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• Creating HTML5 Offline Web Applications with ASP.NET

  - by Stephen Walther

  The goal of this blog entry is to describe how you can create HTML5 Offline Web Applications when building ASP.NET web applications. I describe the method that I used to create an offline Web application when building the JavaScript Reference application. You can read about the HTML5 Offline Web Application standard by visiting the following links: Offline Web Applications Firefox Offline Web Applications Safari Offline Web Applications Currently, the HTML5 Offline Web Applications feature works with all modern browsers with one important exception. You can use Offline Web Applications with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (including iPhone Safari). Unfortunately, however, Internet Explorer does not support Offline Web Applications (not even IE 9). Why Build an HTML5 Offline Web Application? The official reason to build an Offline Web Application is so that you do not need to be connected to the Internet to use it. For example, you can use the JavaScript Reference Application when flying in an airplane, riding a subway, or hiding in a cave in Borneo. The JavaScript Reference Application works great on my iPhone even when I am completely disconnected from any network. The following screenshot shows the JavaScript Reference Application running on my iPhone when airplane mode is enabled (notice the little orange airplane):   Admittedly, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find locations where you can’t get Internet access. A second, and possibly better, reason to create Offline Web Applications is speed. An Offline Web Application must be downloaded only once. After it gets downloaded, all of the files required by your Web application (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Image) are stored persistently on your computer. Think of Offline Web Applications as providing you with a super browser cache. Normally, when you cache files in a browser, the files are cached on a file-by-file basis. For each HTML, CSS, image, or JavaScript file, you specify how long the file should remain in the cache by setting cache headers. Unlike the normal browser caching mechanism, the HTML5 Offline Web Application cache is used to specify a caching policy for an entire set of files. You use a manifest file to list the files that you want to cache and these files are cached until the manifest is changed. Another advantage of using the HTML5 offline cache is that the HTML5 standard supports several JavaScript events and methods related to the offline cache. For example, you can be notified in your JavaScript code whenever the offline application has been updated. You can use JavaScript methods, such as the ApplicationCache.update() method, to update the cache programmatically. Creating the Manifest File The HTML5 Offline Cache uses a manifest file to determine the files that get cached. Here’s what the manifest file looks like for the JavaScript Reference application: CACHE MANIFEST # v30 Default.aspx # Standard Script Libraries Scripts/jquery-1.4.4.min.js Scripts/jquery-ui-1.8.7.custom.min.js Scripts/jquery.tmpl.min.js Scripts/json2.js # App Scripts App_Scripts/combine.js App_Scripts/combine.debug.js # Content (CSS & images) Content/default.css Content/logo.png Content/ui-lightness/jquery-ui-1.8.7.custom.css Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_glass_65_ffffff_1x400.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_glass_100_f6f6f6_1x400.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_highlight-soft_100_eeeeee_1x100.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-icons_222222_256x240.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_glass_100_fdf5ce_1x400.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_diagonals-thick_20_666666_40x40.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-bg_gloss-wave_35_f6a828_500x100.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-icons_ffffff_256x240.png Content/ui-lightness/images/ui-icons_ef8c08_256x240.png Content/browsers/c8.png Content/browsers/es3.png Content/browsers/es5.png Content/browsers/ff3_6.png Content/browsers/ie8.png Content/browsers/ie9.png Content/browsers/sf5.png NETWORK: Services/EntryService.svc http://superexpert.com/resources/JavaScriptReference/ A Cache Manifest file always starts with the line of text Cache Manifest. In the manifest above, all of the CSS, image, and JavaScript files required by the JavaScript Reference application are listed. For example, the Default.aspx ASP.NET page, jQuery library, JQuery UI library, and several images are listed. Notice that you can add comments to a manifest by starting a line with the hash character (#). I use comments in the manifest above to group JavaScript and image files. Finally, notice that there is a NETWORK: section of the manifest. You list any file that you do not want to cache (any file that requires network access) in this section. In the manifest above, the NETWORK: section includes the URL for a WCF Service named EntryService.svc. This service is called to get the JavaScript entries displayed by the JavaScript Reference. There are two important things that you need to be aware of when using a manifest file. First, all relative URLs listed in a manifest are resolved relative to the manifest file. The URLs listed in the manifest above are all resolved relative to the root of the application because the manifest file is located in the application root. Second, whenever you make a change to the manifest file, browsers will download all of the files contained in the manifest (all of them). For example, if you add a new file to the manifest then any browser that supports the Offline Cache standard will detect the change in the manifest and download all of the files listed in the manifest automatically. If you make changes to files in the manifest (for example, modify a JavaScript file) then you need to make a change in the manifest file in order for the new version of the file to be downloaded. The standard way of updating a manifest file is to include a comment with a version number. The manifest above includes a # v30 comment. If you make a change to a file then you need to modify the comment to be # v31 in order for the new file to be downloaded. When Are Updated Files Downloaded? When you make changes to a manifest, the changes are not reflected the very next time you open the offline application in your web browser. Your web browser will download the updated files in the background. This can be very confusing when you are working with JavaScript files. If you make a change to a JavaScript file, and you have cached the application offline, then the changes to the JavaScript file won’t appear when you reload the application. The HTML5 standard includes new JavaScript events and methods that you can use to track changes and make changes to the Application Cache. You can use the ApplicationCache.update() method to initiate an update to the application cache and you can use the ApplicationCache.swapCache() method to switch to the latest version of a cached application. My heartfelt recommendation is that you do not enable your application for offline storage until after you finish writing your application code. Otherwise, debugging the application can become a very confusing experience. Offline Web Applications versus Local Storage Be careful to not confuse the HTML5 Offline Web Application feature and HTML5 Local Storage (aka DOM storage) feature. The JavaScript Reference Application uses both features. HTML5 Local Storage enables you to store key/value pairs persistently. Think of Local Storage as a super cookie. I describe how the JavaScript Reference Application uses Local Storage to store the database of JavaScript entries in a separate blog entry. Offline Web Applications enable you to store static files persistently. Think of Offline Web Applications as a super cache. Creating a Manifest File in an ASP.NET Application A manifest file must be served with the MIME type text/cache-manifest. In order to serve the JavaScript Reference manifest with the proper MIME type, I added two files to the JavaScript Reference Application project: Manifest.txt – This text file contains the actual manifest file. Manifest.ashx – This generic handler sends the Manifest.txt file with the MIME type text/cache-manifest. Here’s the code for the generic handler: using System.Web; namespace JavaScriptReference { public class Manifest : IHttpHandler { public void ProcessRequest(HttpContext context) { context.Response.ContentType = "text/cache-manifest"; context.Response.WriteFile(context.Server.MapPath("Manifest.txt")); } public bool IsReusable { get { return false; } } } } The Default.aspx file contains a reference to the manifest. The opening HTML tag in the Default.aspx file looks like this: <html manifest="Manifest.ashx"> