is done via the width and height properties, and that alignment affects positioning exclusively. This seems intuitive enough: stretching the element is manipulating its width and height, after all! Using the corresponding alignment property to stretch an element seems counter-intuitive and unusual in comparison. This makes me think they didn't just pick this option for no reason: they made a calculated decision and had reasons behind it. Width and Height use the double data type, which would ordinarily mean assigning it a string would be silly. However, WPF's Window objects can take Width="Auto", which gets treated as double.NaN. Couldn't Width="Stretch" be stored as double.PositiveInfinity or some other value?

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  • Good design for a simple site that contains a blog

    - by bporter
    What is a good design for a simple web site with mostly static pages and a blog? I am helping a friend build this for their small business. We are looking for a simple approach that can be implemented fairly quickly. (I am a programmer and can help with coding, hosting, etc.) One option is to use a site like virb, which lets you choose from one of their themes and build a site pretty easily. You can also include a blog. They host the site for a pretty low monthly rate. I recommended this option, but my friend wants a design that is unique and custom. So, I took one of the themes and started modifying the HTML and CSS. This might still be a good option, but... ...If we are going to greatly modify it, why not just create the static pages from scratch and use something like Wordpress for the blog. Is this a good option? It looks fairly easy to integrate Wordpress with a site so that the design and behavior are really cohesive. Is this a good idea? Do you recommend any other approaches?

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  • GLSL billboard move center of rotation

    - by Jacob Kofoed
    I have successfully set up a billboard shader that works, it can take in a quad and rotate it so it always points toward the screen. I am using this vertex-shader: void main(){ vec4 tmpPos = (MVP * bufferMatrix * vec4(0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0)) + (MV * vec4( vertexPosition.x * 1.0 * bufferMatrix[0][0], vertexPosition.y * 1.0 * bufferMatrix[1][1], vertexPosition.z * 1.0 * bufferMatrix[2][2], 0.0) ); UV = UVOffset + vertexUV * UVScale; gl_Position = tmpPos; BufferMatrix is the model-matrix, it is an attribute to support Instance-drawing. The problem is best explained through pictures: This is the start position of the camera: And this is the position, looking in from 45 degree to the right: Obviously, as each character is it's own quad, the shader rotates each one around their own center towards the camera. What I in fact want is for them to rotate around a shared center, how would I do this? What I have been trying to do this far is: mat4 translation = mat4(1.0); translation = glm::translate(translation, vec3(pos)*1.f * 2.f); translation = glm::scale(translation, vec3(scale, 1.f)); translation = glm::translate(translation, vec3(anchorPoint - pos) / vec3(scale, 1.f)); Where the translation is the bufferMatrix sent to the shader. What I am trying to do is offset the center, but this might not be possible with a single matrix..? I am interested in a solution that doesn't require CPU calculations each frame, but rather set it up once and then let the shader do the billboard rotation. I realize there's many different solutions, like merging all the quads together, but I would first like to know if the approach with offsetting the center is possible. If it all seems a bit confusing, it's because I'm a little confused myself.

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  • Developing configuration syntax - best practise/rules/methods?

    - by Isaac
    I am currently developing a small application, which checks if provided data meets certain requirements. The requirements are actually a long list, and might be changing, so I defined a syntax which allows me to state all of the requirements briefly and in a seperate file. Now the overall requirements for the application have changed, and I need to change my configuration syntax. Which leeds me to wonder if there is methodoloy or best practise for developing such syntaxes. Currently what I do is I think about the requirements and come up with an initial syntax, start configuring the first few items and see how it works. If I come upon something that does not work well or not at all with the current syntax, I change the syntax, if possible in a backward compatible way. This somehow works for me, but it feels a bit like fishing in troubled water. Also I feel it does not nessessarly lead to the most concise and easy to understand/use syntax. So I was wondering what other people do, especially if there is a better approach to this.

