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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #039

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 FQL – Facebook Query Language Facebook list following advantages of FQL: Condensed XML reduces bandwidth and parsing costs. More complex requests can reduce the number of requests necessary. Provides a single consistent, unified interface for all of your data. It’s fun! UDF – Get the Day of the Week Function The day of the week can be retrieved in SQL Server by using the DatePart function. The value returned by the function is between 1 (Sunday) and 7 (Saturday). To convert this to a string representing the day of the week, use a CASE statement. UDF – Function to Get Previous And Next Work Day – Exclude Saturday and Sunday While reading ColdFusion blog of Ben Nadel Getting the Previous Day In ColdFusion, Excluding Saturday And Sunday, I realize that I use similar function on my SQL Server Database. This function excludes the Weekends (Saturday and Sunday), and it gets previous as well as next work day. Complete Series of SQL Server Interview Questions and Answers Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Introduction Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 1 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 2 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers – Part 3 Data Warehousing Interview Questions and Answers Complete List Download 2008 Introduction to Log Viewer In SQL Server all the windows event logs can be seen along with SQL Server logs. Interface for all the logs is same and can be launched from the same place. This log can be exported and filtered as well. DBCC SHRINKFILE Takes Long Time to Run If you are DBA who are involved with Database Maintenance and file group maintenance, you must have experience that many times DBCC SHRINKFILE operations takes a long time but any other operations with Database are relatively quicker. mssqlsystemresource – Resource Database The purpose of resource database is to facilitates upgrading to the new version of SQL Server without any hassle. In previous versions whenever version of SQL Server was upgraded all the previous version system objects needs to be dropped and new version system objects to be created. 2009 Puzzle – Write Script to Generate Primary Key and Foreign Key In SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), there is no option to script all the keys. If one is required to script keys they will have to manually script each key one at a time. If database has many tables, generating one key at a time can be a very intricate task. I want to throw a question to all of you if any of you have scripts for the same purpose. Maximizing View of SQL Server Management Studio – Full Screen – New Screen I had explained the following two different methods: 1) Open Results in Separate Tab - This is a very interesting method as result pan shows up in a different tab instead of the splitting screen horizontally. 2) Open SSMS in Full Screen - This works always and to its best. Not many people are aware of this method; hence, very few people use it to enhance performance. 2010 Find Queries using Parallelism from Cached Plan T-SQL script gets all the queries and their execution plan where parallelism operations are kicked up. Pay attention there is TOP 10 is used, if you have lots of transactional operations, I suggest that you change TOP 10 to TOP 50 This is the list of the all the articles in the series of computed columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Storage This article talks about how computed columns are created and why they take more storage space than before. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Performance This article talks about how PERSISTED columns give better performance than non-persisted columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Performance – Part 2 This article talks about how non-persisted columns give better performance than PERSISTED columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column and Performance – Part 3 This article talks about how Index improves the performance of Computed Columns. SQL SERVER – Computed Column – PERSISTED and Storage – Part 2 This article talks about how creating index on computed column does not grow the row length of table. SQL SERVER – Computed Columns – Index and Performance This article summarized all the articles related to computed columns. 2011 SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 21 of 31 What is Data Warehousing? What is Business Intelligence (BI)? What is a Dimension Table? What is Dimensional Modeling? What is a Fact Table? What are the Fundamental Stages of Data Warehousing? What are the Different Methods of Loading Dimension tables? Describes the Foreign Key Columns in Fact Table and Dimension Table? What is Data Mining? What is the Difference between a View and a Materialized View? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 22 of 31 What is OLTP? What is OLAP? What is the Difference between OLTP and OLAP? What is ODS? What is ER Diagram? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 23 of 31 What is ETL? What is VLDB? Is OLTP Database is Design Optimal for Data Warehouse? If denormalizing improves Data Warehouse Processes, then why is the Fact Table is in the Normal Form? What are Lookup Tables? What are Aggregate Tables? What is Real-Time Data-Warehousing? What are Conformed Dimensions? What is a Conformed Fact? How do you Load the Time Dimension? What is a Level of Granularity of a Fact Table? What are Non-Additive Facts? What is a Factless Facts Table? What are Slowly Changing Dimensions (SCD)? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Data Warehousing Concepts – Day 24 of 31 What is Hybrid Slowly Changing Dimension? What is BUS Schema? What is a Star Schema? What Snow Flake Schema? Differences between the Star and Snowflake Schema? What is Difference between ER Modeling and Dimensional Modeling? What is Degenerate Dimension Table? Why is Data Modeling Important? What is a Surrogate Key? What is Junk Dimension? What is a Data Mart? What is the Difference between OLAP and Data Warehouse? What is a Cube and Linked Cube with Reference to Data Warehouse? What is Snapshot with Reference to Data Warehouse? What is Active Data Warehousing? What is the Difference between Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence? What is MDS? Explain the Paradigm of Bill Inmon and Ralph Kimball. SQL SERVER – Azure Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Paras Doshi – Day 25 of 31 Paras Doshi has submitted 21 interesting question and answers for SQL Azure. 1.What is SQL Azure? 2.What is cloud computing? 3.How is SQL Azure different than SQL server? 4.How many replicas are maintained for each SQL Azure database? 5.How can we migrate from SQL server to SQL Azure? 6.Which tools are available to manage SQL Azure databases and servers? 7.Tell me something about security and SQL Azure. 8.What is SQL Azure Firewall? 9.What is the difference between web edition and business edition? 10.How do we synchronize On Premise SQL server with SQL Azure? 11.How do we Backup SQL Azure Data? 12.What is the current pricing model of SQL Azure? 13.What is the current limitation of the size of SQL Azure DB? 14.How do you handle datasets larger than 50 GB? 15.What happens when the SQL Azure database reaches Max Size? 16.How many databases can we create in a single server? 17.How many servers can we create in a single subscription? 18.How do you improve the performance of a SQL Azure Database? 19.What is code near application topology? 20.What were the latest updates to SQL Azure service? 21.When does a workload on SQL Azure get throttled? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Malathi Mahadevan – Day 26 of 31 Malachi had asked a simple question which has several answers. Each answer makes you think and ponder about the reality of the IT world. Look at the simple question – ‘What is the toughest challenge you have faced in your present job and how did you handle it’? and its various answers. Each answer has its own story. SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Guest Post by Rick Morelan – Day 27 of 31 Rick Morelan of Joes2Pros has written an excellent blog post on the subject how to find top N values. Most people are fully aware of how the TOP keyword works with a SELECT statement. After years preparing so many students to pass the SQL Certification I noticed they were pretty well prepared for job interviews too. Yes, they would do well in the interview but not great. There seemed to be a few questions that would come up repeatedly for almost everyone. Rick addresses similar questions in his lucid writing skills. 2012 Observation of Top with Index and Order of Resultset SQL Server has lots of things to learn and share. It is amazing to see how people evaluate and understand different techniques and styles differently when implementing. The real reason may be absolutely different but we may blame something totally different for the incorrect results. Read the blog post to learn more. How do I Record Video and Webcast How to Convert Hex to Decimal or INT Earlier I asked regarding a question about how to convert Hex to Decimal. I promised that I will post an answer with Due Credit to the author but never got around to post a blog post around it. Read the original post over here SQL SERVER – Question – How to Convert Hex to Decimal. Query to Get Unique Distinct Data Based on Condition – Eliminate Duplicate Data from Resultset The natural reaction will be to suggest DISTINCT or GROUP BY. However, not all the questions can be solved by DISTINCT or GROUP BY. Let us see the following example, where a user wanted only latest records to be displayed. Let us see the example to understand further. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Evil DRY

  - by StefanSteinegger

  DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) is a basic software design and coding principle. But there is just no silver bullet. While DRY should increase maintainability by avoiding common design mistakes, it could lead to huge maintenance problems when misunderstood. The root of the problem is most probably that many developers believe that DRY means that any piece of code that is written more then once should be made reusable. But the principle is stated as "Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system." So the important thing here is "knowledge". Nobody ever said "every piece of code". I try to give some examples of misusing the DRY principle. Code Repetitions by Coincidence There is code that is repeated by pure coincidence. It is not the same code because it is based on the same piece of knowledge, it is just the same by coincidence. It's hard to give an example of such a case. Just think about some lines of code the developer thinks "I already wrote something similar". Then he takes the original code, puts it into a public method, even worse into a base class where none had been there before, puts some weird arguments and some if or switch statements into it to support all special cases and calls this "increasing maintainability based on the DRY principle". The resulting "reusable method" is usually something the developer not even can give a meaningful name, because its contents isn't anything specific, it is just a bunch of code. For the same reason, nobody will really understand this piece of code. Typically this method only makes sense to call after some other method had been called. All the symptoms of really bad design is evident. Fact is, writing this kind of "reusable methods" is worse then copy pasting! Believe me. What will happen when you change this weird piece of code? You can't say what'll happen, because you can't understand what the code is actually doing. So better don't touch it anymore. Maintainability just died. Of course this problem is with any badly designed code. But because the developer tried to make this method as reusable as possible, large parts of the system get dependent on it. Completely independent parts get tightly coupled by this common piece of code. Changing on the single common place will have effects anywhere in the system, a typical symptom of too tight coupling. Without trying to dogmatically (and wrongly) apply the DRY principle, you just had a system with a weak design. Now you get a system which just can't be maintained anymore. So what can you do against it? When making code reusable, always identify the generally reusable parts of it. Find the reason why the code is repeated, find the common "piece of knowledge". If you have to search too far, it's probably not really there. Explain it to a colleague, if you can't explain or the explanation is to complicated, it's probably not worth to reuse. If you identify the piece of knowledge, don't forget to carefully find the place where it should be implemented. Reusing code is never worth giving up a clean design. Methods always need to do something specific. If you can't give it a simple and explanatory name, you did probably something weird. If you can't find the common piece of knowledge, try to make the code simpler. For instance, if you have some complicated string or collection operations within this code, write some general-purpose operations into a helper class. If your code gets simple enough, its not so bad if it can't be reused. If you are not able to find anything simple and reasonable, copy paste it. Put a comment into the code to reference the other copies. You may find a solution later. Requirements Repetitions by Coincidence Let's assume that you need to implement complex tax calculations for many countries. It's possible that some countries have very similar tax rules. These rules are still completely independent from each other, since every country can change it of its own. (Assumed that this similarity is actually by coincidence and not by political membership. There might be basic rules applying to all European countries. etc.) Let's assume that there are similarities between an Asian country and an African country. Moving the common part to a central place will cause problems. What happens if one of the countries changes its rules? Or - more likely - what happens if users of one country complain about an error in the calculation? If there is shared code, it is very risky to change it, even for a bugfix. It is hard to find requirements to be repeated by coincidence. Then there is not much you can do against the repetition of the code. What you really should consider is to make coding of the rules as simple as possible. So this independent knowledge "Tax Rules in Timbuktu" or wherever should be as pure as possible, without much overhead and stuff that does not belong to it. So you can write every independent requirement short and clean. DRYing try-catch and using Blocks This is a technical issue. Blocks like try-catch or using (e.g. in C#) are very hard to DRY. Imagine a complex exception handling, including several catch blocks. When the contents of the try block as well as the contents of the individual catch block are trivial, but the whole structure is repeated on many places in the code, there is almost no reasonable way to DRY it. try { // trivial code here using (Thingy thing = new thingy) { //trivial, but always different line of code } } catch(FooException foo) { // trivial foo handling } catch (BarException bar) { // trivial bar handling } catch { // trivial common handling } finally { // trivial finally block } The key here is that every block is trivial, so there is nothing to just move into a separate method. The only part that differs from case to case is the line of code in the body of the using block (or any other block). The situation is especially interesting if the many occurrences of this structure are completely independent: they appear in classes with no common base class, they don't aggregate each other and so on. Let's assume that this is a common pattern in service methods within the whole system. Examples of Evil DRYing in this situation: Put a if or switch statement into the method to choose the line of code to execute. There are several reasons why this is not a good idea: The close coupling of the formerly independent implementation is the strongest. Also the readability of the code and the use of a parameter to control the logic. Put everything into a method which takes a delegate as argument to call. The caller just passes his "specific line of code" to this method. The code will be very unreadable. The same maintainability problems apply as for any "Code Repetition by Coincidence" situations. Enforce a base class to all the classes where this pattern appears and use the template method pattern. It's the same readability and maintainability problem as above, but additionally complex and tightly coupled because of the base class. I would call this "Inheritance by Coincidence" which will not lead to great software design. What can you do against it: Ideally, the individual line of code is a call to a class or interface, which could be made individual by inheritance. If this would be the case, it wouldn't be a problem at all. I assume that it is no such a trivial case. Consider to refactor the error concept to make error handling easier. The last but not worst option is to keep the replications. Some pattern of code must be maintained in consistency, there is nothing we can do against it. And no reason to make it unreadable. Conclusion The DRY-principle is an important and basic principle every software developer should master. The key is to identify the "pieces of knowledge". There is code which can't be reused easily because of technical reasons. This requires quite a bit flexibility and creativity to make code simple and maintainable. It's not the problem of the principle, it is the problem of blindly applying a principle without understanding the problem it should solve. The result is mostly much worse then ignoring the principle.

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• 'Content' is NOT 'Text' in XAML

  - by psheriff

  One of the key concepts in XAML is that the Content property of a XAML control like a Button or ComboBoxItem does not have to contain just textual data. In fact, Content can be almost any other XAML that you want. To illustrate here is a simple example of how to spruce up your Button controls in Silverlight. Here is some very simple XAML that consists of two Button controls within a StackPanel on a Silverlight User Control. <StackPanel>  <Button Name="btnHome"          HorizontalAlignment="Left"          Content="Home" />  <Button Name="btnLog"          HorizontalAlignment="Left"          Content="Logs" /></StackPanel> The XAML listed above will produce a Silverlight control within a Browser that looks like Figure 1.   Figure 1: Normal button controls are quite boring. With just a little bit of refactoring to move the button attributes into Styles, we can make the buttons look a little better. I am a big believer in Styles, so I typically create a Resources section within my user control where I can factor out the common attribute settings for a particular set of controls. Here is a Resources section that I added to my Silverlight user control. <UserControl.Resources>  <Style TargetType="Button"         x:Key="NormalButton">    <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment"            Value="Left" />    <Setter Property="MinWidth"            Value="50" />    <Setter Property="Margin"            Value="10" />  </Style></UserControl.Resources> Now back in the XAML within the Grid control I update the Button controls to use the Style attribute and have each button use the Static Resource called NormalButton. <StackPanel>  <Button Name="btnHome"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}"          Content="Home" />  <Button Name="btnLog"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}"          Content="Logs" /></StackPanel> With the additional attributes set in the Resources section on the Button, the above XAML will now display the two buttons as shown in Figure 2. Figure 2: Use Resources to Make Buttons More Consistent Now let’s re-design these buttons even more. Instead of using words for each button, let’s replace the Content property to use a picture. As they say… a picture is worth a thousand words, so let’s take advantage of that. Modify each of the Button controls and eliminate the Content attribute and instead, insert an <Image> control with the <Button> and the </Button> tags. Add a ToolTip to still display the words you had before in the Content and you will now have better looking buttons, as shown in Figure 3.   Figure 3: Using pictures instead of words can be an effective method of communication The XAML to produce Figure 3 is shown in the following listing: <StackPanel>  <Button Name="btnHome"          ToolTipService.ToolTip="Home"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}">    <Image Style="{StaticResource NormalImage}"            Source="Images/Home.jpg" />  </Button>  <Button Name="btnLog"          ToolTipService.ToolTip="Logs"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}">    <Image Style="{StaticResource NormalImage}"            Source="Images/Log.jpg" />  </Button></StackPanel> You will also need to add the following XAML to the User Control’s Resources section. <Style TargetType="Image"        x:Key="NormalImage">  <Setter Property="Width"          Value="50" /></Style> Add Multiple Controls to Content Now, since the Content can be whatever we want, you could also modify the Content of each button to be a StackPanel control. Then you can have an image and text within the button. <StackPanel>  <Button Name="btnHome"          ToolTipService.ToolTip="Home"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}">    <StackPanel>      <Image Style="{StaticResource NormalImage}"              Source="Images/Home.jpg" />      <TextBlock Text="Home"                  Style="{StaticResource NormalTextBlock}" />    </StackPanel>  </Button>  <Button Name="btnLog"          ToolTipService.ToolTip="Logs"          Style="{StaticResource NormalButton}">    <StackPanel>      <Image Style="{StaticResource NormalImage}"              Source="Images/Log.jpg" />      <TextBlock Text="Logs"                  Style="{StaticResource NormalTextBlock}" />    </StackPanel>  </Button></StackPanel> You will need to add one more resource for the TextBlock control too. <Style TargetType="TextBlock"        x:Key="NormalTextBlock">  <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment"          Value="Center" /></Style> All of the above will now produce the following:   Figure 4: Add multiple controls to the content to make your buttons even more interesting. Summary While this is a simple example, you can see how XAML Content has great flexibility. You could add a MediaElement control as the content of a Button and play a video within the Button. Not that you would necessarily do this, but it does work. What is nice about adding different content within the Button control is you still get the Click event and other attributes of a button, but it does necessarily look like a normal button. Good Luck with your Coding,Paul Sheriff ** SPECIAL OFFER FOR MY BLOG READERS **Visit http://www.pdsa.com/Event/Blog for a free video on Silverlight entitled "Silverlight XAML for the Complete Novice - Part 1."

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• Right-Time Retail Part 3

  - by David Dorf

  This is part three of the three-part series.  Read Part 1 and Part 2 first. 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:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0in; mso-para-margin-right:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0in; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} Right-Time Marketing Real-time isn’t just about executing faster; it extends to interactions with customers as well. As an industry, we’ve spent many years analyzing all the data that’s been collected. Yes, that data has been invaluable in helping us make better decisions like where to open new stores, how to assort those stores, and how to price our products. But the recent advances in technology are now making it possible to analyze and deliver that data very quickly… fast enough to impact a potential sale in near real-time. Let me give you two examples. Salesmen in car dealerships get pretty good at sizing people up. When a potential customer walks in the door, it doesn’t take long for the salesman to figure out the revenue at stake. Is this person a real buyer, or just looking for a fun test drive? Will this person buy today or three months from now? Will this person opt for the expensive packages, or go bare bones? While the salesman certainly asks some leading questions, much of information is discerned through body language. But body language doesn’t translate very well over the web. Eloqua, which was acquired by Oracle earlier this year, reads internet body language. By tracking the behavior of the people visiting your web site, Eloqua categorizes visitors based on their propensity to buy. While Eloqua’s roots have been in B2B, we’ve been looking at leveraging the technology with ATG to target B2C. Knowing what sites were previously visited, how often the customer has been to your site recently, and how long they’ve spent searching can help understand where the customer is in their purchase journey. And knowing that bit of information may be enough to help close the deal with a real-time offer, follow-up email, or online customer service pop-up. This isn’t so different from the days gone by when the clerk behind the counter of the corner store noticed you were lingering in a particular aisle, so he walked over to help you compare two products and close the sale. You appreciated the personalized service, and he knew the value of the long-term relationship. Move that same concept into the digital world and you have Oracle’s CX Suite, a cloud-based offering of end-to-end customer experience tools, assembled primarily from acquisitions. Those tools are Oracle Marketing (Eloqua), Oracle Commerce (ATG, Endeca), Oracle Sales (Oracle CRM On Demand), Oracle Service (RightNow), Oracle Social (Collective Intellect, Vitrue, Involver), and Oracle Content (Fatwire). We are providing the glue that binds the CIO and CMO together to unleash synergies that drive the top-line higher, and by virtue of the cloud-approach, keep costs at bay. My second example of real-time marketing takes place in the store but leverages the concepts of Web marketing. In 1962 the decline of personalized service in retail began. Anyone know the significance of that year? That’s when Target, K-Mart, and Walmart each opened their first stores, and over the succeeding years the industry chose scale over personal service. No longer were you known as “Jane with the snotty kid so make sure we check her out fast,” but you suddenly became “time-starved female age 20-30 with kids.” I’m not saying that was a bad thing – it was the right thing for our industry at the time, and it enabled a huge amount of growth, cheaper prices, and more variety of products. But scale alone is no longer good enough. Today’s sophisticated consumer demands scale, experience, and personal attention. To some extent we’ve delivered that on websites via the magic of cookies, your willingness to log in, and sophisticated data analytics. What store manager wouldn’t love a report detailing all the visitors to his store, where they came from, and which products that examined? People trackers are getting more sophisticated, incorporating infrared, video analytics, and even face recognition. (Next time you walk in front on a mannequin, don’t be surprised if it’s looking back.) But the ultimate marketing conduit is the mobile phone. Since each mobile phone emits a unique number on WiFi networks, it becomes the cookie of the physical world. Assuming congress keeps privacy safeguards reasonable, we’ll have a win-win situation for both retailers and consumers. Retailers get to know more about the consumer’s purchase journey, and consumers get higher levels of service with the retailer. When I call my bank, a couple things happen before the call is connected. A reverse look-up on my phone number identifies me so my accounts can be retrieved from Siebel CRM. Then the system anticipates why I’m calling based on recent transactions. In this example, it sees that I was just charged a foreign currency fee, so it assumes that’s the reason I’m calling. It puts all the relevant information on the customer service rep’s screen as it connects the call. When I complain about the fee, the rep immediately sees I’m a great customer and I travel lots, so she suggests switching me to their traveler’s card that doesn’t have foreign transaction fees. That technology is powered by a product called Oracle Real-Time Decisions, a rules engine built to execute very quickly, basically in the time it takes the phone to ring once. So let’s combine the power of that product with our new-found mobile cookie and provide contextual customer interactions in real-time. Our first opportunity comes when a customer crosses a pre-defined geo-fence, typically a boundary around the store. Context is the key to our interaction: that’s the customer (known or anonymous), the time of day and day of week, and location. Thomas near the downtown store on a Wednesday at noon means he’s heading to lunch. If he were near the mall location on a Saturday morning, that’s a completely different context. But on his way to lunch, we’ll let Thomas know that we’ve got a new shipment of ASICS running shoes on display with a simple text message. We used the context to look-up Thomas’ past purchases and understood he was an avid runner. We used the fact that this was lunchtime to select the type of message, in this case an informational message instead of an offer. Thomas enters the store, phone in hand, and walks to the shoe department. He scans one of the new ASICS shoes using the convenient QR Codes we provided on the shelf-tags, but then he starts scanning low-end Nikes. Each scan is another opportunity to both learn from Thomas and potentially interact via another message. Since he historically buys low-end Nikes and keeps scanning them, he’s likely falling back into his old ways. Our marketing rules are currently set to move loyal customer to higher margin products. We could have set the dials to increase visit frequency, move overstocked items, increase basket size, or many other settings, but today we are trying to move Thomas to higher-margin products. We send Thomas another text message, this time it’s a personalized offer for 10% off ASICS good for 24 hours. Offering him a discount on Nikes would be throwing margin away since he buys those anyway. We are using our marketing dollars to change behavior that increases the long-term value of Thomas. He decides to buy the ASICS and scans the discount code on his phone at checkout. Checkout is yet another opportunity to interact with Thomas, so the transaction is sent back to Oracle RTD for evaluation. Since Thomas didn’t buy anything with the shoes, we’ll print a bounce-back coupon on the receipt offering 30% off ASICS socks if he returns within seven days. We have successfully started moving Thomas from low-margin to high-margin products. In both of these marketing scenarios, we are able to leverage data in near real-time to decide how best to interact with the customer and lead to an increase in the lifetime value of the customer. The key here is acting at the moment the customer shows interest using the context of the situation. We aren’t pushing random products at haphazard times. We are tailoring the marketing to be very specific to this customer, and it’s the technology that allows this to happen in near real-time. Conclusion As we enable more right-time integrations and interactions, retailers will begin to offer increased service to their customers. Localized and personalized service at scale will drive loyalty and lead to meaningful revenue growth for the retailers that execute well. Our industry needs to support Commerce Anywhere…and commerce anytime as well.

