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• What location to put bootloader, when running multiple drives and partition

  - by Matt G

  I have Win8 on my desktop, where a 120G SSD is used to run windows and some select applications, while I have a 2TB HDD to provide basic file storage and where possible, install applications instead of on the SSD. I want to install Ubuntu on a new partition of the HDD (I allocated 300GB, with 5GB swap file). I've used a USB to install the OS, which seemed to have done the job. However, after prompting for a restart, I can no longer boot to ubuntu. During instillation I was confused about where to install the "boot loader instillation". I ended up selecting "/dev/stb" because I figured I would be able to boot with BIOS by selecting the HDD drive as a priority over the SSD. The bootloader is a large part of where I think I went wrong. My partition system looked something like this: /dev/sta ... //SSD ~120 GB /dev/sta1 NTFS (350 MB) //Win8System /dev/sta2 NTFS (118 GB) //Win8C-Drive /dev/stb ... //HDD ~2TB /dev/stb1 NTFS (1563 GB) //FileStorage /dev/stb5 Free Space (300 GB) //Space I want to use for Linux (NOTE: Created two partitions from the 300GB, ~5GB and 295GB. stb5,stb6.) It'd be great if I could get an explanation of what drive you'd select for the boot loader and why, and what selections won't work with regards to the Boot Loader Instillation. I think I understand what Grub is, but I have no idea on how to use it, or play around with it. I seem to be able to get back into OS from my usb, however I believe it's just showing me a preview/trial of Ubuntu (ie, can't access any of the system NTFS drives). Note, if I try to install from the USB again, it will recognize that a version of Ubuntu 13.10 exists on the system. Apologies in advance, have used windows all my life, don't really know to much about Linux at all. Did have a brief skim over some similar questions, didn't find anything too useful. - Where to install bootloader when installing Ubuntu as secondary OS? - ubuntu 12.10 dual boot with windows 8 on two hdds - Dual-boot Windows 7 and Ubuntu on two SSDs with UEFI

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• Why does the release build of my iPhone app crash on the device on the first run after installation?

  - by Chris Cooper

  I have an iPhone app that's been in development for about 2 weeks. We recently tried the "release" version of the build on a device, and to our great unhappiness, it crashes in one of the views with an "EXC_BAD_ACCESS". This crash only occurs on devices, and only in the "release" build. Not only that, but it only happens the first time the app is launched! It is also 100% reproducible. We have removed the small block of code that deals with data persistence, and have tried re-openning Xcode, cleaning the project, deleting and reinstalling the app, etc., as some other questions suggest. Do you have any advice for a) what might be causing this problem, and b) how to go about debugging if it only happens in "release"? Thanks

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• The Alexandria Project, Chap. 11: Have I got an App for You!

  <b>Standards Blog:</b> "While CIA Agent Carl Cummings was being taught to heel, Frank was sitting at his kitchen table, tapping away at the cramped keyboard of a cheap netbook connected to a neighbor&#8217;s unsecured WiFi network. Even this was risky, he reminded himself, so this brief session would have to be his last until he moved on."

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• Anyone used Jenkins with Sparkle (the cocoa app update framework)?

  - by Amy Worrall

  Pushing new Sparkle releases of our internal apps is a pain. I have to make the build, make the release notes file, sign the .zip with the private key, and add a new entry to the appcast file tying everything together. I'd love it if Jenkins could help: use the commit messages for the release notes, and automatically do the rest of it. Should I be looking at writing a new Jenkins plugin, or using shell scripting, or is there something already that will do what I want? (A quick Google didn't find anything.) I'm new to Jenkins, and am still trying to get a feel for what it can do. Do any other maintainers of Cocoa apps have any tips?

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• What considerations should be made for a web app to be released on a cloud hosted system?

  - by Rhubarb

  I have a web app that is primarily a WordPress app, but it pulls content from a Django app, simply by calling a service that uses Django models. My understanding of cloud computing is a bit vague. If the site needs to scale up with short notice, does the cloud provider (Amazon, Rackspace, whomever) simply spin up new instances (copies) of my initially configured server? How is state managed between all of them? Are there any good primers on this subject? It's hard to find much out there without getting caught up in the marketing.

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• Is there a command-line utility app which can locate a specific block of lines in a text file?

  - by fred.bear

  The text "search and replace" utility programs I've seen, seem to only search on a line-by-line basis... Is there a command-line tool which can locate one block of lines (in a text file), and replace it with another block of lines.? For example: Does the test file file contain this exact group of lines: 'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves Did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, And the mome raths outgrabe. 'Beware the Jabberwock, my son! The jaws that bite, the claws that catch! Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun The frumious Bandersnatch!' I want this, so that I can replace multiple lines of text in a file and know I'm not overwriting the wrong lines. I would never replace "The Jabberwocky" (Lewis Carroll), but it makes a novel example :)

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• What approaches can I take to lower the odds of introducing new bugs in a complex legacy app?

  - by m.edmondson

  Where I work I often have to develop (and bug fix) in an old system (.NET 1) whos code is complete spaghetti - with little thought given to variable names, program structure nor comments. Because of this it takes me ages to understand what bits need changed, and I often 'break' the existing software because I've made a modification. I really really want to spend a couple of months (with colleagues) going through it to refactor but existing developers both can't see the need - nor think theres time for this (the system is massive). I dread having to work on its code as it takes days to fix something only to find out I've broken something else. This obviously makes me look incompetent - so how can I deal with this?

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• I am getting an error while writing my first app as shown in developer get-started tutorial

  - by TrickyJ

  I am trying to learn to develop apps in ubuntu and currently i am going through this tutorial. As shown in the video I am writing the below given codes: self.refreshbutton = self.builder.get_object("refreshbutton") def on_refreshbutton_clicked(self, widget): print "Refresh" As soon as I try to run my application it is giving me an error : I type this command to run my application : quickly run (trickybrowser:4418): Gtk-WARNING **: Theme parsing error: gtk-widgets.css:1971:11: Not using units is deprecated. Assuming 'px'. (trickybrowser:4418): Gtk-WARNING **: Failed to parse /usr/share/themes/mac-os-lion-theme-v2/gtk-3.0/settings.ini: Key file contains line '/* ' which is not a key-value pair, group, or comment Traceback (most recent call last): File "bin/trickybrowser", line 32, in <module> import trickybrowser File "/home/tricky/trickybrowser/trickybrowser/__init__.py", line 14, in <module> from trickybrowser import TrickybrowserWindow File "/home/tricky/trickybrowser/trickybrowser/TrickybrowserWindow.py", line 32 print "Refresh" ^ IndentationError: expected an indented block

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• Script / App to unRAR files, and only delete the archives which were sucessfully expanded.

  - by Jeremy

  I have a cron job which runs a script to unrar all files in a certain directory (/rared for argument's sake) and place the expanded files in /unrared. I would like to change this script so that it deletes the original rar archives from /rared only if they successfully extracted. This does not mean that unrar has reported that they have been fully extracted, because I have had data corruption during decompression before. Ideally (pie-in-the-sky, just to give you an idea of what I'm shooting for,) the unrar program would include this functionality, comparing an expected md5sum value with the actual md5sum value and only deleting the archive if they match. I don't mind scripting this entire process if I have to, but there must be a better way than unraring twice and comparing md5sums.

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• Why does creating dynamic bodies in JBox2D freeze my app?