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  • Reverse WiFi to Broadcast connection coming from a USB device

    - by Daniel Clem
    I am using the app called Clockworkmod Tether. It connects using a script ( command line " gksu ./run.sh " ) on the computer. All my programs connect to the internet perfectly, minitube, midori, transmission torrents. But the network manager does not show any connection, wired or wireless. So this may cause issues? What I want to do is take this connection, and be able to share it some way, any way, by wireless. This Acer Timeline "Aspire 5810TZ" does have an Ethernet, so wired out to a router might be an option. But I would prefer to simply reverse the Wireless card to broadcast out to about 2 or 3 devices. Is this possible? Yes I have taken a look at the other questions already posted here, but the answers are 1 year old or older, and not clear at all. I am moderately comfortable (4.5 out of 10 ) on the command line. But pretty much need line by line directions for what commands are needed and what order, ect. Edit I have already tried the method of "Left click network manager, Create New Wireless Network" It is created fine, and I am able to connect to it with a tablet, but am un-able to get an outside connection with it. Using the "Shared to other computers" option because DHCP doesn't seem to work, and WEP Passphrase Security. I get an IP address on the connected device. But as I said, won't bring up any outside webpages or the like. So perhaps this is the wrong approach?

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  • Where to place the R code for R+Sweave+LaTeX workflow

    - by claytontstanley
    I spent the last week learning 3 new tools: R, Sweave, and LaTeX. One question that came to my mind though when working through my first project: Where do I place the majority of the R code? The tutorials that I read online placed the majority of the R code in the LaTeX .Rnw file. However, I find having a bunch of R calculations in the LaTeX file distracting. What I do find extremely helpful (of course) is to call out to R code in the LaTeX file and embed the result. So the workflow I've been using is to place 99% of my R code in my .R file. I run that file first, save a bunch of calculations as objects, and output the .Rout file once finished (to save the work). Then when running Sweave, I load up that .Rout file, so that I have the majority of my calculations already completed and in the Sweave R session. Then my LaTeX callouts to R are quite simple: Just give me the XTable stored in 'res.table', or give me the result of an already-computed calculation stored in the variable 'res'. So I push towards the minimal amount of R code in the LaTex file possible, to achieve the desired result (embedding stats results in the LaTeX writeup). Does anyone have any experience with this approach? I'm just worried I might run into trouble further down the line, when I start really trying to load up and leverage this workflow.

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  • Electronics 101 for kids: littleBits review

    - by Daniel Cazzulino
    I'm always on the lookout for cool toys that can empower my kids (9, 6 and 2yo) to be creative and break the mold of being just consumers of other's ideas. I recently came across littleBits while watching a TED video of their creator. I was immediately hooked. It seemed like the perfect blend of simplicity and self-learning that I was looking to get my kids into electronics. So I went ahead and purchased the kit from SparkFun and a bunch of standalone parts (&quot;bits&quot;) from the site itself. There are also a bunch of videos and pictures on their site to get a better idea of what they are, as well as multitude YouTube videos. This weekend I gave them to my kids, and coincidentally, we also travelled to my hometown and they got to share them too with their cousins. Man, what a blast it was! I decided to approach this &quot;toy&quot; just like one of the iPod/iPad games I buy for them: &quot;How it's used? I've no idea! I just heard it was great, you go figure it out!&quot;. And figure it out they did....Read full article

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  • Tuesday at Oracle OpenWorld 2012 - Must See Session: “Oracle Fusion Applications: Best Practices in Integration Design Patterns”

    - by Lionel Dubreuil
    Don’t miss this “CON8685 - Oracle Fusion Applications: Best Practices in Integration Design Patterns “ session: Speakers: Rajesh Raheja - Senior Director, Development, Oracle Ravi Sankaran - Director, Applications Development, Oracle Date: Tuesday, Oct 2 Time: 1:15 PM - 2:15 PM Location: Palace Hotel - Telegraph Oracle Fusion Applications provide various ways to integrate their functional capabilities with other Oracle applications as well as third-party and legacy applications. In this session, you will learn the patterns used when communicating with Oracle Fusion Applications with a SOA approach. It addresses items related to identifying the integration artifacts available, also known as assets, in Oracle Enterprise Repository; how to invoke synchronous and asynchronous Web services; importing and exporting bulk data; and any integration issues to look out for. The patterns will be applicable to on-premises and SaaS/cloud deployment modes and are indicated as such. Objectives for this session are to: Highlight the various ways to integrate with Oracle Fusion Applications Showcase use of Oracle Fusion Middleware technologies for integration Describe best practices and design patterns for integration Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";}

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  • Doing a passable 4X game AI