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• I thought everyone did it like this – Training Session Code Management

  - by Fatherjack

  One of an occasional series of blogs about things that I do that perhaps others don’t. From very early on in my dealings with SQL Server Management Studio I started using Solutions and Projects. This means that I started using them when writing sessions and it wasn’t until speaking with someone at PASS Summit 2013 that I found out that this was a process that was unheard of by some people. So, here we go, a run through how I create and manage code and other documents that I use in presentations. For people unsure what solutions and projects are; • Solution – a container for one or more projects. • Project – a container for files, .sql files are grouped as Queries, all other files are stored as Misc. How do I start? Open Management Studio as normal, and then click File | New and select Project This will bring up the New Project dialog box and you can select/add details as necessary in the places indicated. If this is the first project you are creating then be sure to select the Create directory for solution check box (4). If know in advance that you are going to have more than one project in the solution then you may want to edit the Solution name (3) as by default it will take the name of the project that you enter at (2). This will lead you to the following folder structure (depending on the location that you chose in 3) above. In SSMS you need to turn on the Solution Explorer, either via the View menu or pressing Ctrl + Alt + L                   This will bring up a dockable window that will let you quickly access the files that you choose to include in the Solution.                     Can we get to work and write some code yet please? Yes, we can. As with many Microsoft products there are several ways to go about this, let’s look at the easiest way when creating new code. When writing a presentation I usually start from the position we are currently in – a brand new solution and project with no code. Later on we will look at incorporating existing code files into the Project where we need it. Right-click on the Project name and choose Add New Query           As soon as you click this you will be prompted to select the sql server that you want to connect to and once you have done that you will have your new query open in the text editor and the Solution Explorer will now look like this, showing your server connection and your new query.               And the Project folder will look like this         Now once you have written your code don’t press save, choose Save As and give the code a better name than QueryX.sql. SSMS will interpret this as a request to rename Query1 and your Project and the Project folder will show that SQLQuery1.sql no longer exists but there is now a file named as you requested. If you happen to click save in error then right-click the query in the project and choose rename.               You can then alter the name as you like, even when open in the SSMS text editor, and the file will be renamed. When creating a set of scripts for a presentation I name files with a numeric prefix so that when they are sorted by name they are in the order that I need to use them during the session. I love this idea but I’ve got loads of existing scripts I want to put in Projects Excellent, adding existing files to a project is easy, let’s consider that you have query files in your My Documents folder and you want to bring them into the Project we have just created. Right-click on the Project and choose Add | Existing Item           Navigate to the location of your chosen file and select it. The file will open in SSMS text editor and the Project will be updated to show that the selected query is now part of your project. If you look in Windows Explorer you will see that the query file has been copied into the Project folder, the original file still remains in your My Documents (or wherever it existed). I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to explore creating further Projects within a solution but will happily answer questions if you get into difficulties. What other advantages do I get from this? Well, as all your code is neatly in one Solution folder and the folder contains only files that are pertinent to the session you are presenting then it makes it very easy to share this code, simply copy the whole folder onto a USB stick, Blog, FTP location, wherever you choose and it’s all there in one self-contained parcel. You don’t have to limit yourself to .sql query files, you can add any sort of document via the Add Existing Item method, just try it out. Right-click on the protect and choose Add | Existing Item           Change the file type filter.                       You can multi select items here using Ctrl as you click each item you want. When you are done, click the Add button and the items will be brought into your project.                 Again, using this process means the files are copied into the project folder, leaving you original files untouched in their original location. Once they are here you can double click them in the SSMS Solution Explorer to open them, for files with a specific file type then the appropriate application will be launched – ie Word, Excel etc. However, if the files are something that the SSMS Text editor can display then they will open in a tab in SSMS. Try it out with a text file or even a PS1 file … This sounds excellent but what do I need to watch out for? One big thing to consider when working like this is the version of SSMS that you are using. There is something fundamentally different between the different versions in the way that the project (.ssmssqlproj) and solution (.sqlsuo and .ssmssln) files are formatted. If you create a solution in an older version of SSMS and then open it in a newer version you will be given the option to upgrade it. Once you do this upgrade then the older version of SSMS will not be able to open the solution any more. Now this ranks as more of an annoyance than disaster as the files within the projects are not affected in any way, you would just have to delete the files mentioned and recreate the solution in the older version again. Summary So, here we have seen how using SSMS Projects and Solutions can help keep related code files (and other document types) together in a neat structure so that they can be quickly navigated during a presentation and it also makes it incredibly simple to distribute your code and share it with others. I hope this is of use to you and helps you bring more order into your sql files, whether you are a person that does technical presentations or not, having your code grouped and managed can make for a lot of advantages as your code library expands.  

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• Adding and accessing custom sections in your C# App.config

  - by deadlydog

  So I recently thought I’d try using the app.config file to specify some data for my application (such as URLs) rather than hard-coding it into my app, which would require a recompile and redeploy of my app if one of our URLs changed.  By using the app.config it allows a user to just open up the .config file that sits beside their .exe file and edit the URLs right there and then re-run the app; no recompiling, no redeployment necessary. I spent a good few hours fighting with the app.config and looking at examples on Google before I was able to get things to work properly.  Most of the examples I found showed you how to pull a value from the app.config if you knew the specific key of the element you wanted to retrieve, but it took me a while to find a way to simply loop through all elements in a section, so I thought I would share my solutions here.   Simple and Easy The easiest way to use the app.config is to use the built-in types, such as NameValueSectionHandler.  For example, if we just wanted to add a list of database server urls to use in my app, we could do this in the app.config file like so: 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <configuration> 3: <configSections> 4: <section name="ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers" type="System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler" /> 5: </configSections> 6: <startup> 7: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" /> 8: </startup> 9: <ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers> 10: <add key="localhost" value="localhost" /> 11: <add key="Dev" value="Dev.MyDomain.local" /> 12: <add key="Test" value="Test.MyDomain.local" /> 13: <add key="Live" value="Prod.MyDomain.com" /> 14: </ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers> 15: </configuration>   And then you can access these values in code like so: 1: string devUrl = string.Empty; 2: var connectionManagerDatabaseServers = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers") as NameValueCollection; 3: if (connectionManagerDatabaseServers != null) 4: { 5: devUrl = connectionManagerDatabaseServers["Dev"].ToString(); 6: }   Sometimes though you don’t know what the keys are going to be and you just want to grab all of the values in that ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers section.  In that case you can get them all like this: 1: // Grab the Environments listed in the App.config and add them to our list. 2: var connectionManagerDatabaseServers = ConfigurationManager.GetSection("ConnectionManagerDatabaseServers") as NameValueCollection; 3: if (connectionManagerDatabaseServers != null) 4: { 5: foreach (var serverKey in connectionManagerDatabaseServers.AllKeys) 6: { 7: string serverValue = connectionManagerDatabaseServers.GetValues(serverKey).FirstOrDefault(); 8: AddDatabaseServer(serverValue); 9: } 10: }   And here we just assume that the AddDatabaseServer() function adds the given string to some list of strings.  So this works great, but what about when we want to bring in more values than just a single string (or technically you could use this to bring in 2 strings, where the “key” could be the other string you want to store; for example, we could have stored the value of the Key as the user-friendly name of the url).   More Advanced (and more complicated) So if you want to bring in more information than a string or two per object in the section, then you can no longer simply use the built-in System.Configuration.NameValueSectionHandler type provided for us.  Instead you have to build your own types.  Here let’s assume that we again want to configure a set of addresses (i.e. urls), but we want to specify some extra info with them, such as the user-friendly name, if they require SSL or not, and a list of security groups that are allowed to save changes made to these endpoints. So let’s start by looking at the app.config: 1: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8" ?> 2: <configuration> 3: <configSections> 4: <section name="ConnectionManagerDataSection" type="ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration.ConnectionManagerDataSection, ConnectionManagerUpdater" /> 5: </configSections> 6: <startup> 7: <supportedRuntime version="v4.0" sku=".NETFramework,Version=v4.5" /> 8: </startup> 9: <ConnectionManagerDataSection> 10: <ConnectionManagerEndpoints> 11: <add name="Development" address="Dev.MyDomain.local" useSSL="false" /> 12: <add name="Test" address="Test.MyDomain.local" useSSL="true" /> 13: <add name="Live" address="Prod.MyDomain.com" useSSL="true" securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges="ConnectionManagerUsers" /> 14: </ConnectionManagerEndpoints> 15: </ConnectionManagerDataSection> 16: </configuration>   The first thing to notice here is that my section is now using the type “ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration.ConnectionManagerDataSection” (the fully qualified path to my new class I created) “, ConnectionManagerUpdater” (the name of the assembly my new class is in).  Next, you will also notice an extra layer down in the <ConnectionManagerDataSection> which is the <ConnectionManagerEndpoints> element.  This is a new collection class that I created to hold each of the Endpoint entries that are defined.  Let’s look at that code now: 1: using System; 2: using System.Collections.Generic; 3: using System.Configuration; 4: using System.Linq; 5: using System.Text; 6: using System.Threading.Tasks; 7:  8: namespace ConnectionManagerUpdater.Data.Configuration 9: { 10: public class ConnectionManagerDataSection : ConfigurationSection 11: { 12: /// <summary> 13: /// The name of this section in the app.config. 14: /// </summary> 15: public const string SectionName = "ConnectionManagerDataSection"; 16: 17: private const string EndpointCollectionName = "ConnectionManagerEndpoints"; 18:  19: [ConfigurationProperty(EndpointCollectionName)] 20: [ConfigurationCollection(typeof(ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection), AddItemName = "add")] 21: public ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection ConnectionManagerEndpoints { get { return (ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection)base[EndpointCollectionName]; } } 22: } 23:  24: public class ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection : ConfigurationElementCollection 25: { 26: protected override ConfigurationElement CreateNewElement() 27: { 28: return new ConnectionManagerEndpointElement(); 29: } 30: 31: protected override object GetElementKey(ConfigurationElement element) 32: { 33: return ((ConnectionManagerEndpointElement)element).Name; 34: } 35: } 36: 37: public class ConnectionManagerEndpointElement : ConfigurationElement 38: { 39: [ConfigurationProperty("name", IsRequired = true)] 40: public string Name 41: { 42: get { return (string)this["name"]; } 43: set { this["name"] = value; } 44: } 45: 46: [ConfigurationProperty("address", IsRequired = true)] 47: public string Address 48: { 49: get { return (string)this["address"]; } 50: set { this["address"] = value; } 51: } 52: 53: [ConfigurationProperty("useSSL", IsRequired = false, DefaultValue = false)] 54: public bool UseSSL 55: { 56: get { return (bool)this["useSSL"]; } 57: set { this["useSSL"] = value; } 58: } 59: 60: [ConfigurationProperty("securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges", IsRequired = false)] 61: public string SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges 62: { 63: get { return (string)this["securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges"]; } 64: set { this["securityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges"] = value; } 65: } 66: } 67: }   So here the first class we declare is the one that appears in the <configSections> element of the app.config.  It is ConnectionManagerDataSection and it inherits from the necessary System.Configuration.ConfigurationSection class.  This class just has one property (other than the expected section name), that basically just says I have a Collection property, which is actually a ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection, which is the next class defined.  The ConnectionManagerEndpointsCollection class inherits from ConfigurationElementCollection and overrides the requied fields.  The first tells it what type of Element to create when adding a new one (in our case a ConnectionManagerEndpointElement), and a function specifying what property on our ConnectionManagerEndpointElement class is the unique key, which I’ve specified to be the Name field. The last class defined is the actual meat of our elements.  It inherits from ConfigurationElement and specifies the properties of the element (which can then be set in the xml of the App.config).  The “ConfigurationProperty” attribute on each of the properties tells what we expect the name of the property to correspond to in each element in the app.config, as well as some additional information such as if that property is required and what it’s default value should be. Finally, the code to actually access these values would look like this: 1: // Grab the Environments listed in the App.config and add them to our list. 2: var connectionManagerDataSection = ConfigurationManager.GetSection(ConnectionManagerDataSection.SectionName) as ConnectionManagerDataSection; 3: if (connectionManagerDataSection != null) 4: { 5: foreach (ConnectionManagerEndpointElement endpointElement in connectionManagerDataSection.ConnectionManagerEndpoints) 6: { 7: var endpoint = new ConnectionManagerEndpoint() { Name = endpointElement.Name, ServerInfo = new ConnectionManagerServerInfo() { Address = endpointElement.Address, UseSSL = endpointElement.UseSSL, SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges = endpointElement.SecurityGroupsAllowedToSaveChanges.Split(',').Where(e => !string.IsNullOrWhiteSpace(e)).ToList() } }; 8: AddEndpoint(endpoint); 9: } 10: } This looks very similar to what we had before in the “simple” example.  The main points of interest are that we cast the section as ConnectionManagerDataSection (which is the class we defined for our section) and then iterate over the endpoints collection using the ConnectionManagerEndpoints property we created in the ConnectionManagerDataSection class.   Also, some other helpful resources around using app.config that I found (and for parts that I didn’t really explain in this article) are: How do you use sections in C# 4.0 app.config? (Stack Overflow) <== Shows how to use Section Groups as well, which is something that I did not cover here, but might be of interest to you. How to: Create Custom Configuration Sections Using Configuration Section (MSDN) ConfigurationSection Class (MSDN) ConfigurationCollectionAttribute Class (MSDN) ConfigurationElementCollection Class (MSDN)   I hope you find this helpful.  Feel free to leave a comment.  Happy Coding!

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 13, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Thursday, June 13, 2013Popular ReleasesBrightstarDB: BrightstarDB 1.3.40613: This is the first "official" BrightstarDB release under the MIT open source license. The code base has been reworked to replace / remove the use of third-party closed-source tools and has been updated to use a patched version of dotNetRDF 1.0 that includes the most recent updates for SPARQL 1.1 and Turtle. We have also extended the core RDF API to support targeting a specific graph with an update or query operation and made a change to the core profiling code to disable it by default, leadin...Lakana - WPF Framework: Lakana V2.1 RTM: - Dynamic text localization - A new application wide message busPokemon Battle Online: ETV: ETV???2012?12??????，????。 ???? Server??????，?????。 ?????????，?????????????，?????????。 ????????，????，?????????，???????????（??）??。 ???????180?，??????????TimeUp?18000?，???????????????????????。 ???? ????????????。 ???????。 ???PP????，????????????????????PP????，??3。 ?????????????，??????????。 ???????? ??? ?? ???? ??? ???? ?? ?????????? ?? ??? ??? ??? ???????? ???? ???? ???????????????、???????????，??“???????”??。 ???bug ???Web Pages CMS: 0.5.0.5: Added empty media directoryModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.4: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. Related downloads NuGet ModernUI for WPF is also available as NuGet package in the NuGet gallery, id: ModernUI.WPF Download Modern UI for WPF Templates A Visual Studio 2012 extension containing a collection of project and item templates for Modern UI for WPF. The extension includes the ModernUI.WPF NuGet package. DownloadToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.6.11): XrmToolbox improvement Add exception handling when loading plugins Updated information panel for displaying two lines of text Tools improvementMetadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10)New tool Web Resources Manager (v1.2013.6.11)Retrieve list of unused web resources Retrieve web resources from a solution All tools listAccess Checker (v1.2013.2.5) Attribute Bulk Updater (v1.2013.1.17) FetchXml Tester (v1.2013.3.4) Iconator (v1.2013.1.17) Metadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10) Privilege...Document.Editor: 2013.23: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.23: New Insert Emoticon support Improved Format support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsChristoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke 7 Project Templates V2.4 for VS2012: V2.4 - Release Date 6/10/2013 Items addressed in this 2.4 release Updated MSBuild Community Tasks reference to 1.4.0.61 Setting up your DotNetNuke Module Development Environment Installing Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Templates Customizing the latest DotNetNuke Module Development Project TemplatesLayered Architecture Sample for .NET: Leave Sample - June 2013 (for .NET 4.5): Thank You for downloading Layered Architecture Sample. Please read the accompanying README.txt file for setup and installation instructions. This is the first set of a series of revised samples that will be released to illustrate the layered architecture design pattern. This version is only supported on Visual Studio 2012. This samples illustrates the use of ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET Model Binding, Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Microsoft Ente...Papercut: Papercut 2013-6-10: Feature: Shows From, To, Date and Subject of Email. Feature: Async UI and loading spinner. Enhancement: Improved speed when loading large attachments. Enhancement: Decoupled SMTP server into secondary assembly. Enhancement: Upgraded to .NET v4. Fix: Messages lost when received very fast. Fix: Email encoding issues on display/Automatically detect message Encoding Installation Note:Installation is copy and paste. Incoming messages are written to the start-up directory of Papercut. If you do n...Supporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1.BETA Unit test Generator Documentation: Welcome to the Unit Test Generator Once you’ve moved to Visual Studio 2012, what’s a dev to do without the Create Unit Tests feature? Based on the high demand on User Voice for this feature to be restored, the Visual Studio ALM Rangers have introduced the Unit Test Generator Visual Studio Extension. The extension adds the “create unit test” feature back, with a focus on automating project creation, adding references and generating stubs, extensibility, and targeting of multiple test framewor...SFDL.NET: SFDL.NET v1.1.0.4: Changelog: Ciritical Bug Fixed : Downloading of Files not possibleMapWinGIS ActiveX Map and GIS Component: MapWinGIS v4.8.8 Release Candidate - 32 Bit: This is the first release candidate of MapWinGIS. Please test it thoroughly.MapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.8 - Release Candidate - 32Bit: Download the release notes here: http://svn.mapwindow.org/svnroot/MapWindow4Dev/Bin/MapWindowNotes.rtfLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.06: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.SimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8 New features: Import BMP color palettes for vehicles Import RASTER file (uncompressed 8.8.8.8 DDS files) View different channels of RASTER files or preview of all layers combined Find text in javascripts TGA viewer Ground textures added to lot editor Many additional identified instances and propertiesWsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1306.09: Add more verifications on certificate validation. WPP will not let user to try publishing an update until the certificate is valid. Add certificate expiration date on the 'About' form. Filter Approbation to avoid a user to try to approve an update for uninstallation when the update do not support uninstallation. Add the server and console version on the 'About' form. WPP will not let user to publish an update until the server and console are not at the same level. WPP do not let user ...AJAX Control Toolkit: June 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - June 2013 Release Version 7.0607June 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...Rawr: Rawr 5.2.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...Json.NET: Json.NET 5.0 Release 6: New feature - Added serialized/deserialized JSON to verbose tracing New feature - Added support for using type name handling with ISerializable content Fix - Fixed not using default serializer settings with primitive values and JToken.ToObject Fix - Fixed error writing BigIntegers with JsonWriter.WriteToken Fix - Fixed serializing and deserializing flag enums with EnumMember attribute Fix - Fixed error deserializing interfaces with a valid type converter Fix - Fixed error deser...New Projects.NET Code Migrator for Dynamics CRM: This project is designed to assist the .NET developer who is migrating their C# code from the CRM 4.0 object model to the CRM 2011 object model.ChronoScript: Programming languageColaBBS: ColaBBS for .NET FrameworkColly: Project for Col col wayFIOCaseRU: ?????? ?????????? ??? ????????? ??? ?? ??????? ?? ??????? ?????.Java Jos - Learning Javanese ( Bahasa Jawa ) with Fun !: Java Jos, a learning Javanese application aims to help kids 7-12 years old learn Javanese character as well as enrich their cultural experienceJavaScript PersianDatePicker: A lightweight (3.5 kb) javascript persian date picker that shows server date.NOH-I Webapplicaties 2013 - Quaack groep 2: Study-projectPrimeLand Accounting: Sistem Informasi Akunting PT Prime Land SemarangPuffy: Project for puf puf ga meSIOGDE: Only test, not to download. This software is not stableTask Manager DNN: Projecto teste, DNN Task Manager video series.TinCan.NET: Using the TinCan specifications, this C# MVC project attempts to provide endpoints for TinCan compliant clients. wBudget: wBudget is a simple budgeting app for windows 8 developed for learning purposes by students.Windows 8 App Design Reference Template: Education Guide: Education Guide template will help if you want to build an app which has the following sections a. Tutorials b. Subjects c. Section in each subject Windows 8 App Design Reference Template: Magazine: Magazine Template will help if you want to build an app which has the following ingredients a. Current Section b. Articles c. Articles details Windows 8 App Design Reference Template: Music and video: Music and Video Template will help if you want to build an app which has place holders for Featured Songs,Top Music,Top Movies, Lyrics section etc.Windows 8 App Design Reference Template: Music Zone: Music Zone Template will help if you want to build an app which has the following ingredients a. Top Songs b. Top Albums c. Genre d. Playlists e. Latest Added Windows 8 App Design Reference Template: Trekking Planner: Trekking Planner template will help if you want to build an app which has the following sections a. Booking Options b. Packages c. Area Details