  - by Amplify91

  My game hangs/freezes when I create dynamic bullet objects with Box2D and I don't know why. I am making a game where the main character can shoot bullets by the user tapping on the screen. Each touch event spawns a new FireProjectileEvent that is handled properly by an event queue. So I know my problem is not trying to create a new body while the box2d world is locked. My bullets are then created and managed by an object pool class like this: public Projectile getProjectile(){ for(int i=0;i<mProjectiles.size();i++){ if(!mProjectiles.get(i).isActive){ return mProjectiles.get(i); } } return mSpriteFactory.createProjectile(); } mSpriteFactory.createProjectile() leads to the physics component of the Projectile class creating its box2d body. I have narrowed the issue down to this method and it looks like this: public void create(World world, float x, float y, Vec2 vertices[], boolean dynamic){ BodyDef bodyDef = new BodyDef(); if(dynamic){ bodyDef.type = BodyType.DYNAMIC; }else{ bodyDef.type = BodyType.STATIC; } bodyDef.position.set(x, y); mBody = world.createBody(bodyDef); PolygonShape dynamicBox = new PolygonShape(); dynamicBox.set(vertices, vertices.length); FixtureDef fixtureDef = new FixtureDef(); fixtureDef.shape = dynamicBox; fixtureDef.density = 1.0f; fixtureDef.friction = 0.0f; mBody.createFixture(fixtureDef); mBody.setFixedRotation(true); } If the dynamic parameter is set to true my game freezes before crashing, but if it is false, it will create a projectile exactly how I want it just doesn't function properly (because a projectile is not a static object). Why does my program fail when I try to create a dynamic object at runtime but not when I create a static one? I have other dynamic objects (like my main character) that work fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated. This is a screenshot of a method profile I did: Especially notable is number 8. I'm just still unsure what I'm doing wrong. Other notes: I am using JBox2D 2.1.2.2. (Upgraded from 2.1.2.1 to try to fix this problem) When the application freezes, if I hit the back button, it appears to move my game backwards by one update tick. Very strange.

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• Does anyone know any good resources for learning how to market a web app?

  - by Jack Kinsella

  I'm a developer first and foremost. I write web apps but have a hard time generating traffic and converting potential users once I've released my product into the wild. I know I need to learn more about marketing but I don't know where to start as I've no baseline to judge the quality of the materials I stumble across. Does anyone know any websites, blogs, e-books or other resources for learning how to market effectively?

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• How many tiers should my models have in a DB driven web app?

  - by Hanno Fietz

  In my experience, the "Model" in MVC is often not really a single layer. I would regularly have "backend" models and "frontend" models, where the backend ones would have properties that I want to hide from the UI code, and the frontend ones have derived or composite properties which are more meaningful in the context of the UI. Recently, I have started to introduce a third layer in between when database normalization created tables that did not really match the conceptual domain objects anymore. In those projects I have model classes that are equivalent with the DB structure, these become components of objects that represent the domain model, and finally these are filtered and amended for displaying information to the user. Are there patterns or guidelines for how, when and why to organize the data model across application layers?

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• What is the proper way to specify a path to 'app' in a Rails plugin?

  - by Brian Deterling

  This question came about because the cells gem specifies template directories using File.join('app','cells'). That works fine until you run Rails as a daemon (scripts/server -d). The daemon switches directories to / which leaves the cells template paths pointing to the wrong absolute path. My solution was to set the default paths to File.join(RAILS_ROOT, 'app', 'cells'). This works in Rails, but the unit tests for the plugin fail because RAILS_ROOT isn't defined. Using File.join(File.dirname(__FILE__),'..' ... also works but requires about 6 levels of '..' which seems wrong. So my question is what is the proper way to specify the path to a directory under 'app' in a Rails plugin? Or is there something else wrong that would cause daemonizing Rails to fail to find the relative paths?

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• [Iphone-Dev] Assigning values : difference between properties and class variables ?