    - by Extrakun
    I am coding a rather "simple" 4X game (if a 4X game can be simple). It's indie in scope, and I am wondering if there's anyway to come up with a passable AI without having me spending months coding on it. The game has three major decision making portions; spending of production points, spending of movement points and spending of tech points (basically there are 3 different 'currency', currency unspent at end of turn is not saved) Spend Production Points Upgrade a planet (increase its tech and production) Build ships (3 types) Move ships from planets to planets (costing Movement Points) Move to attack Move to fortify Research Tech (can partially research a tech i.e, as in Master of Orion) The plan for me right now is a brute force approach. There are basically 4 broad options for the player - Upgrade planet(s) to its his production and tech output Conquer as many planets as possible Secure as many planets as possible Get to a certain tech as soon as possible For each decision, I will iterate through the possible options and come up with a score; and then the AI will choose the decision with the highest score. Right now I have no idea how to 'mix decisions'. That is, for example, the AI wishes to upgrade and conquer planets at the same time. I suppose I can have another logic which do a brute force optimization on a combination of those 4 decisions.... At least, that's my plan if I can't think of anything better. Is there any faster way to make a passable AI? I don't need a very good one, to rival Deep Blue or such, just something that has the illusion of intelligence. This is my first time doing an AI on this scale, so I dare not try something too grand too. So far I have experiences with FSM, DFS, BFS and A*

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  • Best practices: Ajax and server side scripting with stored procedures

    - by Luka Milani
    I need to rebuild an old huge website and probably to port everyting to ASP.NET and jQuery and I would like to ask for some suggestion and tips. Actually the website uses: Ajax (client site with prototype.js) ASP (vb script server side) SQL Server 2005 IIS 7 as web server This website uses hundred of stored procedures and the requests are made by an ajax call and only 1 ASP page that contain an huge select case Shortly an example: JAVASCRIPT + PROTOTYPE: var data = { action: 'NEWS', callback: 'doNews', param1: $('text_example').value, ......: ..........}; AjaxGet(data); // perform a call using another function + prototype SERVER SIDE ASP: <% ...... select case request("Action") case "NEWS" With cmmDB .ActiveConnection = Conn .CommandText = "sp_NEWS_TO_CALL_for_example" .CommandType = adCmdStoredProc Set par0DB = .CreateParameter("Param1", adVarchar, adParamInput,6) Set par1DB = .CreateParameter(".....", adInteger, adParamInput) ' ........ ' can be more parameters .Parameters.Append par0DB .Parameters.Append par1DB par0DB.Value = request("Param1") par1DB.Value = request(".....") set rs=cmmDB.execute RecodsetToJSON rs, jsa ' create JSON response using a sub End With .... %> So as you can see I have an ASP page that has a lot of CASE and this page answers to all the ajax request in the site. My question are: Instead of having many CASES is it possible to create dynamic vb code that parses the ajax request and creates dynamically the call to the desired SP (also implementing the parameters passed by JS)? What is the best approach to handle situations like this, by using the advantages of .Net + protoype or jQuery? How the big sites handle situation like this? Do they do it by creating 1 page for request? Thanks in advance for suggestion, direction and tips.

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  • How to do dependency Injection and conditional object creation based on type?

    - by Pradeep
    I have a service endpoint initialized using DI. It is of the following style. This end point is used across the app. public class CustomerService : ICustomerService { private IValidationService ValidationService { get; set; } private ICustomerRepository Repository { get; set; } public CustomerService(IValidationService validationService,ICustomerRepository repository) { ValidationService = validationService; Repository = repository; } public void Save(CustomerDTO customer) { if (ValidationService.Valid(customer)) Repository.Save(customer); } Now, With the changing requirements, there are going to be different types of customers (Legacy/Regular). The requirement is based on the type of the customer I have to validate and persist the customer in a different way (e.g. if Legacy customer persist to LegacyRepository). The wrong way to do this will be to break DI and do somthing like public void Save(CustomerDTO customer) { if(customer.Type == CustomerTypes.Legacy) { if (LegacyValidationService.Valid(customer)) LegacyRepository.Save(customer); } else { if (ValidationService.Valid(customer)) Repository.Save(customer); } } My options to me seems like DI all possible IValidationService and ICustomerRepository and switch based on type, which seems wrong. The other is to change the service signature to Save(IValidationService validation, ICustomerRepository repository, CustomerDTO customer) which is an invasive change. Break DI. Use the Strategy pattern approach for each type and do something like: validation= CustomerValidationServiceFactory.GetStratedgy(customer.Type); validation.Valid(customer) but now I have a static method which needs to know how to initialize different services. I am sure this is a very common problem, What is the right way to solve this without changing service signatures or breaking DI?