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• SQL SERVER – Weekly Series – Memory Lane – #037

  - by Pinal Dave

  Here is the list of selected articles of SQLAuthority.com across all these years. Instead of just listing all the articles I have selected a few of my most favorite articles and have listed them here with additional notes below it. Let me know which one of the following is your favorite article from memory lane. 2007 Convert Text to Numbers (Integer) – CAST and CONVERT If table column is VARCHAR and has all the numeric values in it, it can be retrieved as Integer using CAST or CONVERT function. List All Stored Procedure Modified in Last N Days If SQL Server suddenly start behaving in un-expectable behavior and if stored procedure were changed recently, following script can be used to check recently modified stored procedure. If a stored procedure was created but never modified afterwards modified date and create a date for that stored procedure are same. Count Duplicate Records – Rows Validate Field For DATE datatype using function ISDATE() We always checked DATETIME field for incorrect data type. One of the user input date as 30/2/2007. The date was sucessfully inserted in the temp table but while inserting from temp table to final table it crashed with error. We had now task to validate incorrect date value before we insert in final table. Jr. Developer asked me how can he do that? We check for incorrect data type (varchar, int, NULL) but this is incorrect date value. Regular expression works fine with them because of mm/dd/yyyy format. 2008 Find Space Used For Any Particular Table It is very simple to find out the space used by any table in the database. Two Convenient Features Inline Assignment – Inline Operations Here is the script which does both – Inline Assignment and Inline Operation DECLARE @idx INT = 0 SET @idx+=1 SELECT @idx Introduction to SPARSE Columns SPARSE column are better at managing NULL and ZERO values in SQL Server. It does not take any space in database at all. If column is created with SPARSE clause with it and it contains ZERO or NULL it will be take lesser space then regular column (without SPARSE clause). SP_CONFIGURE – Displays or Changes Global Configuration Settings If advanced settings are not enabled at configuration level SQL Server will not let user change the advanced features on server. Authorized user can turn on or turn off advance settings. 2009 Standby Servers and Types of Standby Servers Standby Server is a type of server that can be brought online in a situation when Primary Server goes offline and application needs continuous (high) availability of the server. There is always a need to set up a mechanism where data and objects from primary server are moved to secondary (standby) server. BLOB – Pointer to Image, Image in Database, FILESTREAM Storage When it comes to storing images in database there are two common methods. I had previously blogged about the same subject on my visit to Toronto. With SQL Server 2008, we have a new method of FILESTREAM storage. However, the answer on when to use FILESTREAM and when to use other methods is still vague in community. 2010 Upper Case Shortcut SQL Server Management Studio I select the word and hit CTRL+SHIFT+U and it SSMS immediately changes the case of the selected word. Similar way if one want to convert cases to lower case, another short cut CTRL+SHIFT+L is also available. The Self Join – Inner Join and Outer Join Self Join has always been a noteworthy case. It is interesting to ask questions about self join in a room full of developers. I often ask – if there are three kinds of joins, i.e.- Inner Join, Outer Join and Cross Join; what type of join is Self Join? The usual answer is that it is an Inner Join. However, the reality is very different. Parallelism – Row per Processor – Row per Thread – Thread 0  If you look carefully in the Properties window or XML Plan, there is “Thread 0?. What does this “Thread 0” indicate? Well find out from the blog post. How do I Learn and How do I Teach The blog post has raised three very interesting questions. How do you learn? How do you teach? What are you learning or teaching? Let me try to answer the same. 2011 SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 7 of 31 What are Different Types of Locks? What are Pessimistic Lock and Optimistic Lock? When is the use of UPDATE_STATISTICS command? What is the Difference between a HAVING clause and a WHERE clause? What is Connection Pooling and why it is Used? What are the Properties and Different Types of Sub-Queries? What are the Authentication Modes in SQL Server? How can it be Changed? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 8 of 31 Which Command using Query Analyzer will give you the Version of SQL Server and Operating System? What is an SQL Server Agent? Can a Stored Procedure call itself or a Recursive Stored Procedure? How many levels of SP nesting is possible? What is Log Shipping? Name 3 ways to get an Accurate Count of the Number of Records in a Table? What does it mean to have QUOTED_IDENTIFIER ON? What are the Implications of having it OFF? What is the Difference between a Local and a Global Temporary Table? What is the STUFF Function and How Does it Differ from the REPLACE Function? What is PRIMARY KEY? What is UNIQUE KEY Constraint? What is FOREIGN KEY? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 9 of 31 What is CHECK Constraint? What is NOT NULL Constraint? What is the difference between UNION and UNION ALL? What is B-Tree? How to get @@ERROR and @@ROWCOUNT at the Same Time? What is a Scheduled Job or What is a Scheduled Task? What are the Advantages of Using Stored Procedures? What is a Table Called, if it has neither Cluster nor Non-cluster Index? What is it Used for? Can SQL Servers Linked to other Servers like Oracle? What is BCP? When is it Used? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 10 of 31 What Command do we Use to Rename a db, a Table and a Column? What are sp_configure Commands and SET Commands? How to Implement One-to-One, One-to-Many and Many-to-Many Relationships while Designing Tables? What is Difference between Commit and Rollback when Used in Transactions? What is an Execution Plan? When would you Use it? How would you View the Execution Plan? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 11 of 31 What is Difference between Table Aliases and Column Aliases? Do they Affect Performance? What is the difference between CHAR and VARCHAR Datatypes? What is the Difference between VARCHAR and VARCHAR(MAX) Datatypes? What is the Difference between VARCHAR and NVARCHAR datatypes? Which are the Important Points to Note when Multilanguage Data is Stored in a Table? How to Optimize Stored Procedure Optimization? What is SQL Injection? How to Protect Against SQL Injection Attack? How to Find Out the List Schema Name and Table Name for the Database? What is CHECKPOINT Process in the SQL Server? SQL SERVER – Interview Questions and Answers – Frequently Asked Questions – Day 12 of 31 How does Using a Separate Hard Drive for Several Database Objects Improves Performance Right Away? How to Find the List of Fixed Hard Drive and Free Space on Server? Why can there be only one Clustered Index and not more than one? What is Difference between Line Feed (\n) and Carriage Return (\r)? Is It Possible to have Clustered Index on Separate Drive From Original Table Location? What is a Hint? How to Delete Duplicate Rows? Why the Trigger Fires Multiple Times in Single Login? 2012 CTRL+SHIFT+] Shortcut to Select Code Between Two Parenthesis Shortcut key is CTRL+SHIFT+]. This key can be very useful when dealing with multiple subqueries, CTE or query with multiple parentheses. When exercised this shortcut key it selects T-SQL code between two parentheses. Monday Morning Puzzle – Query Returns Results Sometimes but Not Always I am beginner with SQL Server. I have one query, it sometime returns a result and sometime it does not return me the result. Where should I start looking for a solution and what kind of information I should send to you so you can help me with solving. I have no clue, please guide me. Remove Debug Button in SSMS – SQL in Sixty Seconds #020 – Video Effect of Case Sensitive Collation on Resultset Collation is a very interesting concept but I quite often see it is heavily neglected. I have seen developer and DBA looking for a workaround to fix collation error rather than understanding if the side effect of the workaround. Switch Between Two Parenthesis using Shortcut CTRL+] Earlier this week I wrote a blog post about CTRL+SHIFT+] Shortcut to Select Code Between Two Parenthesis, I received quite a lot of positive feedback from readers. If you are a regular reader of the blog post, you must be aware that I appreciate the learning shared by readers. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Memory Lane, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• C#: Handling Notifications: inheritance, events, or delegates?

  - by James Michael Hare

  Often times as developers we have to design a class where we get notification when certain things happen. In older object-oriented code this would often be implemented by overriding methods -- with events, delegates, and interfaces, however, we have far more elegant options. So, when should you use each of these methods and what are their strengths and weaknesses? Now, for the purposes of this article when I say notification, I'm just talking about ways for a class to let a user know that something has occurred. This can be through any programmatic means such as inheritance, events, delegates, etc. So let's build some context. I'm sitting here thinking about a provider neutral messaging layer for the place I work, and I got to the point where I needed to design the message subscriber which will receive messages from the message bus. Basically, what we want is to be able to create a message listener and have it be called whenever a new message arrives. Now, back before the flood we would have done this via inheritance and an abstract class: 1:  2: // using inheritance - omitting argument null checks and halt logic 3: public abstract class MessageListener 4: { 5: private ISubscriber _subscriber; 6: private bool _isHalted = false; 7: private Thread _messageThread; 8:  9: // assign the subscriber and start the messaging loop 10: public MessageListener(ISubscriber subscriber) 11: { 12: _subscriber = subscriber; 13: _messageThread = new Thread(MessageLoop); 14: _messageThread.Start(); 15: } 16:  17: // user will override this to process their messages 18: protected abstract void OnMessageReceived(Message msg); 19:  20: // handle the looping in the thread 21: private void MessageLoop() 22: { 23: while(!_isHalted) 24: { 25: // as long as processing, wait 1 second for message 26: Message msg = _subscriber.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)); 27: if(msg != null) 28: { 29: OnMessageReceived(msg); 30: } 31: } 32: } 33: ... 34: } It seems so odd to write this kind of code now. Does it feel odd to you? Maybe it's just because I've gotten so used to delegation that I really don't like the feel of this. To me it is akin to saying that if I want to drive my car I need to derive a new instance of it just to put myself in the driver's seat. And yet, unquestionably, five years ago I would have probably written the code as you see above. To me, inheritance is a flawed approach for notifications due to several reasons: Inheritance is one of the HIGHEST forms of coupling. You can't seal the listener class because it depends on sub-classing to work. Because C# does not allow multiple-inheritance, I've spent my one inheritance implementing this class. Every time you need to listen to a bus, you have to derive a class which leads to lots of trivial sub-classes. The act of consuming a message should be a separate responsibility than the act of listening for a message (SRP). Inheritance is such a strong statement (this IS-A that) that it should only be used in building type hierarchies and not for overriding use-specific behaviors and notifications. Chances are, if a class needs to be inherited to be used, it most likely is not designed as well as it could be in today's modern programming languages. So lets look at the other tools available to us for getting notified instead. Here's a few other choices to consider. Have the listener expose a MessageReceived event. Have the listener accept a new IMessageHandler interface instance. Have the listener accept an Action<Message> delegate. Really, all of these are different forms of delegation. Now, .NET events are a bit heavier than the other types of delegates in terms of run-time execution, but they are a great way to allow others using your class to subscribe to your events: 1: // using event - ommiting argument null checks and halt logic 2: public sealed class MessageListener 3: { 4: private ISubscriber _subscriber; 5: private bool _isHalted = false; 6: private Thread _messageThread; 7:  8: // assign the subscriber and start the messaging loop 9: public MessageListener(ISubscriber subscriber) 10: { 11: _subscriber = subscriber; 12: _messageThread = new Thread(MessageLoop); 13: _messageThread.Start(); 14: } 15:  16: // user will override this to process their messages 17: public event Action<Message> MessageReceived; 18:  19: // handle the looping in the thread 20: private void MessageLoop() 21: { 22: while(!_isHalted) 23: { 24: // as long as processing, wait 1 second for message 25: Message msg = _subscriber.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)); 26: if(msg != null && MessageReceived != null) 27: { 28: MessageReceived(msg); 29: } 30: } 31: } 32: } Note, now we can seal the class to avoid changes and the user just needs to provide a message handling method: 1: theListener.MessageReceived += CustomReceiveMethod; However, personally I don't think events hold up as well in this case because events are largely optional. To me, what is the point of a listener if you create one with no event listeners? So in my mind, use events when handling the notification is optional. So how about the delegation via interface? I personally like this method quite a bit. Basically what it does is similar to inheritance method mentioned first, but better because it makes it easy to split the part of the class that doesn't change (the base listener behavior) from the part that does change (the user-specified action after receiving a message). So assuming we had an interface like: 1: public interface IMessageHandler 2: { 3: void OnMessageReceived(Message receivedMessage); 4: } Our listener would look like this: 1: // using delegation via interface - omitting argument null checks and halt logic 2: public sealed class MessageListener 3: { 4: private ISubscriber _subscriber; 5: private IMessageHandler _handler; 6: private bool _isHalted = false; 7: private Thread _messageThread; 8:  9: // assign the subscriber and start the messaging loop 10: public MessageListener(ISubscriber subscriber, IMessageHandler handler) 11: { 12: _subscriber = subscriber; 13: _handler = handler; 14: _messageThread = new Thread(MessageLoop); 15: _messageThread.Start(); 16: } 17:  18: // handle the looping in the thread 19: private void MessageLoop() 20: { 21: while(!_isHalted) 22: { 23: // as long as processing, wait 1 second for message 24: Message msg = _subscriber.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)); 25: if(msg != null) 26: { 27: _handler.OnMessageReceived(msg); 28: } 29: } 30: } 31: } And they would call it by creating a class that implements IMessageHandler and pass that instance into the constructor of the listener. I like that this alleviates the issues of inheritance and essentially forces you to provide a handler (as opposed to events) on construction. Well, this is good, but personally I think we could go one step further. While I like this better than events or inheritance, it still forces you to implement a specific method name. What if that name collides? Furthermore if you have lots of these you end up either with large classes inheriting multiple interfaces to implement one method, or lots of small classes. Also, if you had one class that wanted to manage messages from two different subscribers differently, it wouldn't be able to because the interface can't be overloaded. This brings me to using delegates directly. In general, every time I think about creating an interface for something, and if that interface contains only one method, I start thinking a delegate is a better approach. Now, that said delegates don't accomplish everything an interface can. Obviously having the interface allows you to refer to the classes that implement the interface which can be very handy. In this case, though, really all you want is a method to handle the messages. So let's look at a method delegate: 1: // using delegation via delegate - omitting argument null checks and halt logic 2: public sealed class MessageListener 3: { 4: private ISubscriber _subscriber; 5: private Action<Message> _handler; 6: private bool _isHalted = false; 7: private Thread _messageThread; 8:  9: // assign the subscriber and start the messaging loop 10: public MessageListener(ISubscriber subscriber, Action<Message> handler) 11: { 12: _subscriber = subscriber; 13: _handler = handler; 14: _messageThread = new Thread(MessageLoop); 15: _messageThread.Start(); 16: } 17:  18: // handle the looping in the thread 19: private void MessageLoop() 20: { 21: while(!_isHalted) 22: { 23: // as long as processing, wait 1 second for message 24: Message msg = _subscriber.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)); 25: if(msg != null) 26: { 27: _handler(msg); 28: } 29: } 30: } 31: } Here the MessageListener now takes an Action<Message>.  For those of you unfamiliar with the pre-defined delegate types in .NET, that is a method with the signature: void SomeMethodName(Message). The great thing about delegates is it gives you a lot of power. You could create an anonymous delegate, a lambda, or specify any other method as long as it satisfies the Action<Message> signature. This way, you don't need to define an arbitrary helper class or name the method a specific thing. Incidentally, we could combine both the interface and delegate approach to allow maximum flexibility. Doing this, the user could either pass in a delegate, or specify a delegate interface: 1: // using delegation - give users choice of interface or delegate 2: public sealed class MessageListener 3: { 4: private ISubscriber _subscriber; 5: private Action<Message> _handler; 6: private bool _isHalted = false; 7: private Thread _messageThread; 8:  9: // assign the subscriber and start the messaging loop 10: public MessageListener(ISubscriber subscriber, Action<Message> handler) 11: { 12: _subscriber = subscriber; 13: _handler = handler; 14: _messageThread = new Thread(MessageLoop); 15: _messageThread.Start(); 16: } 17:  18: // passes the interface method as a delegate using method group 19: public MessageListener(ISubscriber subscriber, IMessageHandler handler) 20: : this(subscriber, handler.OnMessageReceived) 21: { 22: } 23:  24: // handle the looping in the thread 25: private void MessageLoop() 26: { 27: while(!_isHalted) 28: { 29: // as long as processing, wait 1 second for message 30: Message msg = _subscriber.Receive(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1)); 31: if(msg != null) 32: { 33: _handler(msg); 34: } 35: } 36: } 37: } } This is the method I tend to prefer because it allows the user of the class to choose which method works best for them. You may be curious about the actual performance of these different methods. 1: Enter iterations: 2: 1000000 3:  4: Inheritance took 4 ms. 5: Events took 7 ms. 6: Interface delegation took 4 ms. 7: Lambda delegate took 5 ms. Before you get too caught up in the numbers, however, keep in mind that this is performance over over 1,000,000 iterations. Since they are all < 10 ms which boils down to fractions of a micro-second per iteration so really any of them are a fine choice performance wise. As such, I think the choice of what to do really boils down to what you're trying to do. Here's my guidelines: Inheritance should be used only when defining a collection of related types with implementation specific behaviors, it should not be used as a hook for users to add their own functionality. Events should be used when subscription is optional or multi-cast is desired. Interface delegation should be used when you wish to refer to implementing classes by the interface type or if the type requires several methods to be implemented. Delegate method delegation should be used when you only need to provide one method and do not need to refer to implementers by the interface name.

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• Why unhandled exceptions are useful

  - by Simon Cooper

  It’s the bane of most programmers’ lives – an unhandled exception causes your application or webapp to crash, an ugly dialog gets displayed to the user, and they come complaining to you. Then, somehow, you need to figure out what went wrong. Hopefully, you’ve got a log file, or some other way of reporting unhandled exceptions (obligatory employer plug: SmartAssembly reports an application’s unhandled exceptions straight to you, along with the entire state of the stack and variables at that point). If not, you have to try and replicate it yourself, or do some psychic debugging to try and figure out what’s wrong. However, it’s good that the program crashed. Or, more precisely, it is correct behaviour. An unhandled exception in your application means that, somewhere in your code, there is an assumption that you made that is actually invalid. Coding assumptions Let me explain a bit more. Every method, every line of code you write, depends on implicit assumptions that you have made. Take this following simple method, that copies a collection to an array and includes an item if it isn’t in the collection already, using a supplied IEqualityComparer: public static T[] ToArrayWithItem( ICollection<T> coll, T obj, IEqualityComparer<T> comparer) { // check if the object is in collection already // using the supplied comparer foreach (var item in coll) { if (comparer.Equals(item, obj)) { // it's in the collection already // simply copy the collection to an array // and return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); return array; } } // not in the collection // copy coll to an array, and add obj to it // then return it T[] array = new T[coll.Count+1]; coll.CopyTo(array, 0); array[array.Length-1] = obj; return array; } What’s all the assumptions made by this fairly simple bit of code? coll is never null comparer is never null coll.CopyTo(array, 0) will copy all the items in the collection into the array, in the order defined for the collection, starting at the first item in the array. The enumerator for coll returns all the items in the collection, in the order defined for the collection comparer.Equals returns true if the items are equal (for whatever definition of ‘equal’ the comparer uses), false otherwise comparer.Equals, coll.CopyTo, and the coll enumerator will never throw an exception or hang for any possible input and any possible values of T coll will have less than 4 billion items in it (this is a built-in limit of the CLR) array won’t be more than 2GB, both on 32 and 64-bit systems, for any possible values of T (again, a limit of the CLR) There are no threads that will modify coll while this method is running and, more esoterically: The C# compiler will compile this code to IL according to the C# specification The CLR and JIT compiler will produce machine code to execute the IL on the user’s computer The computer will execute the machine code correctly That’s a lot of assumptions. Now, it could be that all these assumptions are valid for the situations this method is called. But if this does crash out with an exception, or crash later on, then that shows one of the assumptions has been invalidated somehow. An unhandled exception shows that your code is running in a situation which you did not anticipate, and there is something about how your code runs that you do not understand. Debugging the problem is the process of learning more about the new situation and how your code interacts with it. When you understand the problem, the solution is (usually) obvious. The solution may be a one-line fix, the rewrite of a method or class, or a large-scale refactoring of the codebase, but whatever it is, the fix for the crash will incorporate the new information you’ve gained about your own code, along with the modified assumptions. When code is running with an assumption or invariant it depended on broken, then the result is ‘undefined behaviour’. Anything can happen, up to and including formatting the entire disk or making the user’s computer sentient and start doing a good impression of Skynet. You might think that those can’t happen, but at Halting problem levels of generality, as soon as an assumption the code depended on is broken, the program can do anything. That is why it’s important to fail-fast and stop the program as soon as an invariant is broken, to minimise the damage that is done. What does this mean in practice? To start with, document and check your assumptions. As with most things, there is a level of judgement required. How you check and document your assumptions depends on how the code is used (that’s some more assumptions you’ve made), how likely it is a method will be passed invalid arguments or called in an invalid state, how likely it is the assumptions will be broken, how expensive it is to check the assumptions, and how bad things are likely to get if the assumptions are broken. Now, some assumptions you can assume unless proven otherwise. You can safely assume the C# compiler, CLR, and computer all run the method correctly, unless you have evidence of a compiler, CLR or processor bug. You can also assume that interface implementations work the way you expect them to; implementing an interface is more than simply declaring methods with certain signatures in your type. The behaviour of those methods, and how they work, is part of the interface contract as well. For example, for members of a public API, it is very important to document your assumptions and check your state before running the bulk of the method, throwing ArgumentException, ArgumentNullException, InvalidOperationException, or another exception type as appropriate if the input or state is wrong. For internal and private methods, it is less important. If a private method expects collection items in a certain order, then you don’t necessarily need to explicitly check it in code, but you can add comments or documentation specifying what state you expect the collection to be in at a certain point. That way, anyone debugging your code can immediately see what’s wrong if this does ever become an issue. You can also use DEBUG preprocessor blocks and Debug.Assert to document and check your assumptions without incurring a performance hit in release builds. On my coding soapbox… A few pet peeves of mine around assumptions. Firstly, catch-all try blocks: try { ... } catch { } A catch-all hides exceptions generated by broken assumptions, and lets the program carry on in an unknown state. Later, an exception is likely to be generated due to further broken assumptions due to the unknown state, causing difficulties when debugging as the catch-all has hidden the original problem. It’s much better to let the program crash straight away, so you know where the problem is. You should only use a catch-all if you are sure that any exception generated in the try block is safe to ignore. That’s a pretty big ask! Secondly, using as when you should be casting. Doing this: (obj as IFoo).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = obj as IFoo; ... foo.Method(); when you should be doing this: ((IFoo)obj).Method(); or this: IFoo foo = (IFoo)obj; ... foo.Method(); There’s an assumption here that obj will always implement IFoo. If it doesn’t, then by using as instead of a cast you’ve turned an obvious InvalidCastException at the point of the cast that will probably tell you what type obj actually is, into a non-obvious NullReferenceException at some later point that gives you no information at all. If you believe obj is always an IFoo, then say so in code! Let it fail-fast if not, then it’s far easier to figure out what’s wrong. Thirdly, document your assumptions. If an algorithm depends on a non-trivial relationship between several objects or variables, then say so. A single-line comment will do. Don’t leave it up to whoever’s debugging your code after you to figure it out. Conclusion It’s better to crash out and fail-fast when an assumption is broken. If it doesn’t, then there’s likely to be further crashes along the way that hide the original problem. Or, even worse, your program will be running in an undefined state, where anything can happen. Unhandled exceptions aren’t good per-se, but they give you some very useful information about your code that you didn’t know before. And that can only be a good thing.