  - by gotye

  Hey guys, I noticed that I rarely use properties, due to the fact that I rarely need to access my object's variables outside my class ;) So I usually do : NSMutableArray *myArray; // not a property ! My question is : even if i don't declare myArray as a property, does iphone make a retain anyway if I do myArray = arrayPassedToMe; I think so but I just wanted to confirm ;) Any thoughts welcome ! Gotye

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• problem while displayin the texture image on view that works fine on iphone simulator but not on dev

  - by yunas

  hello i am trying to display an image on iphone by converting it into texture and then displaying it on the UIView. here is the code to load an image from an UIImage object - (void)loadImage:(UIImage *)image mipmap:(BOOL)mipmap texture:(uint32_t)texture { int width, height; CGImageRef cgImage; GLubyte *data; CGContextRef cgContext; CGColorSpaceRef colorSpace; GLenum err; if (image == nil) { NSLog(@"Failed to load"); return; } cgImage = [image CGImage]; width = CGImageGetWidth(cgImage); height = CGImageGetHeight(cgImage); colorSpace = CGColorSpaceCreateDeviceRGB(); // Malloc may be used instead of calloc if your cg image has dimensions equal to the dimensions of the cg bitmap context data = (GLubyte *)calloc(width * height * 4, sizeof(GLubyte)); cgContext = CGBitmapContextCreate(data, width, height, 8, width * 4, colorSpace, kCGImageAlphaPremultipliedLast); if (cgContext != NULL) { // Set the blend mode to copy. We don't care about the previous contents. CGContextSetBlendMode(cgContext, kCGBlendModeCopy); CGContextDrawImage(cgContext, CGRectMake(0.0f, 0.0f, width, height), cgImage); glGenTextures(1, &(_textures[texture])); glBindTexture(GL_TEXTURE_2D, _textures[texture]); if (mipmap) glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR_MIPMAP_LINEAR); else glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D, GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER, GL_LINEAR); glTexImage2D(GL_TEXTURE_2D, 0, GL_RGBA, width, height, 0, GL_RGBA, GL_UNSIGNED_BYTE, data); if (mipmap) glGenerateMipmapOES(GL_TEXTURE_2D); err = glGetError(); if (err != GL_NO_ERROR) NSLog(@"Error uploading texture. glError: 0x%04X", err); CGContextRelease(cgContext); } free(data); CGColorSpaceRelease(colorSpace); } The problem that i currently am facing is this code workd perfectly fine and displays the image on simulator where as on the device as seen on debugger an error is displayed i.e. Error uploading texture. glError: 0x0501 any idea how to tackle this bug.... thnx in advance 4 ur soluitons

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• Web App fails when moved to production environment. Which server permissions do I need?

  - by Ashley Ward

  I have developed a small web app. This app allows users to upload images. It also produces text files with the names of those images (the names are stored and retrieved to/from an MySQL Database.) I have developed this app using MAMP. To create the uploaded image files I use the PHP function imagejpeg('my/path/name.jpg') and to delete the files I use the PHP function unlink('folder1/folder2/name.jpg') to write to the text document I am using the function fopen('folder1/folder2/name.txt', 'w') all three of these functions produce errors related to permissions - now the site has been moved to a live hosting environment. Why is this? and what permissions do I need to set the folder's folder1 and folder2 to? I know that permission 777 is generally bad because it opens up your server to the public. However what I have found is that the functions fail to work unless I use 777 on the folders. Can anyone shed any light on my dilemma?

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• Service reference error when moving dev. environment from XP to W7