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  • Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 4: Application Development Considerations

    - by Tim Murphy
    This is the final part in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. Application Development Considerations Now we get to the actual building of your solutions.  What are the skills and resources that will be needed in order to develop a smartphone application in the enterprise? Language Knowledge One of the first things you need to consider when you are deciding which platform language do you either have the most in house skill base or can you easily acquire.  If you already have developers who know Java or C# you may want to use either Android or Windows Phone.  You should also take into consideration the market availability of developers.  If your key developer leaves how easy is it to find a knowledgeable replacement? A second consideration when it comes to programming languages is the qualities exposed by the languages of a particular platform.  How well does that development language and its associated frameworks support things like security and access to the features of the smartphone hardware?  This will play into your overall cost of ownership if you have to create this infrastructure on your own. Manage Limited Resources Everything is limited on a smartphone: battery, memory, processing power, network bandwidth.  When developing your applications you will have to keep your footprint as small as possible in every way.  This means not running unnecessary processes in the background that will drain the battery or pulling more data over the airwaves than you have to.  You also want to keep your on device in as compact a format as possible. Mobile Design Patterns There are a number of design patterns that have either come to life because of smartphone development or have been adapted for this use.  The main pattern in the Windows Phone environment is the MVVM (Model-View-View-Model).  This is great for overall application structure and separation of concerns.  The fun part is trying to keep that separation as pure as possible.  Many of the other patterns may or may not have strict definitions, but some that you need to be concerned with are push notification, asynchronous communication and offline data storage. Real estate is limited on smartphones and even tablets. You are also limited in the type of controls that can be represented in the UI. This means rethinking how you modularize your application. Typing is also much harder to do so you want to reduce this as much as possible.  This leads to UI patterns.  While not what we would traditionally think of as design patterns the guidance each platform has for UI design is critical to the success of your application.  If user find the application difficult navigate they will not use it. Development Process Because of the differences in development tools required, test devices and certification and deployment processes your teams will need to learn new way of working together.  This will include the need to integrate service contracts of back-end systems with mobile applications.  You will also want to make sure that you present consistency across different access points to corporate data.  Your web site may have more functionality than your smartphone application, but it should have a consistent core set of functionality.  This all requires greater communication between sub-teams of your developers. Testing Process Testing of smartphone apps has a lot more to do with what happens when you lose connectivity or if the user navigates away from your application. There are a lot more opportunities for the user or the device to perform disruptive acts.  This should be your main testing concentration aside from the main business requirements.  You will need to do things like setting the phone to airplane mode and seeing what the application does in order to weed out any gaps in your handling communication interruptions. Need For Outside Experts Since this is a development area that is new to most companies the need for experts is a lot greater. Whether these are consultants, vendor representatives or just development community forums you will need to establish expert contacts. Nothing is more dangerous for your project timelines than a lack of knowledge.  Make sure you know who to call to avoid lengthy delays in your project because of knowledge gaps. Security Security has to be a major concern for enterprise applications. You aren't dealing with just someone's game standings. You are dealing with a companies intellectual property and competitive advantage. As such you need to start by limiting access to the application itself.  Once the user is in the app you need to ensure that the data is secure at all times.  This includes both local storage and across the wire.  This means if a platform doesn’t natively support encryption for these functions you will need to find alternatives to secure your data.  You also need to keep secret (encryption) keys obfuscated or locked away outside of the application. People can disassemble the code otherwise and break your encryption. Offline Capabilities As we discussed earlier one your biggest concerns is not having connectivity.  Because of this a good portion of your code may be dedicated to handling loss of connection and reconnection situations.  What do you do if you lose the network?  Back up all your transactions and store of any supporting data so that operations can continue off line. In order to support this you will need to determine the available flat file or local data base capabilities of the platform.  Any failed transactions will need to support a retry mechanism whether it is automatic or user initiated.  This also includes your services since they will need to be able to roll back partially completed transactions.  What ever you do, don’t ignore this area when you are designing your system. Deployment Each platform has different deployment capabilities. Some are more suited to enterprise situations than others. Apple's approach is probably the most mature at the moment. Prior to the current generation of smartphone platforms it would have been Windows CE. Windows Phone 7 has the limitation that the app has to be distributed through the same network as public facing applications. You mark them as private which means that they are only accessible by a direct URL. Unfortunately this does not make them undiscoverable (although it is very difficult). This will change with Windows Phone 8 where companies will be able to certify their own applications and distribute them.  Given this Windows Phone applications need to be more diligent with application access in order to keep them restricted to the company's employees. My understanding of the Android deployment schemes is that it is much less standardized then either iOS or Windows Phone. Someone would have to confirm or deny that for me though since I have not yet put the time into researching this platform further. Given my limited exposure to the iOS and Android platforms I have not been able to confirm this, but there are varying degrees of user involvement to install and keep applications updated. At one extreme the user just goes to a website to do the install and in other case they may need to download files and perform steps to install them. Future Bluetooth Today we use Bluetooth for keyboards, mice and headsets.  In the future it could be used to interrogate car computers or manufacturing systems or possibly retail machines by service techs.  This would open smartphones to greater use as a almost a Star Trek Tricorder.  You would get you all your data as well as being able to use it as a universal remote for just about any device or machine. Better corporation controlled deployment At least in the Windows Phone world the upcoming release of Windows Phone 8 will include a private certification and deployment option that is currently not available with Windows Phone 7 (Mango). We currently have to run the apps through the Marketplace certification process and use a targeted distribution method. Platform independent approaches HTML5 and JavaScript with Web Service has become a popular topic lately for not only creating flexible web site, but also creating cross platform mobile applications.  I’m not yet convinced that this lowest common denominator approach is viable in most cases, but it does have it’s place and seems to be growing.  Be sure to keep an eye on it. Summary From my perspective enterprise smartphone applications can offer a great competitive advantage to many companies.  They are not cheap to build and should be approached cautiously.  Understand the factors I have outlined in this series, do you due diligence and see if there is a portion of your business that can benefit from the mobile experience. del.icio.us Tags: Architecture,Smartphones,Windows Phone,iOS,Android