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• Our winners- and some BBQ for everyone

  - by Steve Tunstall

  Congrats to our two winners for the first two comments on my last entry. Steve from Australia and John Lemon. Steve won since he was the first person over the International Date Line to see the post I made so late after a workday on Friday. So not only does he get to live in a country with the 2nd most beautiful women in the world, but now he gets some cool Oracle Swag, too. (Yes, I live on the beach in southern California, so you can guess where 1st place is for that other contest…Now if Steve happens to live in Manly, we may actually have a tie going…) OK, ok, for everyone else, you can be winners, too. How you ask? I will make you the envy of every guy and gal in your neighborhood or campsite. What follows is the way to smoke the best ribs you or anyone you know have ever tasted. Follow my instructions and give it a try. People at your party/cookout/campsite will tell you that they’re the best ribs they’ve ever had, and I will let you take all the credit. Yes, I fully realize this post is going to be longer than any post I’ve done yet. But let’s get serious here. Smoking meat is much more important, agreed? J In all honesty, this is a repeat of another blog I did, so I’m just copying and pasting. Step 1. Get some ribs. I actually really like Costco’s pack. They have both St. Louis and Baby Back. (They are the same ribs, but cut in half down the sides. St. Louis style is the ‘front’ of the ribs closest to the stomach, and ‘Baby back’ is the part of the ribs where is connects to the backbone). I like them both, so here you see I got one pack of each. About 4 racks to a pack. So these two packs for $25 each will feed about 16-20 of my guests. So around 3 bucks a person is a pretty good deal for the best ribs you’ll ever have. Step 2. Prep the ribs the night before you’re going to smoke. You need to trim them to fit your smoker racks, and also take off the membrane and add your rub. Then cover and set in fridge overnight. Here’s how to take off the membrane, which will not break down with heat and smoke like the rest of the meat, so must be removed. Use a butter knife to work in a ways between the membrane and the white bone. Just enough to make room for your finger. Try really hard not to poke through the membrane, you want to keep it whole. See how my gloved fingers can now start to lift up and pull off the membrane? This is what you are trying to do. It’s awesome when the whole thing can come off at once. This one is going great, maybe the best one I’ve ever done. Sometime, it falls apart and doesn't come off in one nice piece. I hate when that happens. Now, add your rub and pat it down once into the meat with your other hand. My rub is not secret. I got it from my mentor, a BBQ competitive chef who is currently ranked #1 in California and #3 in the nation on the BBQ circuit. He does full-day classes in southern California if anyone is interested in taking his class. Go to www.slapyodaddybbq.com to check him out. I tweaked his run recipe a tad and made my own. It’s one part Lawry’s, one part sugar, one part Montreal Steak Seasoning, one part garlic powder, one-half part red chili powder, one-half part paprika, and then 1/20th part cayenne. You can adjust that last ingredient, or leave it out. Real cheap stuff you can get at Costco. This lets you make enough rub to last about a year or two. Don’t make it all at once, make a shaker’s worth and use it up before you make more. Place it all in a bowl, mix well, and then add to a shaker like you see here. You can get a shaker with medium sized holes on it at any restaurant supply store or Smart & Final. The kind you see at pizza places for their red pepper flakes works best. Now cover and place in fridge overnight. Step 3. The next day. Ok, I’m ready to go. Get your stuff together. You will need your smoker, some good foil, a can of peach nectar, a bottle of Agave syrup, and a package of brown sugar. You will need this stuff later. I also use a clean spray bottle, and apple juice. Step 4. Make your fire, or turn on your electric smoker. In this example I’m using my portable charcoal smoker. I got this for only $40. I then modified it to be useful. Once modified, these guys actually work very well. Trust me, your food DOES NOT KNOW how expensive your smoker is. Someone who tells you that you need to spend a bunch of money on a smoker is an idiot. I also have an electric smoker that stays in my backyard. It’s cleaner and larger so I can smoke more food. But this little $40 one works great for going camping. Here is what my fire-bowl looks like. I leave a space in the middle open, and place cold charcoal and wood chucks in a circle going outwards. This makes it so when I dump the hot coals down the middle, they will slowly burn outwards, hitting different wood chucks at different times, allowing me to go 4-5 hours without having to even touch my fire. For ribs, I use apple and pecan wood. Pecan works for anything. Apple or any fruit wood is excellent for pork. So now I make my hot charcoal with a chimney only about half-full. I found a great use for that side-burner on my grill that I never use. It makes a fantastic chimney starter. You never use fluids of any kind, nor ever use that stupid charcoal that has lighter fluid built into it. Never, ever, ever. Step 5. Smoke. Add your ribs in the racks and stack them up in your smoker. I have a digital thermometer on a probe that I use to keep track of the temp in the smoker. I just lay the probe on the top rack and shut the lid. This cheap guy is a little harder to maintain the right temperature of around 225 F, so I do have to keep my eye on it more than my electric one or a more expensive charcoal one with the cool gadgets that regulate your temp for you. Every hour, spray apple juice all over your ribs using that spray bottle. After about 3 hours, you should have a very good crust (called the Bark) on your ribs. Once you have the Bark where you want it, carefully remove your ribs and place them in a tray. We are now ready for a very important part to make the flavor. Get a large piece of foil and place one rib section on it. Splash some of the peach nectar on it, and then a drizzle of the Agave syrup. Then, use your gloved hand to pack on some brown sugar. Do this on BOTH sides, and then completely wrap it up TIGHT in the foil. Do this for each rib section, and then place all the wrapped sections back into the smoker for another 4 to 6 hours. This is where the meat will get tender and flavorful. The first three hours is only to make the smoke bark. You don’t need smoke anymore, since the ribs are wrapped, you only need to keep the heat around 225 for the next 4-6 hours. Obviously you don’t spray anymore. Just time and slow heat. Be patient. It’s actually really hard to overdo it. You can let them go longer, and all that will happen is they will get even MORE tender!!! If you take them out too soon, they will be tough. How do you know? Take out one package (use long tongs) and open it up. If you grab a bone with your tongs and it just falls apart and breaks away from the rest of the meat, you are done!!! Enjoy!!! Step 6. Eat. It pulls apart like this when it’s done. By the way, smoking tri-tip is way easier. Just rub it with the same rub, and put in your smoker for about 2.5 hours at 250 F. That’s it. Low-maintenance. It comes out like this, with a fantastic smoke ring and amazing flavor. Thanks, and I will put up another good tip, about the ZFSSA, around the end of November. Steve 

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 14, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, June 14, 2013Popular ReleasesBlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.1: 2013.06.13 Ver5.9.1 (1) Web??????SSI?#include???、CGI?????????????????????? (2) ???????????????????????????BrightstarDB: BrightstarDB 1.3.40613: This is the first "official" BrightstarDB release under the MIT open source license. The code base has been reworked to replace / remove the use of third-party closed-source tools and has been updated to use a patched version of dotNetRDF 1.0 that includes the most recent updates for SPARQL 1.1 and Turtle. We have also extended the core RDF API to support targeting a specific graph with an update or query operation and made a change to the core profiling code to disable it by default, leadin...Lakana - WPF Framework: Lakana V2.1 RTM: - Dynamic text localization - A new application wide message busPokemon Battle Online: ETV: ETV???2012?12??????，????，???????$/PBO/branches/PrivateBeta??。 ???????bug???????。 ???? Server??????，?????。 ?????????，?????????????，?????????。 ????????，????，?????????，???????????（??）??。 ???? ????????????。 ???????。 ???PP????，????????????????????PP????，??3。 ?????????????，??????????。 ???????? ??? ?? ???? ??? ???? ?? ?????????? ?? ??? ??? ??? ???????? ???? ???? ???????????????、???????????，??“???????”??。 ???bug ???Web Pages CMS: 0.5.0.5: Added empty media directoryModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.4: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. Related downloads NuGet ModernUI for WPF is also available as NuGet package in the NuGet gallery, id: ModernUI.WPF Download Modern UI for WPF Templates A Visual Studio 2012 extension containing a collection of project and item templates for Modern UI for WPF. The extension includes the ModernUI.WPF NuGet package. DownloadToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.6.11): XrmToolbox improvement Add exception handling when loading plugins Updated information panel for displaying two lines of text Tools improvementMetadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10)New tool Web Resources Manager (v1.2013.6.11)Retrieve list of unused web resources Retrieve web resources from a solution All tools listAccess Checker (v1.2013.2.5) Attribute Bulk Updater (v1.2013.1.17) FetchXml Tester (v1.2013.3.4) Iconator (v1.2013.1.17) Metadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10) Privilege...Document.Editor: 2013.23: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.23: New Insert Emoticon support Improved Format support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsChristoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke 7 Project Templates V2.4 for VS2012: V2.4 - Release Date 6/10/2013 Items addressed in this 2.4 release Updated MSBuild Community Tasks reference to 1.4.0.61 Setting up your DotNetNuke Module Development Environment Installing Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Templates Customizing the latest DotNetNuke Module Development Project TemplatesLayered Architecture Sample for .NET: Leave Sample - June 2013 (for .NET 4.5): Thank You for downloading Layered Architecture Sample. Please read the accompanying README.txt file for setup and installation instructions. This is the first set of a series of revised samples that will be released to illustrate the layered architecture design pattern. This version is only supported on Visual Studio 2012. This samples illustrates the use of ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET Model Binding, Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Microsoft Ente...Papercut: Papercut 2013-6-10: Feature: Shows From, To, Date and Subject of Email. Feature: Async UI and loading spinner. Enhancement: Improved speed when loading large attachments. Enhancement: Decoupled SMTP server into secondary assembly. Enhancement: Upgraded to .NET v4. Fix: Messages lost when received very fast. Fix: Email encoding issues on display/Automatically detect message Encoding Installation Note:Installation is copy and paste. Incoming messages are written to the start-up directory of Papercut. If you do n...Supporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1.BETA Unit test Generator Documentation: Welcome to the Unit Test Generator Once you’ve moved to Visual Studio 2012, what’s a dev to do without the Create Unit Tests feature? Based on the high demand on User Voice for this feature to be restored, the Visual Studio ALM Rangers have introduced the Unit Test Generator Visual Studio Extension. The extension adds the “create unit test” feature back, with a focus on automating project creation, adding references and generating stubs, extensibility, and targeting of multiple test framewor...MapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.8 - Release Candidate - 32Bit: Download the release notes here: http://svn.mapwindow.org/svnroot/MapWindow4Dev/Bin/MapWindowNotes.rtfLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.06: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.VR Player: VR Player 0.3.1 ALPHA: New plugin system with individual folders TrackIR support Maya and 3ds max formats support Dual screen support Mono layouts (left and right) Cylinder height parameter Barel effect factor parameter Razer hydra filter parameter VRPN bug fixes UI improvements Performances improvements Stabilization and logging with Log4Net New default values base on users feedback CTRL key to open menuSimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8 New features: Import BMP color palettes for vehicles Import RASTER file (uncompressed 8.8.8.8 DDS files) View different channels of RASTER files or preview of all layers combined Find text in javascripts TGA viewer Ground textures added to lot editor Many additional identified instances and propertiesWsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1306.09: Add more verifications on certificate validation. WPP will not let user to try publishing an update until the certificate is valid. Add certificate expiration date on the 'About' form. Filter Approbation to avoid a user to try to approve an update for uninstallation when the update do not support uninstallation. Add the server and console version on the 'About' form. WPP will not let user to publish an update until the server and console are not at the same level. WPP do not let user ...AJAX Control Toolkit: June 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - June 2013 Release Version 7.0607June 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...Rawr: Rawr 5.2.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.13: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageJumbo.com" links FIXED: Ripping of Threads with multiple pagesNew ProjectsControl de stock: sistema para control de stockEmails Outlook Mac Recovery Software That Is Provenly Better Than Others: Recover OLM Emails with Outlook Mac Recovery Software that restore Mac OLM files as well as Convert OLM files in EML and DBX file format. Horarios e Disciplinas: O projeto de Grade Horária do CEPE é desenvolvido por um analista programador experiente e dois estagiários ciosos de conhecimento nas linguagens C#, Razor, Entity Framework, AJAX.Hyper-v VHost and VM Inventory Reports: Get a detailed inventory/report from your VHost and it's VMs. Powershell script that dumps the report as a test file.jean0614changbranch: ddjean0614jabbrchangebranch: dLandscape: Planned Maintenance System, is a system being used for any fleet of assets where a regular maintenance is required.MongoCamp: MongoCamp for MongoDBNo-nonsense Flickr Uploader: Simple, easy to-use, stable, flickr uploader for large batch uploads.Outlook PST Converter to Export, Convert & Save PST in Other Formats: Outlook PST Converter to export Outlook emails in other formats from PST format which will be a better option to change format of Outlook PST file to PDF, MSG.Penrose Tiles: A simple windows forms based penrose tile generator.Ranch Master - an Object Oriented Progamming 2013 College Project: Raise the sheep by maintaining the Hunger & Thirst level low, keep the condition to 'Healthy', collect wools produced, trade the wools into points.SH Demo App: Summary!Stock Right: Initial releaseTesting Project: testingtestjabbr0613: testUnits of Measure: Simple solution to cope with units of measure in C# applications. You can develop your own unit system, be it SI-based or anything else that suits your needs.User Friendly Registration Plugin for DotNetNuke: This plugin makes DotNetNuke registration process more user friendly. Main idea is to inform user about possible mistakes in the registration form immediately,

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 15, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Saturday, June 15, 2013Popular ReleasesNuPattern: NuPattern 1.3.22.0: Just download the 'NuPattern Installer.msi' above to install NuPattern for both VS2010 and VS2012. All the extensions listed above are included within this installer. This release includes a version of the 'NuPattern Toolkit Builder' tools and 'NuPattern Toolkit Builder Hands-On Labs' VSIXes for both VS2010 and for VS2012. Both of these extensions are installed in to both VS2010 and VS2012 in the combined MSI installer. Once NuPattern has been installed, please go to the Getting Started pag...BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.1: 2013.06.13 Ver5.9.1 (1) Web??????SSI?#include???、CGI?????????????????????? (2) ???????????????????????????Lakana - WPF Framework: Lakana V2.1 RTM: - Dynamic text localization - A new application wide message busFree language translator and file converter: Free Language Translator 3.3: some bug fixes and a new link to video tutorials on Youtube.Pokemon Battle Online: ETV: ETV???2012?12??????，????，???????$/PBO/branches/PrivateBeta??。 ???????bug???????。 ???? Server??????，?????。 ?????????，?????????????，?????????。 ????????，????，?????????，???????????（??）??。 ???? ????????????。 ???????。 ???PP????，????????????????????PP????，??3。 ?????????????，??????????。 ???????? ??? ?? ???? ??? ???? ?? ?????????? ?? ??? ??? ??? ???????? ???? ???? ???????????????、???????????，??“???????”??。 ???bug ???Web Pages CMS: 0.5.0.5: Added empty media directoryModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.4: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. Related downloads NuGet ModernUI for WPF is also available as NuGet package in the NuGet gallery, id: ModernUI.WPF Download Modern UI for WPF Templates A Visual Studio 2012 extension containing a collection of project and item templates for Modern UI for WPF. The extension includes the ModernUI.WPF NuGet package. DownloadToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.6.11): XrmToolbox improvement Add exception handling when loading plugins Updated information panel for displaying two lines of text Tools improvementMetadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10)New tool Web Resources Manager (v1.2013.6.11)Retrieve list of unused web resources Retrieve web resources from a solution All tools listAccess Checker (v1.2013.2.5) Attribute Bulk Updater (v1.2013.1.17) FetchXml Tester (v1.2013.3.4) Iconator (v1.2013.1.17) Metadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10) Privilege...Document.Editor: 2013.23: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.23: New Insert Emoticon support Improved Format support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsChristoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke 7 Project Templates V2.4 for VS2012: V2.4 - Release Date 6/10/2013 Items addressed in this 2.4 release Updated MSBuild Community Tasks reference to 1.4.0.61 Setting up your DotNetNuke Module Development Environment Installing Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Templates Customizing the latest DotNetNuke Module Development Project TemplatesLayered Architecture Sample for .NET: Leave Sample - June 2013 (for .NET 4.5): Thank You for downloading Layered Architecture Sample. Please read the accompanying README.txt file for setup and installation instructions. This is the first set of a series of revised samples that will be released to illustrate the layered architecture design pattern. This version is only supported on Visual Studio 2012. This set contains 2 samples that illustrates the use of: ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET Model Binding, Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (W...Papercut: Papercut 2013-6-10: Feature: Shows From, To, Date and Subject of Email. Feature: Async UI and loading spinner. Enhancement: Improved speed when loading large attachments. Enhancement: Decoupled SMTP server into secondary assembly. Enhancement: Upgraded to .NET v4. Fix: Messages lost when received very fast. Fix: Email encoding issues on display/Automatically detect message Encoding Installation Note:Installation is copy and paste. Incoming messages are written to the start-up directory of Papercut. If you do n...Supporting Guidance and Whitepapers: v1.BETA Unit test Generator Documentation: Welcome to the Unit Test Generator Once you’ve moved to Visual Studio 2012, what’s a dev to do without the Create Unit Tests feature? Based on the high demand on User Voice for this feature to be restored, the Visual Studio ALM Rangers have introduced the Unit Test Generator Visual Studio Extension. The extension adds the “create unit test” feature back, with a focus on automating project creation, adding references and generating stubs, extensibility, and targeting of multiple test framewor...MapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.8 - Release Candidate - 32Bit: Download the release notes here: http://svn.mapwindow.org/svnroot/MapWindow4Dev/Bin/MapWindowNotes.rtfLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.06: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.VR Player: VR Player 0.3.1 ALPHA: New plugin system with individual folders TrackIR support Maya and 3ds max formats support Dual screen support Mono layouts (left and right) Cylinder height parameter Barel effect factor parameter Razer hydra filter parameter VRPN bug fixes UI improvements Performances improvements Stabilization and logging with Log4Net New default values base on users feedback CTRL key to open menuSimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8 New features: Import BMP color palettes for vehicles Import RASTER file (uncompressed 8.8.8.8 DDS files) View different channels of RASTER files or preview of all layers combined Find text in javascripts TGA viewer Ground textures added to lot editor Many additional identified instances and propertiesWsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1306.09: Add more verifications on certificate validation. WPP will not let user to try publishing an update until the certificate is valid. Add certificate expiration date on the 'About' form. Filter Approbation to avoid a user to try to approve an update for uninstallation when the update do not support uninstallation. Add the server and console version on the 'About' form. WPP will not let user to publish an update until the server and console are not at the same level. WPP do not let user ...AJAX Control Toolkit: June 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - June 2013 Release Version 7.0607June 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...Rawr: Rawr 5.2.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...New Projects3000????C?????????: 3000??C??????????AspTestPage: asp test Chiroredactie voor MS Word 2010: Chiroredactie voor MS Word dient om medewerkers en vrijwilligers van de Chiro te helpen wanneer ze teksten schrijven en/of eindredactie doen.Coastal Climbing: Coastal Climbing is the best bouldering gym in the south east!Data Moving Plug-in Examples: Examples of usage of the Data Moving Plug-in, of the Mvc Controls toolkit. The Data Moving Plug-in is an advanced set of controls and tools for Asp.net Mvc.Dynamics AX Admin Utilities: Dynamics AX Admin Utilities provide the utilities missing for Dynamics AX 2012: silent install, client and server configuration, AOS and Model Store management.Epilog Blogging Framework: A customisable, editable blogging framework based on MVC4 and written in C#.fashion photomania: fashion photomaniaGetemp: Gerenciador do Tempo de ProduçãoGlobal Tracker: Solução para rastreamento de dispositivos móveis composta por: - Uma Aplicação ASP.NET; - Um Web Service; - Uma Aplicação utilizando o plugin Xamarin.HyperLinkTagEditor: URL Appender using regexisotopos2: otra vez se borro, dejate de joder codeplexxlatex-tools: Latex supports, including syntax highlight.Lighter: Text to Braille: Lighter is an extensible and flexible Thai/English and further language translation to Braille format.Lock Screen Switcher: Change your Windows Logon or Lock Screen background image. Specify a directory and it will choose an image from that directory for your background.Patient Database Planning: The Patient Information Database will lower design costs for the Health Care Industry and the software will be user to use / understand for the average user.PERRS: perrsPHPReport: PHP ReportrapSharp: lightweight Audio PlayerRedmine Task List: Redmine Task List Visual Studio Package.RoHuay - 2013: Desarrollo del sistema web logistico para RoHuaySkautSIS: SkautSIS is a web based information system for Czech scouting centers which helps them manage their agenda and present their activities on the Web.test061501jabbr: testThorMVR: ThorMVRWindows Azure Cloud Sensor Sample for Windows Embedded Compact 2013: Windows Azure Cloud Sensor Sample for Windows Embedded Compact 2013, Windows CEWindows Phone 8 Mapping Samples: This project contains a set of code for basic location acquisition, location updates and mapping in Windows Phone 8.