  - by Peter

  Hi, I am building an application and I am using web services for getting data from a server. It was working fine when I was developing on my XP machine but had to switch to Windows 7. On the new machine I grabbed the latest version of the code using sourcesafe. However, when I try to add a service reference in the solution or update an existing one I get the following error: There was an error downloading 'http://localhost:52490/Service/CustomerService.asmx'. The request failed with the error message: Server Error in '/' Application. Parser Error Description: An error occurred during the parsing of a resource required to service this request. Please review the following specific parse error details and modify your source file appropriately. Parser Error Message: Could not create type 'Digital_Server.CustomerService'. Source Error <%@ WebService Language="vb" CodeBehind="CustomerService.asmx.vb" Class="Digital_Server.CustomerService" % Source File: /Service/CustomerService.asmxLine: 1 Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:2.0.50727.4927; ASP.NET Version:2.0.50727.4927 --. Metadata contains a reference that cannot be resolved: 'http://localhost:52490/Service/CustomerService.asmx'. An error occurred while receiving the HTTP response to http://localhost:52490/Service/CustomerService.asmx. This could be due to the service endpoint binding not using the HTTP protocol. This could also be due to an HTTP request context being aborted by the server (possibly due to the service shutting down). See server logs for more details. The underlying connection was closed: An unexpected error occurred on a receive. Unable to read data from the transport connection: An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host. An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host If the service is defined in the current solution, try building the solution and adding the service reference again. Does it has anything to do with the IIS or is it any configuration file I have to change in the solution? Any help is appreciated.

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• Using components with different permissive licenses in a commercial app. How to display copyright correctly?

  - by Ivaylo Slavov

  I am writing a commercial application that will make use of some open libraries licensed under different licenses. For example one library will be licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, another will use the LGPL license. Both licenses allow usage in commercial applications, but differ in the way the attributions of licensed work is given. It is my first commercial application that uses 3rd party libraries and I want to do the right thing so that the 3rd party licenses are satisfied. I am not only asking what I should do, but also what I must not do.

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• First Windows Phone 7 &ndash; Mobile LOB App.

  - by Richard Jones

  So I spent a couple of hours yesterday building my first Windows 7 Phone Series. application.   I still can’t get used to saying Windows 7 Phone Series.   So I think I’ll just go with WP7.   I must say I’m really impressed.    Calling web-services a breeze laying out User Interface a very straight forward.   I had made called into Dynamics NAV using web-services in under 10 minutes. Working in XAML takes a bit of getting used to,  I’m not trying to-do anything too clever yet. One thing I will point out to transition from one XAML page to the next use this.NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/Primary.xaml", UriKind.Relative)); Going from Compact Framework this is equivalent of a Window.Show Its so nice to be able to talk nicely again, about Windows Based Mobile Development!

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• Parallel Port Problem in 12.04

  - by Frank Oberle

  I have a “dumb” printer attached to a parallel port in my machine which works fine under the “other” resident operating system (from Redmond) on the same machine. I recently added Ubuntu 12.04 as a dual boot on the machine, but Ubuntu doesn't seem to recognize the parallel port at all. All I need to set up a printer is a really plain-vanilla fixed pitch text-only generic driver, which is present, but no parallel ports show up. (The other printers, all on USB ports, seem to work just fine). Following what appeared to me to be the most reasonable of the many conflicting pieces of advice on the web, here's what I did: I added the following lines to /etc/modules parport_pc ppdev parport Then, after rebooting, I checked to see that the lines were still present, and they were. I ran dmesg | grep par and got the following references in the output that seemed like they might have to do with the parallel port: [ 14.169511] parport_pc 0000:03:07.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 21 (level, low) -> IRQ 21 [ 14.169516] PCI parallel port detected: 9710:9805, I/O at 0xce00(0xcd00), IRQ 21 [ 14.169577] parport0: PC-style at 0xce00 (0xcd00), irq 21, using FIFO [PCSPP,TRISTATE,COMPAT,ECP] [ 14.354254] lp0: using parport0 (interrupt-driven). [ 14.571358] ppdev: user-space parallel port driver [ 16.588304] type=1400 audit(1347226670.386:5): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf" pid=964 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.588756] type=1400 audit(1347226670.386:6): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/sbin/cupsd" pid=964 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.673679] type=1400 audit(1347226670.470:7): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm/lightdm-guest-session-wrapper" pid=1010 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.675252] type=1400 audit(1347226670.470:8): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/mission-control-5" pid=1014 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.675716] type=1400 audit(1347226670.470:9): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_load" name="/usr/lib/telepathy/telepathy-*" pid=1014 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.676636] type=1400 audit(1347226670.474:10): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/lib/cups/backend/cups-pdf" pid=1015 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 16.677124] type=1400 audit(1347226670.474:11): apparmor="STATUS" operation="profile_replace" name="/usr/sbin/cupsd" pid=1015 comm="apparmor_parser" [ 1545.725328] parport0: ppdev0 forgot to release port I have no idea what any of that means, but the line “parport0: ppdev0 forgot to release port ” seems unusual. I was still unable to add a printer for my old clunker, so I tried the direct approach, typing echo “Hello” > /dev/lp0 and received a Permission denied message. I then tried echo “Hello” > /dev/parport0 which didn't give me any message at all, but still didn't print anything. Running the command sudo /usr/lib/cups/backend/parallel gives the following: direct parallel:/dev/lp0 "unknown" "LPT #1" "" "" Checking the permissions for /dev/parport0, Owner, Group, and Other are all set to read and write. crw-rw---- 1 root lp 6, 0 Sep 9 16:37 /dev/lp0 crw-rw-rw- 1 root lp 99, 0 Sep 9 16:37 /dev/parport0 The output of the command lpinfo -v includes the following line: direct parallel:/dev/lp0 I've read several web postings that seem to suggest this has been a problem for several years, but the bug reports were closed because there wasn't enough information to address the issue (shades of Microsoft!). Any suggestions as to what I might be missing here?