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  • Finding shapes in 2D Array, then optimising

    - by assemblism
    I'm new so I can't do an image, but below is a diagram for a game I am working on, moving bricks into patterns, and I currently have my code checking for rotated instances of a "T" shape of any colour. The X and O blocks would be the same colour, and my last batch of code would find the "T" shape where the X's are, but what I wanted was more like the second diagram, with two "T"s Current result      Desired Result [X][O][O]                [1][1][1] [X][X][_]                [2][1][_] [X][O][_]                [2][2][_] [O][_][_]                [2][_][_] My code loops through x/y, marks blocks as used, rotates the shape, repeats, changes colour, repeats. I have started trying to fix this checking with great trepidation. The current idea is to: loop through the grid and make note of all pattern occurrences (NOT marking blocks as used), and putting these to an array loop through the grid again, this time noting which blocks are occupied by which patterns, and therefore which are occupied by multiple patterns. looping through the grid again, this time noting which patterns obstruct which patterns That much feels right... What do I do now? I think I would have to try various combinations of conflicting shapes, starting with those that obstruct the most other patterns first.How do I approach this one? use the rational that says I have 3 conflicting shapes occupying 8 blocks, and the shapes are 4 blocks each, therefore I can only have a maximum of two shapes. (I also intend to incorporate other shapes, and there will probably be score weighting which will need to be considered when going through the conflicting shapes, but that can be another day) I don't think it's a bin packing problem, but I'm not sure what to look for. Hope that makes sense, thanks for your help

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  • How would you TDD the functionality of getting the corresponding process of a running windows service?

    - by Matt Spinelli
    Purpose Over the last year or more I've been learning unit testing via books I've read recently like The Art of Unit Testing, Working Effectively with Legacy Code, and others. I've also been using unit tests, mocking frameworks, and the like, periodically at work and definitely see the value. However, I'm still having a hard time wrapping my mind around TDD (as opposed to TAD) when the situation calls for code that is gong to mostly use external API calls. Problem to solve Get the process associated with a windows service using the service name. example: Function GetProcess(ByVal serviceName As String) As Process Rules Show each major iteration in production & test code using TDD No need to see any other code or configuration that is required to get things to run. Just curious about the interfaces, concrete classes, and test methods. C# or VB.NET Must use the .Net framework regarding services/processes (i.e. System.Diagnostics.Process) Test Frameworks: Nunit or MSTest Isolation Frameworks: Moq, Rhino Mock, or Microsoft Moles Must write true unit tests (no integration tests) Additional notes As far as I can tell there are two approaches design wise. Use an Inversion of Control approach along with using the Adapter and/or Facade patterns to wrap the underlying .net framework objects dealing with processes and services. Keep the .net framework code in the class containing the Get Process method and use code detouring (interception) via Microsoft Moles to isolate the hard dependencies from the method under test.