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• C#/.NET Little Wonders: Constraining Generics with Where Clause

  - by James Michael Hare

  Back when I was primarily a C++ developer, I loved C++ templates.  The power of writing very reusable generic classes brought the art of programming to a brand new level.  Unfortunately, when .NET 1.0 came about, they didn’t have a template equivalent.  With .NET 2.0 however, we finally got generics, which once again let us spread our wings and program more generically in the world of .NET However, C# generics behave in some ways very differently from their C++ template cousins.  There is a handy clause, however, that helps you navigate these waters to make your generics more powerful. The Problem – C# Assumes Lowest Common Denominator In C++, you can create a template and do nearly anything syntactically possible on the template parameter, and C++ will not check if the method/fields/operations invoked are valid until you declare a realization of the type.  Let me illustrate with a C++ example: 1: // compiles fine, C++ makes no assumptions as to T 2: template <typename T> 3: class ReverseComparer 4: { 5: public: 6: int Compare(const T& lhs, const T& rhs) 7: { 8: return rhs.CompareTo(lhs); 9: } 10: }; Notice that we are invoking a method CompareTo() off of template type T.  Because we don’t know at this point what type T is, C++ makes no assumptions and there are no errors. C++ tends to take the path of not checking the template type usage until the method is actually invoked with a specific type, which differs from the behavior of C#: 1: // this will NOT compile! C# assumes lowest common denominator. 2: public class ReverseComparer<T> 3: { 4: public int Compare(T lhs, T rhs) 5: { 6: return lhs.CompareTo(rhs); 7: } 8: } So why does C# give us a compiler error even when we don’t yet know what type T is?  This is because C# took a different path in how they made generics.  Unless you specify otherwise, for the purposes of the code inside the generic method, T is basically treated like an object (notice I didn’t say T is an object). That means that any operations, fields, methods, properties, etc that you attempt to use of type T must be available at the lowest common denominator type: object.  Now, while object has the broadest applicability, it also has the fewest specific.  So how do we allow our generic type placeholder to do things more than just what object can do? Solution: Constraint the Type With Where Clause So how do we get around this in C#?  The answer is to constrain the generic type placeholder with the where clause.  Basically, the where clause allows you to specify additional constraints on what the actual type used to fill the generic type placeholder must support. You might think that narrowing the scope of a generic means a weaker generic.  In reality, though it limits the number of types that can be used with the generic, it also gives the generic more power to deal with those types.  In effect these constraints says that if the type meets the given constraint, you can perform the activities that pertain to that constraint with the generic placeholders. Constraining Generic Type to Interface or Superclass One of the handiest where clause constraints is the ability to specify the type generic type must implement a certain interface or be inherited from a certain base class. For example, you can’t call CompareTo() in our first C# generic without constraints, but if we constrain T to IComparable<T>, we can: 1: public class ReverseComparer<T> 2: where T : IComparable<T> 3: { 4: public int Compare(T lhs, T rhs) 5: { 6: return lhs.CompareTo(rhs); 7: } 8: } Now that we’ve constrained T to an implementation of IComparable<T>, this means that our variables of generic type T may now call any members specified in IComparable<T> as well.  This means that the call to CompareTo() is now legal. If you constrain your type, also, you will get compiler warnings if you attempt to use a type that doesn’t meet the constraint.  This is much better than the syntax error you would get within C++ template code itself when you used a type not supported by a C++ template. Constraining Generic Type to Only Reference Types Sometimes, you want to assign an instance of a generic type to null, but you can’t do this without constraints, because you have no guarantee that the type used to realize the generic is not a value type, where null is meaningless. Well, we can fix this by specifying the class constraint in the where clause.  By declaring that a generic type must be a class, we are saying that it is a reference type, and this allows us to assign null to instances of that type: 1: public static class ObjectExtensions 2: { 3: public static TOut Maybe<TIn, TOut>(this TIn value, Func<TIn, TOut> accessor) 4: where TOut : class 5: where TIn : class 6: { 7: return (value != null) ? accessor(value) : null; 8: } 9: } In the example above, we want to be able to access a property off of a reference, and if that reference is null, pass the null on down the line.  To do this, both the input type and the output type must be reference types (yes, nullable value types could also be considered applicable at a logical level, but there’s not a direct constraint for those). Constraining Generic Type to only Value Types Similarly to constraining a generic type to be a reference type, you can also constrain a generic type to be a value type.  To do this you use the struct constraint which specifies that the generic type must be a value type (primitive, struct, enum, etc). Consider the following method, that will convert anything that is IConvertible (int, double, string, etc) to the value type you specify, or null if the instance is null. 1: public static T? ConvertToNullable<T>(IConvertible value) 2: where T : struct 3: { 4: T? result = null; 5:  6: if (value != null) 7: { 8: result = (T)Convert.ChangeType(value, typeof(T)); 9: } 10:  11: return result; 12: } Because T was constrained to be a value type, we can use T? (System.Nullable<T>) where we could not do this if T was a reference type. Constraining Generic Type to Require Default Constructor You can also constrain a type to require existence of a default constructor.  Because by default C# doesn’t know what constructors a generic type placeholder does or does not have available, it can’t typically allow you to call one.  That said, if you give it the new() constraint, it will mean that the type used to realize the generic type must have a default (no argument) constructor. Let’s assume you have a generic adapter class that, given some mappings, will adapt an item from type TFrom to type TTo.  Because it must create a new instance of type TTo in the process, we need to specify that TTo has a default constructor: 1: // Given a set of Action<TFrom,TTo> mappings will map TFrom to TTo 2: public class Adapter<TFrom, TTo> : IEnumerable<Action<TFrom, TTo>> 3: where TTo : class, new() 4: { 5: // The list of translations from TFrom to TTo 6: public List<Action<TFrom, TTo>> Translations { get; private set; } 7:  8: // Construct with empty translation and reverse translation sets. 9: public Adapter() 10: { 11: // did this instead of auto-properties to allow simple use of initializers 12: Translations = new List<Action<TFrom, TTo>>(); 13: } 14:  15: // Add a translator to the collection, useful for initializer list 16: public void Add(Action<TFrom, TTo> translation) 17: { 18: Translations.Add(translation); 19: } 20:  21: // Add a translator that first checks a predicate to determine if the translation 22: // should be performed, then translates if the predicate returns true 23: public void Add(Predicate<TFrom> conditional, Action<TFrom, TTo> translation) 24: { 25: Translations.Add((from, to) => 26: { 27: if (conditional(from)) 28: { 29: translation(from, to); 30: } 31: }); 32: } 33:  34: // Translates an object forward from TFrom object to TTo object. 35: public TTo Adapt(TFrom sourceObject) 36: { 37: var resultObject = new TTo(); 38:  39: // Process each translation 40: Translations.ForEach(t => t(sourceObject, resultObject)); 41:  42: return resultObject; 43: } 44:  45: // Returns an enumerator that iterates through the collection. 46: public IEnumerator<Action<TFrom, TTo>> GetEnumerator() 47: { 48: return Translations.GetEnumerator(); 49: } 50:  51: // Returns an enumerator that iterates through a collection. 52: IEnumerator IEnumerable.GetEnumerator() 53: { 54: return GetEnumerator(); 55: } 56: } Notice, however, you can’t specify any other constructor, you can only specify that the type has a default (no argument) constructor. Summary The where clause is an excellent tool that gives your .NET generics even more power to perform tasks higher than just the base "object level" behavior.  There are a few things you cannot specify with constraints (currently) though: Cannot specify the generic type must be an enum. Cannot specify the generic type must have a certain property or method without specifying a base class or interface – that is, you can’t say that the generic must have a Start() method. Cannot specify that the generic type allows arithmetic operations. Cannot specify that the generic type requires a specific non-default constructor. In addition, you cannot overload a template definition with different, opposing constraints.  For example you can’t define a Adapter<T> where T : struct and Adapter<T> where T : class.  Hopefully, in the future we will get some of these things to make the where clause even more useful, but until then what we have is extremely valuable in making our generics more user friendly and more powerful!   Technorati Tags: C#,.NET,Little Wonders,BlackRabbitCoder,where,generics

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• Managed Service Architectures Part I

  - by barryoreilly

  Instead of thinking about service oriented architecture, a concept that is continually defined, redefined, abused and mistreated, perhaps it is time to drop the acronym and consider what we actually need to get the job done.   ‘Pure’ SOA involves the modeling of an organisation’s processes, the so called ‘Top Down’ approach, followed by the implementation of these processes as services.     Another approach, more commonly seen in the wild, is the bottom up approach. This usually involves services that simply start popping up in the organization, and SOA in this case is often just an attempt to rein in these services. Such projects, although described as SOA projects for a variety of reasons, have clearly little relation to process driven architecture. Much has been written about these two approaches, with many deciding that a hybrid of both methods is needed to succeed with SOA.   These hybrid methods are a sensible compromise, but one gets the feeling that there is too much focus on ‘Succeeding with SOA’. Organisations who focus too much on bottom up development, or who waste too much time and money on top down approaches that don’t produce results, are often recommended to attempt an ‘agile’(Erl) or ‘middle-out’ (Microsoft) approach in order to succeed with SOA.  The problem with recommending this approach is that, in most cases, succeeding with SOA isn’t the aim of the project. If a project is started with the simple aim of ‘Succeeding with SOA’ then the reasons for the projects existence probably need to be questioned.   There are a number of things we can be sure of: ·         An organisation will have a number of disparate IT systems ·         Some of these systems will have redundant data and functionality ·         Integration will give considerable ROI ·         Integration will already be under way. ·         Services will already exist in the organisation ·         These services will be inconsistent in their implementation and in their governance   So there are three goals here: 1.       Alignment between the business and IT 2.     Integration of disparate systems 3.     Management of services.   2 and 3 are going to happen,  in fact they must happen if any degree of return is expected from the IT department. Ignoring 1 is considered a typical mistake in SOA implementations, as it ignores the business implications. However, the business implication of this approach is the money saved in more efficient IT processes. 2 and 3 are ongoing, and they will continue happening, even if a large project to produce a SOA metamodel is started. The result will then be an unstructured cackle of services, and a metamodel that is already going out of date. So we get stuck in and rebuild our services so that they match the metamodel, with the far reaching consequences that this will have on all our LOB systems are current. Lets imagine that this actually works ( how often do we rip and replace working software because it doesn't fit a certain pattern? Never -that's the point of integration), we will now be working with a metamodel that is out of date, and most likely incomplete if the organisation is large.      Accepting that an object can have more than one model over time, with perhaps more than one model being  at any given time will help us realise the limitations of the top down model. It is entirely normal , and perhaps necessary, for an organisation to be able to view an entity from different perspectives.   So, instead of trying to constantly force these goals in a straight line, why not let them happen in parallel, and manage the changes in each layer.     If  company A has chosen to model their business processes and create a business architecture, there will be a reason behind this. Often the aim is to make the business more flexible and able to cope with change, through alignment between the business and the IT department.   If company B’s IT department recognizes the problem of wild services springing up everywhere, and decides to do something about it, by designing a platform and processes for the introduction of services, is this not a valid approach?   With the hybrid approach, it is recommended that company A begin deploying services as quickly as possible. Based on models that are clearly incomplete, and which will therefore change rapidly and often in the near future. Natural business evolution will also mean that the models can be guaranteed to change in the not so near future. To ‘Succeed with SOA’ Company B needs to go back to the drawing board and start modeling processes and objects. So, in effect, we are telling business analysts to start developing code based on a model they are unsure of, and telling programmers to ignore the obvious and growing problems in their IT department and start drawing lines and boxes.     Could the problem be that there are two different problem domains? And the whole concept of SOA as it being described by clever salespeople today creates an example of oft dreaded ‘tight coupling’ between these two domains?   Could it be that we have taken two large problem areas, and bundled the solution together in order to create a magic bullet? And then convinced ourselves that the bullet actually exists?   Company A wants to have a closer relationship between the business and its IT department, in order to become a more flexible organization. Company B wants to decrease the maintenance costs of its IT infrastructure. If both companies focus on succeeding with SOA, then they aren’t focusing on their actual goals.   If Company A starts building services from incomplete models, without a gameplan, they will end up in the same situation as company B, with wild services. If company B focuses on modeling, they could easily end up with the same problems as company A.   Now we have two companies, who a short while ago had one problem each, that now have two problems each. This has happened because of a focus on ‘Succeeding with SOA’, rather than solving the problem at hand.   This is not to suggest that the two problem domains are unrelated, a strategy that encompasses both will obviously be good for the organization. But only if the organization realizes this and can develop such a strategy. This strategy cannot be bought in a box.       Anyone who has worked with SOA for a while will be used to analyzing the solutions to a problem and judging the solution’s level of coupling. If we have two applications that each perform separate functions, but need to communicate with each other, we create a integration layer between them, perhaps with a service, but we do all we can to reduce the dependency between the two systems. Using the same approach, we can separate the modeling (business architecture) and the service hosting (technical architecture).     The business architecture describes the processes and business objects in the business domain.   The technical architecture describes the hosting and management and implementation of services.   The glue that binds these together, the integration layer in our analogy, is the service contract, where the operations map the processes to their technical implementation, and the messages map business concepts to software objects in the implementation.   If we reduce the coupling between these layers, we should be able to allow developers to develop services, and business analysts to develop models, without the changes rippling through from one side to the other.   This would allow company A to carry on modeling, and company B to develop a service platform, each achieving their intended goal, without necessarily creating the problems seen in pure top down or bottom up approaches. Company B could then at a later date map their service infrastructure to a unified model, and company A could carry on modeling, insulating deployed services from changes in the ongoing modeling.   How do we do this?  The concept of service virtualization has been around for a while, and is instantly realizable in Microsoft’s Managed Services Engine. Here we can create a layer of virtual services, which represent the business analyst’s view, presenting uniform contracts to the outside world. These services can then transform and route messages to the actual service implementations. I like to think of the virtual services with their beautifully modeled interfaces as ‘SOA services’, and the implementations as simple integration ‘adapter’ services providing an interface to a technical implementation. The Managed Services Engine also provides policy based control over services, regardless of where they are deployed, simplifying handling of security, logging, exception handling etc.   This solves a big problem. The pressure to deliver services quickly is always there in projects. It is very important to quickly show value when implementing service architectures. There is also pressure to deliver quality, and you can’t easily do both at the same time. This approach allows quick delivery with quality increasing over time, allowing modeling and service development to occur in parallel and independent of each other. The link between business modeling and service implementation is not one that is obvious to many organizations, and requires a certain maturity to realize and drive forward. It is also completely possible that a company can benefit from one without the other, even if this approach is frowned upon today, there are many companies doing so and seeing ROI.   Of course there are disadvantages to this. The biggest one being the transformations necessary between the virtual interfaces and the service implementations. Bad choices in developing the services in the service implementation could mean that it is impossible to map the modeled processes to the implementation with redevelopment of the service. In many cases the architect will not have a choice here anyway, as proprietary systems are often delivered with predeveloped services. The alternative is to wait until the model is finished and then build the service according the model. However, if that approach worked we wouldn’t be having this discussion! And even when it does work, natural business evolution will mean that the two concepts (model and implementation) will immediately start to drift away from each other, so coupling them tightly together so that they are forever bound to the model that only applies at the time of the modeling work will not really achieve a great deal. Architecture is all about trade offs, and here a choice has to be made. The choice is between something will initially be of low quality but will work, or something that may well be impossible to achieve in most situations.         In conclusion, top-down is a natural approach for business analysts, and bottom-up  is a natural approach for developers. Instead of trying to force something on both that neither want, and which has not shown itself to be successful,  why not let them get on with their jobs, and let an enterprise architect coordinate the processes?

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 12, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, June 12, 2013Popular ReleasesWeb Pages CMS: 0.5.0.5: Added empty media directoryWindows 8 App Desing Reference Template: Education Big Picture: EducationBigPicture: Download includes the following -> Source (C# and JS) -> Package -> Snapshots -> DocumentationModern UI for WPF: Modern UI 1.0.4: The ModernUI assembly including a demo app demonstrating the various features of Modern UI for WPF. Related downloads NuGet ModernUI for WPF is also available as NuGet package in the NuGet gallery, id: ModernUI.WPF Download Modern UI for WPF Templates A Visual Studio 2012 extension containing a collection of project and item templates for Modern UI for WPF. The extension includes the ModernUI.WPF NuGet package. DownloadToolbox for Dynamics CRM 2011: XrmToolBox (v1.2013.6.11): XrmToolbox improvement Add exception handling when loading plugins Updated information panel for displaying two lines of text Tools improvementMetadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10)New tool Web Resources Manager (v1.2013.6.11)Retrieve list of unused web resources Retrieve web resources from a solution All tools listAccess Checker (v1.2013.2.5) Attribute Bulk Updater (v1.2013.1.17) FetchXml Tester (v1.2013.3.4) Iconator (v1.2013.1.17) Metadata Document Generator (v1.2013.6.10) Privilege...Document.Editor: 2013.23: What's new for Document.Editor 2013.23: New Insert Emoticon support Improved Format support Minor Bug Fix's, improvements and speed upsChristoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Template: DotNetNuke 7 Project Templates V2.4 for VS2012: V2.4 - Release Date 6/10/2013 Items addressed in this 2.4 release Updated MSBuild Community Tasks reference to 1.4.0.61 Setting up your DotNetNuke Module Development Environment Installing Christoc's DotNetNuke Module Development Templates Customizing the latest DotNetNuke Module Development Project TemplatesLayered Architecture Sample for .NET: Leave Sample - June 2013 (for .NET 4.5): Thank You for downloading Layered Architecture Sample. Please read the accompanying README.txt file for setup and installation instructions. This is the first set of a series of revised samples that will be released to illustrate the layered architecture design pattern. This version is only supported on Visual Studio 2012. This samples illustrates the use of ASP.NET Web Forms, ASP.NET Model Binding, Windows Communications Foundation (WCF), Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) and Microsoft Ente...Papercut: Papercut 2013-6-10: Feature: Shows From, To, Date and Subject of Email. Feature: Async UI and loading spinner. Enhancement: Improved speed when loading large attachments. Enhancement: Decoupled SMTP server into secondary assembly. Enhancement: Upgraded to .NET v4. Fix: Messages lost when received very fast. Fix: Email encoding issues on display/Automatically detect message Encoding Installation Note:Installation is copy and paste. Incoming messages are written to the start-up directory of Papercut. If you do n...SFDL.NET: SFDL.NET v1.1.0.4: Changelog: Ciritical Bug Fixed : Downloading of Files not possibleMapWinGIS ActiveX Map and GIS Component: MapWinGIS v4.8.8 Release Candidate - 32 Bit: This is the first release candidate of MapWinGIS. Please test it thoroughly.MapWindow 4: MapWindow GIS v4.8.8 - Release Candidate - 32Bit: Download the release notes here: http://svn.mapwindow.org/svnroot/MapWindow4Dev/Bin/MapWindowNotes.rtfLINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter v2.1.06: Supports .NET 3.5, .NET 4.0, .NET 4.5, Silverlight 4.0, Windows Phone 7.1, Windows Phone 8, Client Profile, Windows 8, and Windows Azure. 100% Twitter API coverage. Also supports Twitter API v1.1! Also on NuGet.VR Player: VR Player 0.3 ALPHA: New plugin system with individual folders TrackIR support Maya and 3ds max formats support Dual screen support Mono layouts (left and right) Cylinder height parameter Barel effect factor parameter Razer hydra filter parameter VRPN bug fixes UI improvements Performances improvements Stabilization and logging with Log4Net New default values base on users feedback CTRL key to open menuSimCityPak: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8: SimCityPak 0.1.0.8 New features: Import BMP color palettes for vehicles Import RASTER file (uncompressed 8.8.8.8 DDS files) View different channels of RASTER files or preview of all layers combined Find text in javascripts TGA viewer Ground textures added to lot editor Many additional identified instances and propertiesWsus Package Publisher: Release v1.2.1306.09: Add more verifications on certificate validation. WPP will not let user to try publishing an update until the certificate is valid. Add certificate expiration date on the 'About' form. Filter Approbation to avoid a user to try to approve an update for uninstallation when the update do not support uninstallation. Add the server and console version on the 'About' form. WPP will not let user to publish an update until the server and console are not at the same level. WPP do not let user ...AJAX Control Toolkit: June 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - June 2013 Release Version 7.0607June 2013 release of the AJAX Control Toolkit. AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4.5 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 4 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 4 and sample site (Recommended). AJAX Control Toolkit .NET 3.5 – AJAX Control Toolkit for .NET 3.5 and sample site (Recommended). Notes: - Instructions for using the AJAX Control Toolkit with ASP.NET 4.5 can be found at...Rawr: Rawr 5.2.1: This is the Downloadable WPF version of Rawr!For web-based version see http://elitistjerks.com/rawr.php You can find the version notes at: http://rawr.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=VersionNotes Rawr Addon (NOT UPDATED YET FOR MOP)We now have a Rawr Official Addon for in-game exporting and importing of character data hosted on Curse. The Addon does not perform calculations like Rawr, it simply shows your exported Rawr data in wow tooltips and lets you export your character to Rawr (including ba...VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.13: changes NEW: Added Support for "ImageJumbo.com" links FIXED: Ripping of Threads with multiple pagesJson.NET: Json.NET 5.0 Release 6: New feature - Added serialized/deserialized JSON to verbose tracing New feature - Added support for using type name handling with ISerializable content Fix - Fixed not using default serializer settings with primitive values and JToken.ToObject Fix - Fixed error writing BigIntegers with JsonWriter.WriteToken Fix - Fixed serializing and deserializing flag enums with EnumMember attribute Fix - Fixed error deserializing interfaces with a valid type converter Fix - Fixed error deser...Biller: Biller 1.49: This release fixes company sales statisticsNew Projectsapiviewer: Documentation viewer for your service API.ArgusLib: Set of libraries I use in most of my projects.arwani: this is armani project.Blue Mercs Data Gateway: The Data Gateway is an open source project which simplifies coding fluently database SQL statements, stored procedure, connections and transactions.Convert Hashtable Rows into DataTable Columns in C#: Simplest way to convert a Hashtable into a DataTable with all the Hashtable rows converted into DataTable columns.everynet: EveryNet is an internet service provider servicing homes Fraktalysator: Software to visualize fractals such as the Mandelbrot Set. Still in early development state.Free BarCode API for .NET: Freee BarCode API for .NETGraphic filters in WPF: FiltersGrid Plugin: Grid Plugin , Turn your <table> into a fully functional price grid.mediamonitor: this is mediamonitor project.MyCodingStuffs: This solution includes C#, WCF, MVC4.0, ASP.net libraries.OpenErp .Net Connector: Access to OpenErp from .NetPhong and Flat shading: Phong shadingPixel Replacer: The Pixel Replacer is a simple library for replacing pixel colors with a new color, by setting a filter rule.plainetl in vb.net: a one db to another db transform, threaded, commandline tool, ... initially created to get a flat-File db (FoxPro) into a mssql.Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3: Contains material developed while visiting a Microsoft course for the MCSD exam 70-480ProjectLinker2012: This tool helps to automatically create and maintain links from a source project to a target project to share code that is common to Silverlight and WPF.SALDERA Project: SALDERA TEST Project Summary Mire lesz ez jó? Majd Kiderül.TCPMessageServer: Simple TCP Client/Server used to pass an object between client and serverThats-Me Dot Net API: Thats-Me Dot Net API is a library which implements the Thats-Me.ch API for the Dot Net Framework.T-Sql Code Documentor: Document T-SQL Code and Extract Comments for all objects in a database.Windows 8 App Design Reference Template: Measurement: Measurement template will help if you want to build an app which addresses Mass/Weight, Distance/Length, Capacity/Volume etc. measurement placeholders.Windows 8 App Design Reference Template: Weather Clock: Weather Clock Template will help if you want to build an app which has the features to add Current/Previous day temperatures and add cities for coverage. Windows 8 App Desing Reference Template: Education Big Picture: Education Big Picture Template will help if you want to build an app which has an option for showcasing campus details, courses, student life etc dataWinodws 8 App Design Reference Template: Social Feed: Social Feed template will help if you want to build an app which has the Messaging, Facebook, twitter feeds sections. WP7FlacPlayer: Implemented JFlacLib in C# A simple player to play flac in windows phone system