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• How to create an object reference to a xaml page from App.xaml.cs codebehind?

  - by John K.

  Hi all, I have a Silverlight 4 Business Project where I have enabled the ASP.NET Authentication/Authorization role information. I would like to pass the currently authenticated user's account information from the app.xaml.cs codebehind to a different XAML page, but I have no idea how that is done, or if it's even possible. My goal is to databind the IsEnabled property of various buttons of my target XAML page, based on whether the current user is in a particular admin related role or not. The Application_UserLoaded event handler of app.xaml.cs seems to be the safest event handler to initiate this task because it fires only after the user's account information is loaded from the server. I had previously attempted to retrieve the current user information directly from my target XAML page, but I was never getting the current user information because Application_UserLoaded hadn't finished loading the current user info yet. public partial class App : Application { private void Application_UserLoaded(LoadUserOperation operation) { // How do you create an object reference to a XAML page from your project solution // from this event handler? } } Thanks in advance for any assistance, John

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• Anyone realize success using Apple Mac OS 10.6 and Parallels 5 for a Visual Studio Dev machine?

  - by Buffalo

  Greetings my wonderful StackOverflow family :) I grew up using Windows and switched to OSX as a Computer Science major in College. I've recently started my first real software developer job, and have a ThinkPad and Windows XP for developing ASP.NET / MS SQL applications (Visual Studio 2008). Question: Basically, I am wondering if any developers out there have had real success creating ASP.NET applications on a Mac using a VM? I've been fighting with Parallels 5 all week and finally have Windows 7 and VS 2008 running but my hot-keys are all screwed up. Is it worth the work to keep beating this thing into submission? Should I give up? Should I give Mono a try instead? Thanks Folks, I can't wait to see what you all think!

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• call my web services from other app with javascript?

  - by Dejan.S

  Hi. I got .asmx a web service on my app. I need to call a method from an other app to get statistics from my app. I need it to return XML. the call to the webmethod is done with javascript soap. There is a default hellow world webmethod and calling that work but it seem that when i try to call a method where i need to pass parameters and it need to execute code it wont work and just return my error message. any ideas on what can be wrong. am I using the wrong web method?

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• Handling SMS/email convergence: how does a good business app do it?