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  • MVC + 3 tier; where ViewModels come into play?

    - by mikhairu
    I'm designing a 3-tiered application using ASP.NET MVC 4. I used the following resources as a reference. CodeProject: MVC + N-tier + Entity Framework Separating data access in ASP.NET MVC I have the following desingn so far. Presentation Layer (PL) (main MVC project, where M of MVC was moved to Data Access Layer): MyProjectName.Main Views/ Controllers/ ... Business Logic Layer (BLL): MyProjectName.BLL ViewModels/ ProjectServices/ ... Data Access Layer (DAL): MyProjectName.DAL Models/ Repositories.EF/ Repositories.Dapper/ ... Now, PL references BLL and BLL references DAL. This way lower layer does not depend on the one above it. In this design PL invokes a service of the BLL. PL can pass a View Model to BLL and BLL can pass a View Model back to PL. Also, BLL invokes DAL layer and DAL layer can return a Model back to BLL. BLL can in turn build a View Model and return it to PL. Up to now this pattern was working for me. However, I've ran into a problem where some of my ViewModels require joins on several entities. In the plain MVC approach, in the controller I used a LINQ query to do joins and then select new MyViewModel(){ ... }. But now, in the DAL I do not have access to where ViewModels are defined (in the BLL). This means I cannot do joins in DAL and return it to BLL. It seems I have to do separate queries in DAL (instead of joins in one query) and BLL would then use the result of these to build a ViewModel. This is very inconvenient, but I don't think I should be exposing DAL to ViewModels. Any ideas how I can solve this dilemma? Thanks.

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  • Real-time stock market application

    - by Sam
    I'm an amateur programmer. I'd like to develop a software application (like Tradestation), to analyse real-time market data. Please teach me if the following approach is correct, ie the procedures, knowledge or software needed etc: Use a DB to read the real-time feed from data provider: what should be the right DB to use? I know it should be a time serious one. Can I use SQL, Mysql, or others? What database can receive real-time data feed? Do I need to configure the DB to do this? If the real-time data is in ASCII form, how can it be converted to those that can be read by the DB and my application? Should I have to write codes or just use some add-ins? What kind of add-in are needed? How should I code the program to retrieve the changing data from the DB so that the analysis software screen data can also change asynchronously? (like the RTD in excel) Which aspects of programming do I need to learn to develop the above? Are there web resources/ books I can refer to for more information?

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  • SUM of metric for normalized logical hierarchy

    - by Alex254
    Suppose there's a following table Table1, describing parent-child relationship and metric: Parent | Child | Metric (of a child) ------------------------------------ name0 | name1 | a name0 | name2 | b name1 | name3 | c name2 | name4 | d name2 | name5 | e name3 | name6 | f Characteristics: 1) Child always has 1 and only 1 parent; 2) Parent can have multiple children (name2 has name4 and name5 as children); 3) Number of levels in this "hierarchy" and number of children for any given parent are arbitrary and do not depend on each other; I need SQL request that will return result set with each name and a sum of metric of all its descendants down to the bottom level plus itself, so for this example table the result would be (look carefully at name1): Name | Metric ------------------ name1 | a + c + f name2 | b + d + e name3 | c + f name4 | d name5 | e name6 | f (name0 is irrelevant and can be excluded). It should be ANSI or Teradata SQL. I got as far as a recursive query that can return a SUM (metric) of all descendants of a given name: WITH RECURSIVE temp_table (Child, metric) AS ( SELECT root.Child, root.metric FROM table1 root WHERE root.Child = 'name1' UNION ALL SELECT indirect.Child, indirect.metric FROM temp_table direct, table1 indirect WHERE direct.Child = indirect.Parent) SELECT SUM(metric) FROM temp_table; Is there a way to turn this query into a function that takes name as an argument and returns this sum, so it can be called like this? SELECT Sum_Of_Descendants (Child) FROM Table1; Any suggestions about how to approach this from a different angle would be appreciated as well, because even if the above way is implementable, it will be of poor performance - there would be a lot of iterations of reading metrics (value f would be read 3 times in this example). Ideally, the query should read a metric of each name only once.

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