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• Of transactions and Mongo

  - by Nuri Halperin

  Originally posted on: http://geekswithblogs.net/nuri/archive/2014/05/20/of-transactions-and-mongo-again.aspxWhat's the first thing you hear about NoSQL databases? That they lose your data? That there's no transactions? No joins? No hope for "real" applications? Well, you *should* be wondering whether a certain of database is the right one for your job. But if you do so, you should be wondering that about "traditional" databases as well! In the spirit of exploration let's take a look at a common challenge: You are a bank. You have customers with accounts. Customer A wants to pay B. You want to allow that only if A can cover the amount being transferred. Let's looks at the problem without any context of any database engine in mind. What would you do? How would you ensure that the amount transfer is done "properly"? Would you prevent a "transaction" from taking place unless A can cover the amount? There are several options: Prevent any change to A's account while the transfer is taking place. That boils down to locking. Apply the change, and allow A's balance to go below zero. Charge person A some interest on the negative balance. Not friendly, but certainly a choice. Don't do either. Options 1 and 2 are difficult to attain in the NoSQL world. Mongo won't save you headaches here either. Option 3 looks a bit harsh. But here's where this can go: ledger. See, and account doesn't need to be represented by a single row in a table of all accounts with only the current balance on it. More often than not, accounting systems use ledgers. And entries in ledgers - as it turns out – don't actually get updated. Once a ledger entry is written, it is not removed or altered. A transaction is represented by an entry in the ledger stating and amount withdrawn from A's account and an entry in the ledger stating an addition of said amount to B's account. For sake of space-saving, that entry in the ledger can happen using one entry. Think {Timestamp, FromAccountId, ToAccountId, Amount}. The implication of the original question – "how do you enforce non-negative balance rule" then boils down to: Insert entry in ledger Run validation of recent entries Insert reverse entry to roll back transaction if validation failed. What is validation? Sum up the transactions that A's account has (all deposits and debits), and ensure the balance is positive. For sake of efficiency, one can roll up transactions and "close the book" on transactions with a pseudo entry stating balance as of midnight or something. This lets you avoid doing math on the fly on too many transactions. You simply run from the latest "approved balance" marker to date. But that's an optimization, and premature optimizations are the root of (some? most?) evil.. Back to some nagging questions though: "But mongo is only eventually consistent!" Well, yes, kind of. It's not actually true that Mongo has not transactions. It would be more descriptive to say that Mongo's transaction scope is a single document in a single collection. A write to a Mongo document happens completely or not at all. So although it is true that you can't update more than one documents "at the same time" under a "transaction" umbrella as an atomic update, it is NOT true that there' is no isolation. So a competition between two concurrent updates is completely coherent and the writes will be serialized. They will not scribble on the same document at the same time. In our case - in choosing a ledger approach - we're not even trying to "update" a document, we're simply adding a document to a collection. So there goes the "no transaction" issue. Now let's turn our attention to consistency. What you should know about mongo is that at any given moment, only on member of a replica set is writable. This means that the writable instance in a set of replicated instances always has "the truth". There could be a replication lag such that a reader going to one of the replicas still sees "old" state of a collection or document. But in our ledger case, things fall nicely into place: Run your validation against the writable instance. It is guaranteed to have a ledger either with (after) or without (before) the ledger entry got written. No funky states. Again, the ledger writing *adds* a document, so there's no inconsistent document state to be had either way. Next, we might worry about data loss. Here, mongo offers several write-concerns. Write-concern in Mongo is a mode that marshals how uptight you want the db engine to be about actually persisting a document write to disk before it reports to the application that it is "done". The most volatile, is to say you don't care. In that case, mongo would just accept your write command and say back "thanks" with no guarantee of persistence. If the server loses power at the wrong moment, it may have said "ok" but actually no written the data to disk. That's kind of bad. Don't do that with data you care about. It may be good for votes on a pole regarding how cute a furry animal is, but not so good for business. There are several other write-concerns varying from flushing the write to the disk of the writable instance, flushing to disk on several members of the replica set, a majority of the replica set or all of the members of a replica set. The former choice is the quickest, as no network coordination is required besides the main writable instance. The others impose extra network and time cost. Depending on your tolerance for latency and read-lag, you will face a choice of what works for you. It's really important to understand that no data loss occurs once a document is flushed to an instance. The record is on disk at that point. From that point on, backup strategies and disaster recovery are your worry, not loss of power to the writable machine. This scenario is not different from a relational database at that point. Where does this leave us? Oh, yes. Eventual consistency. By now, we ensured that the "source of truth" instance has the correct data, persisted and coherent. But because of lag, the app may have gone to the writable instance, performed the update and then gone to a replica and looked at the ledger there before the transaction replicated. Here are 2 options to deal with this. Similar to write concerns, mongo support read preferences. An app may choose to read only from the writable instance. This is not an awesome choice to make for every ready, because it just burdens the one instance, and doesn't make use of the other read-only servers. But this choice can be made on a query by query basis. So for the app that our person A is using, we can have person A issue the transfer command to B, and then if that same app is going to immediately as "are we there yet?" we'll query that same writable instance. But B and anyone else in the world can just chill and read from the read-only instance. They have no basis to expect that the ledger has just been written to. So as far as they know, the transaction hasn't happened until they see it appear later. We can further relax the demand by creating application UI that reacts to a write command with "thank you, we will post it shortly" instead of "thank you, we just did everything and here's the new balance". This is a very powerful thing. UI design for highly scalable systems can't insist that the all databases be locked just to paint an "all done" on screen. People understand. They were trained by many online businesses already that your placing of an order does not mean that your product is already outside your door waiting (yes, I know, large retailers are working on it... but were' not there yet). The second thing we can do, is add some artificial delay to a transaction's visibility on the ledger. The way that works is simply adding some logic such that the query against the ledger never nets a transaction for customers newer than say 15 minutes and who's validation flag is not set. This buys us time 2 ways: Replication can catch up to all instances by then, and validation rules can run and determine if this transaction should be "negated" with a compensating transaction. In case we do need to "roll back" the transaction, the backend system can place the timestamp of the compensating transaction at the exact same time or 1ms after the original one. Effectively, once A or B visits their ledger, both transactions would be visible and the overall balance "as of now" would reflect no change.  The 2 transactions (attempted/ reverted) would be visible , since we do actually account for the attempt. Hold on a second. There's a hole in the story: what if several transfers from A to some accounts are registered, and 2 independent validators attempt to compute the balance concurrently? Is there a chance that both would conclude non-sufficient-funds even though rolling back transaction 100 would free up enough for transaction 117 (some random later transaction)? Yes. there is that chance. But the integrity of the business rule is not compromised, since the prime rule is don't dispense money you don't have. To minimize or eliminate this scenario, we can also assign a single validation process per origin account. This may seem non-scalable, but it can easily be done as a "sharded" distribution. Say we have 11 validation threads (or processing nodes etc.). We divide the account number space such that each validator is exclusively responsible for a certain range of account numbers. Sounds cunningly similar to Mongo's sharding strategy, doesn't it? Each validator then works in isolation. More capacity needed? Chop the account space into more chunks. So where  are we now with the nagging questions? "No joins": Huh? What are those for? "No transactions": You mean no cross-collection and no cross-document transactions? Granted - but don't always need them either. "No hope for real applications": well... There are more issues and edge cases to slog through, I'm sure. But hopefully this gives you some ideas of how to solve common problems without distributed locking and relational databases. But then again, you can choose relational databases if they suit your problem.

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• Software development is (mostly) a trade, and what to do about it

  - by Jeff

  (This is another cross-post from my personal blog. I don’t even remember when I first started to write it, but I feel like my opinion is well enough baked to share.) I've been sitting on this for a long time, particularly as my opinion has changed dramatically over the last few years. That I've encountered more crappy code than maintainable, quality code in my career as a software developer only reinforces what I'm about to say. Software development is just a trade for most, and not a huge academic endeavor. For those of you with computer science degrees readying your pitchforks and collecting your algorithm interview questions, let me explain. This is not an assault on your way of life, and if you've been around, you know I'm right about the quality problem. You also know the HR problem is very real, or we wouldn't be paying top dollar for mediocre developers and importing people from all over the world to fill the jobs we can't fill. I'm going to try and outline what I see as some of the problems, and hopefully offer my views on how to address them. The recruiting problem I think a lot of companies are doing it wrong. Over the years, I've had two kinds of interview experiences. The first, and right, kind of experience involves talking about real life achievements, followed by some variation on white boarding in pseudo-code, drafting some basic system architecture, or even sitting down at a comprooder and pecking out some basic code to tackle a real problem. I can honestly say that I've had a job offer for every interview like this, save for one, because the task was to debug something and they didn't like me asking where to look ("everyone else in the company died in a plane crash"). The other interview experience, the wrong one, involves the classic torture test designed to make the candidate feel stupid and do things they never have, and never will do in their job. First they will question you about obscure academic material you've never seen, or don't care to remember. Then they'll ask you to white board some ridiculous algorithm involving prime numbers or some kind of string manipulation no one would ever do. In fact, if you had to do something like this, you'd Google for a solution instead of waste time on a solved problem. Some will tell you that the academic gauntlet interview is useful to see how people respond to pressure, how they engage in complex logic, etc. That might be true, unless of course you have someone who brushed up on the solutions to the silly puzzles, and they're playing you. But here's the real reason why the second experience is wrong: You're evaluating for things that aren't the job. These might have been useful tactics when you had to hire people to write machine language or C++, but in a world dominated by managed code in C#, or Java, people aren't managing memory or trying to be smarter than the compilers. They're using well known design patterns and techniques to deliver software. More to the point, these puzzle gauntlets don't evaluate things that really matter. They don't get into code design, issues of loose coupling and testability, knowledge of the basics around HTTP, or anything else that relates to building supportable and maintainable software. The first situation, involving real life problems, gives you an immediate idea of how the candidate will work out. One of my favorite experiences as an interviewee was with a guy who literally brought his work from that day and asked me how to deal with his problem. I had to demonstrate how I would design a class, make sure the unit testing coverage was solid, etc. I worked at that company for two years. So stop looking for algorithm puzzle crunchers, because a guy who can crush a Fibonacci sequence might also be a guy who writes a class with 5,000 lines of untestable code. Fashion your interview process on ways to reveal a developer who can write supportable and maintainable code. I would even go so far as to let them use the Google. If they want to cut-and-paste code, pass on them, but if they're looking for context or straight class references, hire them, because they're going to be life-long learners. The contractor problem I doubt anyone has ever worked in a place where contractors weren't used. The use of contractors seems like an obvious way to control costs. You can hire someone for just as long as you need them and then let them go. You can even give them the work that no one else wants to do. In practice, most places I've worked have retained and budgeted for the contractor year-round, meaning that the $90+ per hour they're paying (of which half goes to the person) would have been better spent on a full-time person with a $100k salary and benefits. But it's not even the cost that is an issue. It's the quality of work delivered. The accountability of a contractor is totally transient. They only need to deliver for as long as you keep them around, and chances are they'll never again touch the code. There's no incentive for them to get things right, there's little incentive to understand your system or learn anything. At the risk of making an unfair generalization, craftsmanship doesn't matter to most contractors. The education problem I don't know what they teach in college CS courses. I've believed for most of my adult life that a college degree was an essential part of being successful. Of course I would hold that bias, since I did it, and have the paper to show for it in a box somewhere in the basement. My first clue that maybe this wasn't a fully qualified opinion comes from the fact that I double-majored in journalism and radio/TV, not computer science. Eventually I worked with people who skipped college entirely, many of them at Microsoft. Then I worked with people who had a masters degree who sucked at writing code, next to the high school diploma types that rock it every day. I still think there's a lot to be said for the social development of someone who has the on-campus experience, but for software developers, college might not matter. As I mentioned before, most of us are not writing compilers, and we never will. It's actually surprising to find how many people are self-taught in the art of software development, and that should reveal some interesting truths about how we learn. The first truth is that we learn largely out of necessity. There's something that we want to achieve, so we do what I call just-in-time learning to meet those goals. We acquire knowledge when we need it. So what about the gaps in our knowledge? That's where the most valuable education occurs, via our mentors. They're the people we work next to and the people who write blogs. They are critical to our professional development. They don't need to be an encyclopedia of jargon, but they understand the craft. Even at this stage of my career, I probably can't tell you what SOLID stands for, but you can bet that I practice the principles behind that acronym every day. That comes from experience, augmented by my peers. I'm hell bent on passing that experience to others. Process issues If you're a manager type and don't do much in the way of writing code these days (shame on you for not messing around at least), then your job is to isolate your tradespeople from nonsense, while bringing your business into the realm of modern software development. That doesn't mean you slap up a white board with sticky notes and start calling yourself agile, it means getting all of your stakeholders to understand that frequent delivery of quality software is the best way to deal with change and evolving expectations. It also means that you have to play technical overlord to make sure the education and quality issues are dealt with. That's why I make the crack about sticky notes, because without the right technique being practiced among your code monkeys, you're just a guy with sticky notes. You're asking your business to accept frequent and iterative delivery, now make sure that the folks writing the code can handle the same thing. This means unit testing, the right instrumentation, integration tests, automated builds and deployments... all of the stuff that makes it easy to see when change breaks stuff. The prognosis I strongly believe that education is the most important part of what we do. I'm encouraged by things like The Starter League, and it's the kind of thing I'd love to see more of. I would go as far as to say I'd love to start something like this internally at an existing company. Most of all though, I can't emphasize enough how important it is that we mentor each other and share our knowledge. If you have people on your staff who don't want to learn, fire them. Seriously, get rid of them. A few months working with someone really good, who understands the craftsmanship required to build supportable and maintainable code, will change that person forever and increase their value immeasurably.

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• SPF record doesn't work (not sure which DNS server to tweak)

  - by Ion

  Problem: Google (and perhaps others) marks our emails as SPF neutral. Let me give you some background about the setup: initially got a dedicated server (Hetzner) with Plesk installed to host a domain/web application, let's say: bigjaws.com. Plesk automatically creates a DNS zone for it with some records for the various services it provides out of the box, e.g. webmail.bigjaws.com as a CNAME to bigjaws.com to provide Horde/whatever, etc. Let me point out four relevant of these records (where XXX.XXX.XXX.158 is our dedicated IP): bigjaws.com. A XXX.XXX.XXX.158 mail.bigjaws.com. A XXX.XXX.XXX.158 bigjaws.com MX (10) mail.bigjaws.com. bigjaws.com. TXT v=spf1 +a +mx -all The above records are not(?) valid anymore though, because after using this dedicated server for a while, our site got bigger and bigger so we decided to move our operations over to AWS (EC2, RDS, ELB, etc), but we retained the mail functionality as is, i.e. emails from [email protected] are sent by connecting to our dedicated server where Plesk takes care of things. This was decided in order not to setup anything from scratch. Of course for all DNS-related things we now use Route53. In Route53 I have the following records: mail.schoox.com. A XXX.XXX.XXX.158 bigjaws.com. MX (10) mail.bigjaws.com bigjaws.com. SPF "v=spf1 +ip4:XXX.XXX.XXX.158 +mx ~all" From my understanding of SPF, the SPF status should have been passed: I designate that all email being sent by bigjaws.com from XXX.XXX.XXX.158 are valid/not spam (I added +mx there but I'm not sure if needed). When a mail server receives an email, doesn't it lookup the SPF record of the domain and checks against the IP it got the email from? Checking with spfquery: root@box:~# spfquery -ip XXX.XXX.XXX.158 -sender [email protected] -rcpt-to [email protected] StartError Context: Failed to query MAIL-FROM ErrorCode: (2) Could not find a valid SPF record Error: No DNS data for 'bigjaws.com'. EndError noneneutral Please see http://www.openspf.org/Why?id=employee1%40bigjaws.com&ip=XXX.XXX.XXX.158&receiver=spfquery : Reason: default spfquery: XXX.XXX.XXX.158 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of bigjaws.com Received-SPF: neutral (spfquery: XXX.XXX.XXX.158 is neither permitted nor denied by domain of bigjaws.com) client-ip=XXX.XXX.XXX.158; [email protected]; If I go to the address listed above (openspf.org) it tells me that the message should have been accepted(!): spfquery rejected a message that claimed an envelope sender address of [email protected]. spfquery received a message from static.158.XXX.XXX.XXX.clients.your-server.de (XXX.XXX.XXX.158) that claimed an envelope sender address of [email protected]. The domain bigjaws.com has authorized static.158.XXX.XXX.XXX.clients.your-server.de (XXX.XXX.XXX.158) to send mail on its behalf, so the message should have been accepted. It is impossible for us to say why it was rejected. What should I do? If the problem persists, contact the bigjaws.com postmaster. Also, here are some headers from an email sent by one of our [email protected] addresses to a gmail.com address (by the way, bigjaws.de listed in the "Received: from" field was the initial domain hosted on the dedicated server before adding the .com one -- both are still listed as separate subscriptions under Plesk). Delivered-To: [email protected] Received: by 10.14.177.70 with SMTP id c46csp289656eem; Wed, 23 Oct 2013 01:11:00 -0700 (PDT) X-Received: by 10.14.102.66 with SMTP id c42mr306186eeg.47.1382515860386; Wed, 23 Oct 2013 01:11:00 -0700 (PDT) Return-Path: <[email protected]> Received: from bigjaws.de (static.158.XXX.XXX.XXX.clients.your-server.de. [XXX.XXX.XXX.158]) by mx.google.com with ESMTPS id l4si19438578eew.161.2013.10.23.01.10.59 for <[email protected]> (version=TLSv1 cipher=RC4-SHA bits=128/128); Wed, 23 Oct 2013 01:10:59 -0700 (PDT) Received-SPF: neutral (google.com: XXX.XXX.XXX.158 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of [email protected]) client-ip=XXX.XXX.XXX.158; Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=neutral (google.com: XXX.XXX.XXX.158 is neither permitted nor denied by best guess record for domain of [email protected]) [email protected] DomainKey-Signature: a=rsa-sha1; q=dns; c=nofws; s=default; d=bigjaws.com; b=WwRAS0WKjp9lO17iMluYPXOHzqRcOueiQT4rPdvy3WFf0QzoXiy6rLfxU/Ra53jL1vlPbwlLNa5gjoJBi7ZwKfUcvs3s02hJI7b3ozl0fEgJtTPKoCfnwl4bLPbtXNFu; h=Received:Received:Message-ID:Date:From:User-Agent:MIME-Version:To:Subject:Content-Type:Content-Transfer-Encoding; Received: (qmail 22722 invoked from network); 23 Oct 2013 10:10:59 +0200 Received: from hostname.static.ISP.com (HELO ?192.168.1.60?) (YYY.YYY.ISP.IP) by static.158.XXX.XXX.XXX.clients.your-server.de. with ESMTPSA (DHE-RSA-AES256-SHA encrypted, authenticated); 23 Oct 2013 10:10:59 +0200 Message-ID: <[email protected]> Date: Wed, 23 Oct 2013 11:11:00 +0300 From: BigJaws Employee <[email protected]> User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:24.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/24.0.1 MIME-Version: 1.0 To: [email protected] Subject: test SPF Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit test SPF Any ideas why SPF is not working correctly? Also, are there any DNS settings that are not needed anymore and create a problem?