  - by Tim Cooper

  I'm writing a school administration software package, but it strikes me that many developers will face this same issue: when communicating with users, should you use email or SMS or both, and should you treat them as fundamentally equivalent channels such that any message can get sent using any media, (with long and short forms of the message template obviously) or should different business functions be specifically tailored to each of the 3? This question got kicked off "StackOverflow" for being overly general, so I'm hoping it's not too general for this site - the answers will no doubt be subjective but "you don't need to write a whole book to answer the question". I'm particularly interested in people who have direct experience of having written comparable business applications. Sub-questions: Do I treat SMS as "moderately secure" and email as less secure? (I'm thinking about booking tokens for parent/teacher nights, permission slips for excursions, absence explanation notes - so high security is not a requirement for us, although medium security is) Is it annoying for users to receive the same message on multiple channels? Should we have a unified framework that reports on delivery or lack thereof of emails and SMS's?

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• Building Enterprise Smartphone App &ndash; Part 2: Platforms and Features

  - by Tim Murphy

  This is part 2 in a series of posts based on a talk I gave recently at the Chicago Information Technology Architects Group.  Feel free to leave feedback. In the previous post I discussed what reasons a company might have for creating a smartphone application.  In this installment I will cover some of history and state of the different platforms as well as features that can be leveraged for building enterprise smartphone applications. Platforms Before you start choosing a platform to develop your solutions on it is good to understand how we got here and what features you can leverage. History To my memory we owe all of this to a product called the Apple Newton that came out in 1987. It was the first PDA and back then I was much more of an Apple fan.  I was very impressed with this device even though it never really went anywhere.  The Palm Pilot by US Robotics was the next major advancement in PDA. It had a simple short hand window that allowed for quick stylus entry.. Later, Windows CE came out and started the broadening of the PDA market. After that it was the Palm and CE operating systems that started showing up on cell phones and for some time these were the two dominant operating systems that were distributed with devices from multiple hardware vendors. Current The iPhone was the first smartphone to take away the stylus and give us a multi-touch interface.  It was a revolution in usability and really changed the attractiveness of smartphones for the general public.  This brought us to the beginning of the current state of the market with the concept of an online store that makes it easy for customers to get new features and functionality on demand. With Android, Google made this more than a one horse race.  Not only did they come to compete, their low cost actually made them the leading OS.  Of course what made Android so attractive also is its major fault.  It is so open that it has been a target for malware which leaves consumers exposed.  Fortunately for Google though, most consumers aren’t aware of the threat that they are under. Although Microsoft had put out one of the first smart phone operating systems with CE it had to play catch up and finally came out with the Windows Phone.  They have gone for a market approach between those of iOS and Android.  They support multiple hardware vendors like Google, but they kept a certification process for applications that is similar to Apple.  They also created a user interface that was different enough to give it a clear separation from the other two platforms. The result of all this is hundreds of millions of smartphones being sold monthly across all three platforms giving us a wide range of choices and challenges when it comes to developing solutions. Features So what are the features that make these devices flexible enough be considered for use in the enterprise? The biggest advantage of today's devices is network connectivity.  The ability to access information from multiple sources at a moment’s notice is critical for businesses.  Add to that the ability to communicate over a variety of text, voice and video modes and we have a powerful starting point. Every smartphone has a cameras and they are not just useful for posting to Instagram. We are seeing more applications such as Bing vision that allow us to scan just about any printed code or text to find information.  These capabilities have been made available to developers in the form of standard libraries for reading barcodes of just about an flavor and optical character recognition (OCR) interpretation. Bluetooth give us the ability to communicate with multiple devices. Whether these are headsets, keyboard or printers the wireless communication capabilities are just starting to evolve.  The more these wireless communication protocols grow, the more opportunities we will see to transfer data between users and a variety of devices. Local storage of information that can be called up even when the device cannot reach the network is the other big capability.  This give users the ability to work offline as well and transmit information when connections are restored. These are the tools that we have to work with to build applications that can be leveraged to gain a competitive advantage for companies that implement them. Coming Up In the third installment I will cover key concerns that you face when building enterprise smartphone apps. del.icio.us Tags: smartphones,enterprise smartphone Apps,architecture,iOS,Android,Windows Phone

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