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• Using SPServices &amp; jQuery to Find My Stuff from Multi-Select Person/Group Field

  - by Mark Rackley

  Okay… quick blog post for all you SPServices fans out there. I needed to quickly write a script that would return all the tasks currently assigned to me.  I also wanted it to return any task that was assigned to a group I belong to. This can actually be done with a CAML query, so no big deal, right?  The rub is that the “assigned to” field is a multi-select person or group field. As far as I know (and I actually know so little) you cannot just write a CAML query to return this information. If you can, please leave a comment below and disregard the rest of this blog post… So… what’s a hacker to do? As always, I break things down to their most simple components (I really love the KISS principle and would get it tattooed on my back if people wouldn’t think it meant “Knights In Satan’s Service”. You really gotta be an old far to get that reference).  Here’s what we’re going to do: Get currently logged in user’s name as it is stored in a person field Find all the SharePoint groups the current user belongs to Retrieve a set of assigned tasks from the task list and then find those that are assigned to current  user or group current user belongs to Nothing too hairy… So let’s get started Some Caveats before I continue There are some obvious performance implications with this solution as I make a total of four SPServices calls and there’s a lot of looping going on. Also, the CAML query in this blog has NOT been optimized. If you move forward with this code, tweak it so that it returns a further subset of data or you will see horrible performance if you have a few hundred entries in your task list. Add a date range to the CAML or something. Find some way to limit the results as much as possible. Lastly, if you DO have a better solution, I would like you to share. Iron sharpens iron and all…   Alright, let’s really get started. Get currently logged in user’s name as it is stored in a person field First thing we need to do is understand how a person group looks when you look at the XML returned from a SharePoint Web Service call. It turns out it’s stored like any other multi select item in SharePoint which is <id>;#<value> and when you assign a person to that field the <value> equals the person’s name “Mark Rackley” in my case. This is for Windows Authentication, I would expect this to be different in FBA, but I’m not using FBA. If you want to know what it looks like with FBA you can use the code in this blog and strategically place an alert to see the value.  Anyway… I need to find the name of the user who is currently logged in as it is stored in the person field. This turns out to be one SPServices call: var userName = $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser({                     fieldName: "Title",                     debug: false                     }); As you can see, the “Title” field has the information we need. I suspect (although again, I haven’t tried) that the Title field also contains the user’s name as we need it if I was using FBA. Okay… last thing we need to do is store our users name in an array for processing later: myGroups = new Array(); myGroups.push(userName); Find all the SharePoint groups the current user belongs to Now for the groups. How are groups returned in that XML stream?  Same as the person <ID>;#<Group Name>, and if it’s a mutli select it’s all returned in one big long string “<ID>;#<Group Name>;#<ID>;#<Group Name>;#<ID>;#<Group Name>;#<ID>;#<Group Name>;#<ID>;#<Group Name>”.  So, how do we find all the groups the current user belongs to? This is also a simple SPServices call. Using the “GetGroupCollectionFromUser” operation we can find all the groups a user belongs to. So, let’s execute this method and store all our groups. $().SPServices({       operation: "GetGroupCollectionFromUser",       userLoginName: $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser(),       async: false,       completefunc: function(xData, Status) {          $(xData.responseXML).find("[nodeName=Group]").each(function() {                 myGroups.push($(this).attr("Name"));          });         }     }); So, all we did in the above code was execute the “GetGroupCollectionFromUser” operation and look for the each “Group” node (row) and store the name for each group in our array that we put the user’s name in previously (myGroups). Now we have an array that contains the current user’s name as it will appear in the person field XML and  all the groups the current user belongs to. The Rest Now comes the easy part for all of you familiar with SPServices. We are going to retrieve our tasks from the Task list using “GetListItems” and look at each entry to see if it belongs to this person. If it does belong to this person we are going to store it for later processing. That code looks something like this: // get list of assigned tasks that aren't closed... *modify the CAML to perform better!*             $().SPServices({                   operation: "GetListItems",                   async: false,                   listName: "Tasks",                   CAMLViewFields: "<ViewFields>" +                             "<FieldRef Name='AssignedTo' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='Title' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='StartDate' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='EndDate' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='Status' />" +                             "</ViewFields>",                   CAMLQuery: "<Query><Where><And><IsNotNull><FieldRef Name='AssignedTo'/></IsNotNull><Neq><FieldRef Name='Status'/><Value Type='Text'>Completed</Value></Neq></And></Where></Query>",                     completefunc: function (xData, Status) {                         var aDataSet = new Array();                        //loop through each returned Task                         $(xData.responseXML).find("[nodeName=z:row]").each(function() {                             //store the multi-select string of who task is assigned to                             var assignedToString = $(this).attr("ows_AssignedTo");                             found = false;                            //loop through the persons name and all the groups they belong to                             for(var i=0; i<myGroups.length; i++) {                                 //if the person's name or group exists in the assigned To string                                 //then the task is assigned to them                                 if (assignedToString.indexOf(myGroups[i]) >= 0){                                     found = true;                                     break;                                 }                             }                             //if the Task belongs to this person then store or display it                             //(I'm storing it in an array)                             if (found){                                 var thisName = $(this).attr("ows_Title");                                 var thisStartDate = $(this).attr("ows_StartDate");                                 var thisEndDate = $(this).attr("ows_EndDate");                                 var thisStatus = $(this).attr("ows_Status");                                                                  var aDataRow=new Array(                                     thisName,                                     thisStartDate,                                     thisEndDate,                                     thisStatus);                                 aDataSet.push(aDataRow);                             }                          });                          SomeFunctionToDisplayData(aDataSet);                     }                 }); Some notes on why I did certain things and additional caveats. You will notice in my code that I’m doing an AssignedToString.indexOf(GroupName) to see if the task belongs to the person. This could possibly return bad results if you have SharePoint Group names that are named in such a way that the “IndexOf” returns a false positive.  For example if you have a Group called “My Users” and a group called “My Users – SuperUsers” then if a user belonged to “My Users” it would return a false positive on executing “My Users – SuperUsers”.IndexOf(“My Users”). Make sense? Just be aware of this when naming groups, we don’t have this problem. This is where also some fine-tuning can probably be done by those smarter than me. This is a pretty inefficient method to determine if a task belongs to a user, I mean what if a user belongs to 20 groups? That’s a LOT of looping.  See all the opportunities I give you guys to do something fun?? Also, why am I storing my values in an array instead of just writing them out to a Div? Well.. I want to pass my data to a jQuery library to format it all nice and pretty and an Array is a great way to do that. When all is said and done and we put all the code together it looks like:   $(document).ready(function() {         var userName = $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser({                     fieldName: "Title",                     debug: false                     });         myGroups = new Array();     myGroups.push(userName );       $().SPServices({       operation: "GetGroupCollectionFromUser",       userLoginName: $().SPServices.SPGetCurrentUser(),       async: false,       completefunc: function(xData, Status) {          $(xData.responseXML).find("[nodeName=Group]").each(function() {                 myGroups.push($(this).attr("Name"));          });                      // get list of assigned tasks that aren't closed... *modify this CAML to perform better!*             $().SPServices({                   operation: "GetListItems",                   async: false,                   listName: "Tasks",                   CAMLViewFields: "<ViewFields>" +                             "<FieldRef Name='AssignedTo' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='Title' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='StartDate' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='EndDate' />" +                             "<FieldRef Name='Status' />" +                             "</ViewFields>",                   CAMLQuery: "<Query><Where><And><IsNotNull><FieldRef Name='AssignedTo'/></IsNotNull><Neq><FieldRef Name='Status'/><Value Type='Text'>Completed</Value></Neq></And></Where></Query>",                     completefunc: function (xData, Status) {                         var aDataSet = new Array();                         //loop through each returned Task                         $(xData.responseXML).find("[nodeName=z:row]").each(function() {                             //store the multi-select string of who task is assigned to                             var assignedToString = $(this).attr("ows_AssignedTo");                             found = false;                            //loop through the persons name and all the groups they belong to                             for(var i=0; i<myGroups.length; i++) {                                 //if the person's name or group exists in the assigned To string                                 //then the task is assigned to them                                 if (assignedToString.indexOf(myGroups[i]) >= 0){                                     found = true;                                     break;                                 }                             }                            //if the Task belongs to this person then store or display it                             //(I'm storing it in an array)                             if (found){                                 var thisName = $(this).attr("ows_Title");                                 var thisStartDate = $(this).attr("ows_StartDate");                                 var thisEndDate = $(this).attr("ows_EndDate");                                 var thisStatus = $(this).attr("ows_Status");                                                                  var aDataRow=new Array(                                     thisName,                                     thisStartDate,                                     thisEndDate,                                     thisStatus);                                 aDataSet.push(aDataRow);                             }                          });                          SomeFunctionToDisplayData(aDataSet);                     }                 });       }    });  }); Final Thoughts So, there you have it. Take it and run with it. Make it something cool (and tell me how you did it). Another possible way to improve performance in this scenario is to use a DVWP to display the tasks and use jQuery and the “myGroups” array from this blog post to hide all those rows that don’t belong to the current user. I haven’t tried it, but it does move some of the processing off to the server (generating the view) so it may perform better.  As always, thanks for stopping by… hope you have a Merry Christmas…

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• Azure &ndash; Part 5 &ndash; Repository Pattern for Table Service

  - by Shaun

  In my last post I created a very simple WCF service with the user registration functionality. I created an entity for the user data and a DataContext class which provides some methods for operating the entities such as add, delete, etc. And in the service method I utilized it to add a new entity into the table service. But I didn’t have any validation before registering which is not acceptable in a real project. So in this post I would firstly add some validation before perform the data creation code and show how to use the LINQ for the table service.   LINQ to Table Service Since the table service utilizes ADO.NET Data Service to expose the data and the managed library of ADO.NET Data Service supports LINQ we can use it to deal with the data of the table service. Let me explain with my current example: I would like to ensure that when register a new user the email address should be unique. So I need to check the account entities in the table service before add. If you remembered, in my last post I mentioned that there’s a method in the TableServiceContext class – CreateQuery, which will create a IQueryable instance from a given type of entity. So here I would create a method under my AccountDataContext class to return the IQueryable<Account> which named Load. 1: public class AccountDataContext : TableServiceContext 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _storageAccount; 4:  5: public AccountDataContext(CloudStorageAccount storageAccount) 6: : base(storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, storageAccount.Credentials) 7: { 8: _storageAccount = storageAccount; 9:  10: var tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(_storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, 11: _storageAccount.Credentials); 12: tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist("Account"); 13: } 14:  15: public void Add(Account accountToAdd) 16: { 17: AddObject("Account", accountToAdd); 18: SaveChanges(); 19: } 20:  21: public IQueryable<Account> Load() 22: { 23: return CreateQuery<Account>("Account"); 24: } 25: } The method returns the IQueryable<Account> so that I can perform the LINQ operation on it. And back to my service class, I will use it to implement my validation. 1: public bool Register(string email, string password) 2: { 3: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 4: var accountToAdd = new Account(email, password) { DateCreated = DateTime.Now }; 5: var accountContext = new AccountDataContext(storageAccount); 6:  7: // validation 8: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 9: .Where(a => a.Email == accountToAdd.Email) 10: .Count(); 11: if (accountNumber > 0) 12: { 13: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Your account {0} had been used.", accountToAdd.Email)); 14: } 15:  16: // create entity 17: try 18: { 19: accountContext.Add(accountToAdd); 20: return true; 21: } 22: catch (Exception ex) 23: { 24: Trace.TraceInformation(ex.ToString()); 25: } 26: return false; 27: } I used the Load method to retrieve the IQueryable<Account> and use Where method to find the accounts those email address are the same as the one is being registered. If it has I through an exception back to the client side. Let’s run it and test from my simple client application. Oops! Looks like we encountered an unexpected exception. It said the “Count” is not support by the ADO.NET Data Service LINQ managed library. That is because the table storage managed library (aka. TableServiceContext) is based on the ADO.NET Data Service and it supports very limit LINQ operation. Although I didn’t find a full list or documentation about which LINQ methods it supports I could even refer a page on msdn here. It gives us a roughly summary of which query operation the ADO.NET Data Service managed library supports and which doesn't. As you see the Count method is not in the supported list. Not only the query operation, there inner lambda expression in the Where method are limited when using the ADO.NET Data Service managed library as well. For example if you added (a => !a.DateDeleted.HasValue) in the Where method to exclude those deleted account it will raised an exception said "Invalid Input". Based on my experience you should always use the simple comparison (such as ==, >, <=, etc.) on the simple members (such as string, integer, etc.) and do not use any shortcut methods (such as string.Compare, string.IsNullOrEmpty etc.). 1: // validation 2: var accountNumber = accountContext.Load() 3: .Where(a => a.Email == accountToAdd.Email) 4: .ToList() 5: .Count; 6: if (accountNumber > 0) 7: { 8: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("Your account {0} had been used.", accountToAdd.Email)); 9: } We changed the a bit and try again. Since I had created an account with my mail address so this time it gave me an exception said that the email had been used, which is correct.   Repository Pattern for Table Service The AccountDataContext takes the responsibility to save and load the account entity but only for that specific entity. Is that possible to have a dynamic or generic DataContext class which can operate any kinds of entity in my system? Of course yes. Although there's no typical database in table service we can threat the entities as the records, similar with the data entities if we used OR Mapping. As we can use some patterns for ORM architecture here we should be able to adopt the one of them - Repository Pattern in this example. We know that the base class - TableServiceContext provide 4 methods for operating the table entities which are CreateQuery, AddObject, UpdateObject and DeleteObject. And we can create a relationship between the enmity class, the table container name and entity set name. So it's really simple to have a generic base class for any kinds of entities. Let's rename the AccountDataContext to DynamicDataContext and make the type of Account as a type parameter if it. 1: public class DynamicDataContext<T> : TableServiceContext where T : TableServiceEntity 2: { 3: private CloudStorageAccount _storageAccount; 4: private string _entitySetName; 5:  6: public DynamicDataContext(CloudStorageAccount storageAccount) 7: : base(storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, storageAccount.Credentials) 8: { 9: _storageAccount = storageAccount; 10: _entitySetName = typeof(T).Name; 11:  12: var tableStorage = new CloudTableClient(_storageAccount.TableEndpoint.AbsoluteUri, 13: _storageAccount.Credentials); 14: tableStorage.CreateTableIfNotExist(_entitySetName); 15: } 16:  17: public void Add(T entityToAdd) 18: { 19: AddObject(_entitySetName, entityToAdd); 20: SaveChanges(); 21: } 22:  23: public void Update(T entityToUpdate) 24: { 25: UpdateObject(entityToUpdate); 26: SaveChanges(); 27: } 28:  29: public void Delete(T entityToDelete) 30: { 31: DeleteObject(entityToDelete); 32: SaveChanges(); 33: } 34:  35: public IQueryable<T> Load() 36: { 37: return CreateQuery<T>(_entitySetName); 38: } 39: } I saved the name of the entity type when constructed for performance matter. The table name, entity set name would be the same as the name of the entity class. The Load method returned a generic IQueryable instance which supports the lazy load feature. Then in my service class I changed the AccountDataContext to DynamicDataContext and that's all. 1: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); Run it again and register another account. The DynamicDataContext now can be used for any entities. For example, I would like the account has a list of notes which contains 3 custom properties: Account Email, Title and Content. We create the note entity class. 1: public class Note : TableServiceEntity 2: { 3: public string AccountEmail { get; set; } 4: public string Title { get; set; } 5: public string Content { get; set; } 6: public DateTime DateCreated { get; set; } 7: public DateTime? DateDeleted { get; set; } 8:  9: public Note() 10: : base() 11: { 12: } 13:  14: public Note(string email) 15: : base(email, string.Format("{0}_{1}", email, Guid.NewGuid().ToString())) 16: { 17: AccountEmail = email; 18: } 19: } And no need to tweak the DynamicDataContext we can directly go to the service class to implement the logic. Notice here I utilized two DynamicDataContext instances with the different type parameters: Note and Account. 1: public class NoteService : INoteService 2: { 3: public void Create(string email, string title, string content) 4: { 5: var storageAccount = CloudStorageAccount.FromConfigurationSetting("DataConnectionString"); 6: var accountContext = new DynamicDataContext<Account>(storageAccount); 7: var noteContext = new DynamicDataContext<Note>(storageAccount); 8:  9: // validate - email must be existed 10: var accounts = accountContext.Load() 11: .Where(a => a.Email == email) 12: .ToList() 13: .Count; 14: if (accounts <= 0) 15: throw new ApplicationException(string.Format("The account {0} does not exsit in the system please register and try again.", email)); 16:  17: // save the note 18: var noteToAdd = new Note(email) { Title = title, Content = content, DateCreated = DateTime.Now }; 19: noteContext.Add(noteToAdd); 20: } 21: } And updated our client application to test the service. I didn't implement any list service to show all notes but we can have a look on the local SQL database if we ran it at local development fabric.   Summary In this post I explained a bit about the limited LINQ support for the table service. And then I demonstrated about how to use the repository pattern in the table service data access layer and make the DataContext dynamically. The DynamicDataContext I created in this post is just a prototype. In fact we should create the relevant interface to make it testable and for better structure we'd better separate the DataContext classes for each individual kind of entity. So it should have IDataContextBase<T>, DataContextBase<T> and for each entity we would have class AccountDataContext<Account> : IDataContextBase<Account>, DataContextBase<Account> { … } class NoteDataContext<Note> : IDataContextBase<Note>, DataContextBase<Note> { … }   Besides the structured data saving and loading, another common scenario would be saving and loading some binary data such as images, files. In my next post I will show how to use the Blob Service to store the bindery data - make the account be able to upload their logo in my example.   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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• Farseer tutorial for the absolute beginners

  - by Bil Simser

  This post is inspired (and somewhat a direct copy) of a couple of posts Emanuele Feronato wrote back in 2009 about Box2D (his tutorial was ActionScript 3 based for Box2D, this is C# XNA for the Farseer Physics Engine). Here’s what we’re building: What is Farseer The Farseer Physics Engine is a collision detection system with realistic physics responses to help you easily create simple hobby games or complex simulation systems. Farseer was built as a .NET version of Box2D (based on the Box2D.XNA port of Box2D). While the constructs and syntax has changed over the years, the principles remain the same. This tutorial will walk you through exactly what Emanuele create for Flash but we’ll be doing it using C#, XNA and the Windows Phone platform. The first step is to download the library from its home on CodePlex. If you have NuGet installed, you can install the library itself using the NuGet package that but we’ll also be using some code from the Samples source that can only be obtained by downloading the library. Once you download and unpacked the zip file into a folder and open the solution, this is what you will get: The Samples XNA WP7 project (and content) have all the demos for Farseer. There’s a wealth of info here and great examples to look at to learn. The Farseer Physics XNA WP7 project contains the core libraries that do all the work. DebugView XNA contains an XNA-ready class to let you view debug data and information in the game draw loop (which you can copy into your project or build the source and reference the assembly). The downloaded version has to be compiled as it’s only available in source format so you can do that now if you want (open the solution file and rebuild everything). If you’re using the NuGet package you can just install that. We only need the core library and we’ll be copying in some code from the samples later. Your first Farseer experiment Start Visual Studio and create a new project using the Windows Phone template can call it whatever you want. It’s time to edit Game1.cs 1 public class Game1 : Game 2 { 3 private readonly GraphicsDeviceManager _graphics; 4 private DebugViewXNA _debugView; 5 private Body _floor; 6 private SpriteBatch _spriteBatch; 7 private float _timer; 8 private World _world; 9 10 public Game1() 11 { 12 _graphics = new GraphicsDeviceManager(this) 13 { 14 PreferredBackBufferHeight = 800, 15 PreferredBackBufferWidth = 480, 16 IsFullScreen = true 17 }; 18 19 Content.RootDirectory = "Content"; 20 21 // Frame rate is 30 fps by default for Windows Phone. 22 TargetElapsedTime = TimeSpan.FromTicks(333333); 23 24 // Extend battery life under lock. 25 InactiveSleepTime = TimeSpan.FromSeconds(1); 26 } 27 28 protected override void LoadContent() 29 { 30 // Create a new SpriteBatch, which can be used to draw textures. 31 _spriteBatch = new SpriteBatch(_graphics.GraphicsDevice); 32 33 // Load our font (DebugViewXNA needs it for the DebugPanel) 34 Content.Load<SpriteFont>("font"); 35 36 // Create our World with a gravity of 10 vertical units 37 if (_world == null) 38 { 39 _world = new World(Vector2.UnitY*10); 40 } 41 else 42 { 43 _world.Clear(); 44 } 45 46 if (_debugView == null) 47 { 48 _debugView = new DebugViewXNA(_world); 49 50 // default is shape, controller, joints 51 // we just want shapes to display 52 _debugView.RemoveFlags(DebugViewFlags.Controllers); 53 _debugView.RemoveFlags(DebugViewFlags.Joint); 54 55 _debugView.LoadContent(GraphicsDevice, Content); 56 } 57 58 // Create and position our floor 59 _floor = BodyFactory.CreateRectangle( 60 _world, 61 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(480), 62 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(50), 63 10f); 64 _floor.Position = ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(240, 775); 65 _floor.IsStatic = true; 66 _floor.Restitution = 0.2f; 67 _floor.Friction = 0.2f; 68 } 69 70 protected override void Update(GameTime gameTime) 71 { 72 // Allows the game to exit 73 if (GamePad.GetState(PlayerIndex.One).Buttons.Back == ButtonState.Pressed) 74 Exit(); 75 76 // Create a random box every second 77 _timer += (float) gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalSeconds; 78 if (_timer >= 1.0f) 79 { 80 // Reset our timer 81 _timer = 0f; 82 83 // Determine a random size for each box 84 var random = new Random(); 85 var width = random.Next(20, 100); 86 var height = random.Next(20, 100); 87 88 // Create it and store the size in the user data 89 var box = BodyFactory.CreateRectangle( 90 _world, 91 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(width), 92 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(height), 93 10f, 94 new Point(width, height)); 95 96 box.BodyType = BodyType.Dynamic; 97 box.Restitution = 0.2f; 98 box.Friction = 0.2f; 99 100 // Randomly pick a location along the top to drop it from 101 box.Position = ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(random.Next(50, 400), 0); 102 } 103 104 // Advance all the elements in the world 105 _world.Step(Math.Min((float) gameTime.ElapsedGameTime.TotalMilliseconds*0.001f, (1f/30f))); 106 107 // Clean up any boxes that have fallen offscreen 108 foreach (var box in from box in _world.BodyList 109 let pos = ConvertUnits.ToDisplayUnits(box.Position) 110 where pos.Y > _graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height 111 select box) 112 { 113 _world.RemoveBody(box); 114 } 115 116 base.Update(gameTime); 117 } 118 119 protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) 120 { 121 GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.FromNonPremultiplied(51, 51, 51, 255)); 122 123 _spriteBatch.Begin(); 124 125 var projection = Matrix.CreateOrthographicOffCenter( 126 0f, 127 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(_graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Width), 128 ConvertUnits.ToSimUnits(_graphics.GraphicsDevice.Viewport.Height), 0f, 0f, 129 1f); 130 _debugView.RenderDebugData(ref projection); 131 132 _spriteBatch.End(); 133 134 base.Draw(gameTime); 135 } 136 } 137 Lines 4: Declare the debug view we’ll use for rendering (more on that later). Lines 8: Declare _world variable of type class World. World is the main object to interact with the Farseer engine. It stores all the joints and bodies, and is responsible for stepping through the simulation. Lines 12-17: Create the graphics device we’ll be rendering on. This is an XNA component and we’re just setting it to be the same size as the phone and toggling it to be full screen (no system tray). Lines 34: We create a SpriteFont here by adding it to the project. It’s called “font” because that’s what the DebugView uses but you can name it whatever you want (and if you’re not using DebugView for your production app you might have several fonts). Lines 37-44: We create the physics environment that Farseer uses to contain all the objects by specifying it here. We’re using Vector2.UnitY*10 to represent the gravity to be used in the environment. In other words, 10 units going in a downward motion. Lines 46-56: We create the DebugViewXNA here. This is copied from the […] from the code you downloaded and provides the ability to render all entities onto the screen. In a production release you’ll be doing the rendering yourself of each object but we cheat a bit for the demo and let the DebugView do it for us. The other thing it can provide is to render out a panel of debugging information while the simulation is going on. This is useful in tracking down objects, figuring out how something works, or just keeping track of what’s in the engine. Lines 49-67: Here we create a rigid body (Farseer only supports rigid bodies) to represent the floor that we’ll drop objects onto. We create it by using one of the Farseer factories and specifying the width and height. The ConvertUnits class is copied from the samples code as-is and lets us toggle between display units (pixels) and simulation units (usually metres). We’re creating a floor that’s 480 pixels wide and 50 pixels high (converting them to SimUnits for the engine to understand). We also position it near the bottom of the screen. Values are in metres and when specifying values they refer to the centre of the body object. Lines 77-78: The game Update method fires 30 times a second, too fast to be creating objects this quickly. So we use a variable to track the elapsed seconds since the last update, accumulate that value, then create a new box to drop when 1 second has passed. Lines 89-94: We create a box the same way we created our floor (coming up with a random width and height for the box). Lines 96-101: We set the box to be Dynamic (rather than Static like the floor object) and position it somewhere along the top of the screen. And now you created the world. Gravity does the rest and the boxes fall to the ground. Here’s the result: Farseer Physics Engine Demo using XNA Lines 105: We must update the world at every frame. We do this with the Step method which takes in the time interval. [more] Lines 108-114: Body objects are added to the world but never automatically removed (because Farseer doesn’t know about the display world, it has no idea if an item is on the screen or not). Here we just loop through all the entities and anything that’s dropped off the screen (below the bottom) gets removed from the World. This keeps our entity count down (the simulation never has more than 30 or 40 objects in the world no matter how long you run it for). Too many entities and the app will grind to a halt. Lines 125-130: Farseer knows nothing about the UI so that’s entirely up to you as to how to draw things. Farseer is just tracking the objects and moving them around using the physics engine and it’s rules. You’ll still use XNA to draw items (using the SpriteBatch.Draw method) so you can load up your usual textures and draw items and pirates and dancing zombies all over the screen. Instead in this demo we’re going to cheat a little. In the sample code for Farseer you can download there’s a project called DebugView XNA. This project contains the DebugViewXNA class which just handles iterating through all the bodies in the world and drawing the shapes. So we call the RenderDebugData method here of that class to draw everything correctly. In the case of this demo, we just want to draw Shapes so take a look at the source code for the DebugViewXNA class as to how it extracts all the vertices for the shapes created (in this case simple boxes) and draws them. You’ll learn a *lot* about how Farseer works just by looking at this class. That’s it, that’s all. Simple huh? Hope you enjoy the code and library. Physics is hard and requires some math skills to really grok. The Farseer Physics Engine makes it pretty easy to get up and running and start building games. In future posts we’ll get more in-depth with things you can do with the engine so this is just the beginning. Enjoy!

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• Adventures in Windows 8: Working around the navigation animation issues in LayoutAwarePage

  - by Laurent Bugnion

  LayoutAwarePage is a pretty cool add-on to Windows 8 apps, which facilitates greatly the implementation of orientation-aware (portrait, landscape) as well as state-aware (snapped, filled, fullscreen) apps. It has however a few issues that are obvious when you use transformed elements on your page. Adding a LayoutAwarePage to your application If you start with a blank app, the MainPage is a vanilla Page, with no such feature. In order to have a LayoutAwarePage into your app, you need to add this class (and a few helpers) with the following operation: Right click on the Solution and select Add, New Item from the context menu. From the dialog, select a Basic Page (not a Blank Page, which is another vanilla page). If you prefer, you can also use Split Page, Items Page, Item Detail Page, Grouped Items Page or Group Detail Page which are all LayoutAwarePages. Personally I like to start with a Basic Page, which gives me more creative freedom. Adding this new page will cause Visual Studio to show a prompt asking you for permission to add additional helper files to the Common folder. One of these helpers in the LayoutAwarePage class, which is where the magic happens. LayoutAwarePage offers some help for the detection of orientation and state (which makes it a pleasure to design for all these scenarios in Blend, by the way) as well as storage for the navigation state (more about that in a future article). Issue with LayoutAwarePage When you use UI elements such as a background picture, a watermark label, logos, etc, it is quite common to do a few things with those: Making them partially transparent (this is especially true for background pictures; for instance I really like a black Page background with a half transparent picture placed on top of it). Transforming them, for instance rotating them a bit, scaling them, etc. Here is an example with a picture of my two beautiful daughters in the Bird Park in Kuala Lumpur, as well as a transformed TextBlock. The image has an opacity of 40% and the TextBlock a simple RotateTransform. If I create an application with a MainPage that navigates to this LayoutAwarePage, however, I will have a very annoying effect: The background picture appears with an Opacity of 100%. The TextBlock is not rotated. This lasts only for less than a second (during the navigation animation) before the elements “snap into place” and get their desired effect. Here is the XAML that cause the annoying effect: <common:LayoutAwarePage x:Name="pageRoot" x:Class="App13.BasicPage1" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" xmlns:common="using:App13.Common" xmlns:d="http://schemas.microsoft.com/expression/blend/2008" xmlns:mc="http://schemas.openxmlformats.org/markup-compatibility/2006" mc:Ignorable="d"> <Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="140" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Image Source="Assets/el20120812025.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill" Opacity="0.4" Grid.RowSpan="2" /> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button x:Name="backButton" Click="GoBack" IsEnabled="{Binding Frame.CanGoBack, ElementName=pageRoot}" Style="{StaticResource BackButtonStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="pageTitle" Grid.Column="1" Text="Welcome" Style="{StaticResource PageHeaderTextStyle}" /> </Grid> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="Welcome to my Windows 8 Application" Grid.Row="1" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontFamily="Segoe UI Light" FontSize="70" FontWeight="Light" TextAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFFFA200" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" UseLayoutRounding="False" d:LayoutRounding="Auto" Margin="0,0,0,153"> <TextBlock.RenderTransform> <CompositeTransform Rotation="-6.545" /> </TextBlock.RenderTransform> </TextBlock> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> [...] </VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> </Grid> </common:LayoutAwarePage> Solving the issue In order to solve this “snapping” issue, the solution is to wrap the elements that are transformed into an empty Grid. Honestly, to me it sounds like a bug in the LayoutAwarePage navigation animation, but thankfully the workaround is not that difficult: Simple change the main Grid as follows: <Grid Style="{StaticResource LayoutRootStyle}"> <Grid.RowDefinitions> <RowDefinition Height="140" /> <RowDefinition Height="*" /> </Grid.RowDefinitions> <Grid Grid.RowSpan="2"> <Image Source="Assets/el20120812025.jpg" Stretch="UniformToFill" Opacity="0.4" /> </Grid> <Grid> <Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <ColumnDefinition Width="Auto" /> <ColumnDefinition Width="*" /> </Grid.ColumnDefinitions> <Button x:Name="backButton" Click="GoBack" IsEnabled="{Binding Frame.CanGoBack, ElementName=pageRoot}" Style="{StaticResource BackButtonStyle}" /> <TextBlock x:Name="pageTitle" Grid.Column="1" Text="Welcome" Style="{StaticResource PageHeaderTextStyle}" /> </Grid> <Grid Grid.Row="1"> <TextBlock HorizontalAlignment="Center" TextWrapping="Wrap" Text="Welcome to my Windows 8 Application" VerticalAlignment="Bottom" FontFamily="Segoe UI Light" FontSize="70" FontWeight="Light" TextAlignment="Center" Foreground="#FFFFA200" RenderTransformOrigin="0.5,0.5" UseLayoutRounding="False" d:LayoutRounding="Auto" Margin="0,0,0,153"> <TextBlock.RenderTransform> <CompositeTransform Rotation="-6.545" /> </TextBlock.RenderTransform> </TextBlock> </Grid> <VisualStateManager.VisualStateGroups> [...] </Grid> Hopefully this will help a few people, I banged my head on the wall for a while before someone at Microsoft pointed me to the solution ;) Happy coding, Laurent   Laurent Bugnion (GalaSoft) Subscribe | Twitter | Facebook | Flickr | LinkedIn

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• What's up with LDoms: Part 5 - A few Words about Consoles

  - by Stefan Hinker

  Back again to look at a detail of LDom configuration that is often forgotten - the virtual console server. Remember, LDoms are SPARC systems.  As such, each guest will have it's own OBP running.  And to connect to that OBP, the administrator will need a console connection.  Since it's OBP, and not some x86 BIOS, this console will be very serial in nature ;-)  It's really very much like in the good old days, where we had a terminal concentrator where all those serial cables ended up in.  Just like with other components in LDoms, the virtualized solution looks very similar. Every LDom guest requires exactly one console connection.  Envision this similar to the RS-232 port on older SPARC systems.  The LDom framework provides one or more console services that provide access to these connections.  This would be the virtual equivalent of a network terminal server (NTS), where all those serial cables are plugged in.  In the physical world, we'd have a list somewhere, that would tell us which TCP-Port of the NTS was connected to which server.  "ldm list" does just that: root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 0.4% 27d 8h 22m jupiter bound ------ 5002 20 8G mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.5% 55d 14h 10m venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.5% 56d 40m pluto inactive ------ 4 4G The column marked "CONS" tells us, where to reach the console of each domain. In the case of the primary domain, this is actually a (more) physical connection - it's the console connection of the physical system, which is either reachable via the ILOM of that system, or directly via the serial console port on the chassis. All the other guests are reachable through the console service which we created during the inital setup of the system.  Note that pluto does not have a port assigned.  This is because pluto is not yet bound.  (Binding can be viewed very much as the assembly of computer parts - CPU, Memory, disks, network adapters and a serial console cable are all put together when binding the domain.)  Unless we set the port number explicitly, LDoms Manager will do this on a first come, first serve basis.  For just a few domains, this is fine.  For larger deployments, it might be a good idea to assign these port numbers manually using the "ldm set-vcons" command.  However, there is even better magic associated with virtual consoles. You can group several domains into one console group, reachable through one TCP port of the console service.  This can be useful when several groups of administrators are to be given access to different domains, or for other grouping reasons.  Here's an example: root@sun # ldm set-vcons group=planets service=console jupiter root@sun # ldm set-vcons group=planets service=console pluto root@sun # ldm bind jupiter root@sun # ldm bind pluto root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 6.1% 27d 8h 24m jupiter bound ------ 5002 200 8G mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.6% 55d 14h 12m pluto bound ------ 5002 4 4G venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.5% 56d 42m root@sun # telnet localhost 5002 Trying 127.0.0.1... Connected to localhost. Escape character is '^]'. sun-vnts-planets: h, l, c{id}, n{name}, q:l DOMAIN ID DOMAIN NAME DOMAIN STATE 2 jupiter online 3 pluto online sun-vnts-planets: h, l, c{id}, n{name}, q:npluto Connecting to console "pluto" in group "planets" .... Press ~? for control options .. What I did here was add the two domains pluto and jupiter to a new console group called "planets" on the service "console" running in the primary domain.  Simply using a group name will create such a group, if it doesn't already exist.  By default, each domain has its own group, using the domain name as the group name.  The group will be available on port 5002, chosen by LDoms Manager because I didn't specify it.  If I connect to that console group, I will now first be prompted to choose the domain I want to connect to from a little menu. Finally, here's an example how to assign port numbers explicitly: root@sun # ldm set-vcons port=5044 group=pluto service=console pluto root@sun # ldm bind pluto root@sun # ldm list NAME STATE FLAGS CONS VCPU MEMORY UTIL UPTIME primary active -n-cv- UART 16 7680M 3.8% 27d 8h 54m jupiter active -t---- 5002 200 8G 0.5% 30m mars active -n---- 5000 2 8G 0.6% 55d 14h 43m pluto bound ------ 5044 4 4G venus active -n---- 5001 2 8G 0.4% 56d 1h 13m With this, pluto would always be reachable on port 5044 in its own exclusive console group, no matter in which order other domains are bound. Now, you might be wondering why we always have to mention the console service name, "console" in all the examples here.  The simple answer is because there could be more than one such console service.  For all "normal" use, a single console service is absolutely sufficient.  But the system is flexible enough to allow more than that single one, should you need them.  In fact, you could even configure such a console service on a domain other than the primary (or control domain), which would make that domain a real console server.  I actually have a customer who does just that - they want to separate console access from the control domain functionality.  But this is definately a rather sophisticated setup. Something I don't want to go into in this post is access control.  vntsd, which is the daemon providing all these console services, is fully RBAC-aware, and you can configure authorizations for individual users to connect to console groups or individual domain's consoles.  If you can't wait until I get around to security, check out the man page of vntsd. Further reading: The Admin Guide is rather reserved on this subject.  I do recommend to check out the Reference Manual. The manpage for vntsd will discuss all the control sequences as well as the grouping and authorizations mentioned here.

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• Java EE 7 Survey Results!

  - by reza_rahman

  On November 8th, the Java EE EG posted a survey to gather broad community feedback on a number of critical open issues. For reference, you can find the original survey here. We kept the survey open for about three weeks until November 30th. To our delight, over 1100 developers took time out of their busy lives to let their voices be heard! The results of the survey were sent to the EG on December 12th. The subsequent EG discussion is available here. The exact summary sent to the EG is available here. We would like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one the individuals who took the survey. It is very appreciated, encouraging and worth it's weight in gold. In particular, I tried to capture just some of the high-quality, intelligent, thoughtful and professional comments in the summary to the EG. I highly encourage you to continue to stay involved, perhaps through the Adopt-a-JSR program. We would also like to sincerely thank java.net, JavaLobby, TSS and InfoQ for helping spread the word about the survey. Below is a brief summary of the results... APIs to Add to Java EE 7 Full/Web Profile The first question asked which of the four new candidate APIs (WebSocket, JSON-P, JBatch and JCache) should be added to the Java EE 7 Full and Web profile respectively. As the following graph shows, there was significant support for adding all the new APIs to the full profile: Support is relatively the weakest for Batch 1.0, but still good. A lot of folks saw WebSocket 1.0 as a critical technology with comments such as this one: "A modern web application needs Web Sockets as first class citizens" While it is clearly seen as being important, a number of commenters expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of a higher-level JSON data binding API as illustrated by this comment: "How come we don't have a Data Binding API for JSON" JCache was also seen as being very important as expressed with comments like: "JCache should really be that foundational technology on which other specs have no fear to depend on" The results for the Web Profile is not surprising. While there is strong support for adding WebSocket 1.0 and JSON-P 1.0 to the Web Profile, support for adding JCache 1.0 and Batch 1.0 is relatively weak. There was actually significant opposition to adding Batch 1. 0 (with 51.8% casting a 'No' vote). Enabling CDI by Default The second question asked was whether CDI should be enabled in Java EE environments by default. A significant majority of 73.3% developers supported enabling CDI, only 13.8% opposed. Comments such as these two reflect a strong general support for CDI as well as a desire for better Java EE alignment with CDI: "CDI makes Java EE quite valuable!" "Would prefer to unify EJB, CDI and JSF lifecycles" There is, however, a palpable concern around the performance impact of enabling CDI by default as exemplified by this comment: "Java EE projects in most cases use CDI, hence it is sensible to enable CDI by default when creating a Java EE application. However, there are several issues if CDI is enabled by default: scanning can be slow - not all libs use CDI (hence, scanning is not needed)" Another significant concern appears to be around backwards compatibility and conflict with other JSR 330 implementations like Spring: "I am leaning towards yes, however can easily imagine situations where errors would be caused by automatically activating CDI, especially in cases of backward compatibility where another DI engine (such as Spring and the like) happens to use the same mechanics to inject dependencies and in that case there would be an overlap in injections and probably an uncertain outcome" Some commenters such as this one attempt to suggest solutions to these potential issues: "If you have Spring in use and use javax.inject.Inject then you might get some unexpected behavior that could be equally confusing. I guess there will be a way to switch CDI off. I'm tempted to say yes but am cautious for this reason" Consistent Usage of @Inject The third question was around using CDI/JSR 330 @Inject consistently vs. allowing JSRs to create their own injection annotations. A slight majority of 53.3% developers supported using @Inject consistently across JSRs. 28.8% said using custom injection annotations is OK, while 18.0% were not sure. The vast majority of commenters were strongly supportive of CDI and general Java EE alignment with CDI as illistrated by these comments: "Dependency Injection should be standard from now on in EE. It should use CDI as that is the DI mechanism in EE and is quite powerful. Having a new JSR specific DI mechanism to deal with just means more reflection, more proxies. JSRs should also be constructed to allow some of their objects Injectable. @Inject @TransactionalCache or @Inject @JMXBean etc...they should define the annotations and stereotypes to make their code less procedural. Dog food it. If there is a shortcoming in CDI for a JSR fix it and we will all be grateful" "We're trying to make this a comprehensive platform, right? Injection should be a fundamental part of the platform; everything else should build on the same common infrastructure. Each-having-their-own is just a recipe for chaos and having to learn the same thing 10 different ways" Expanding the Use of @Stereotype The fourth question was about expanding CDI @Stereotype to cover annotations across Java EE beyond just CDI. A significant majority of 62.3% developers supported expanding the use of @Stereotype, only 13.3% opposed. A majority of commenters supported the idea as well as the theme of general CDI/Java EE alignment as expressed in these examples: "Just like defining new types for (compositions of) existing classes, stereotypes can help make software development easier" "This is especially important if many EJB services are decoupled from the EJB component model and can be applied via individual annotations to Java EE components. @Stateless is a nicely compact annotation. Code will not improve if that will have to be applied in the future as @Transactional, @Pooled, @Secured, @Singlethreaded, @...." Some, however, expressed concerns around increased complexity such as this commenter: "Could be very convenient, but I'm afraid if it wouldn't make some important class annotations less visible" Expanding Interceptor Use The final set of questions was about expanding interceptors further across Java EE... A very solid 96.3% of developers wanted to expand interceptor use to all Java EE components. 35.7% even wanted to expand interceptors to other Java EE managed classes. Most developers (54.9%) were not sure if there is any place that injection is supported that should not support interceptors. 32.8% thought any place that supports injection should also support interceptors. Only 12.2% were certain that there are places where injection should be supported but not interceptors. The comments reflected the diversity of opinions, generally supportive of interceptors: "I think interceptors are as fundamental as injection and should be available anywhere in the platform" "The whole usage of interceptors still needs to take hold in Java programming, but it is a powerful technology that needs some time in the Sun. Basically it should become part of Java SE, maybe the next step after lambas?" A distinct chain of thought separated interceptors from filters and listeners: "I think that the Servlet API already provides a rich set of possibilities to hook yourself into different Servlet container events. I don't find a need to 'pollute' the Servlet model with the Interceptors API"

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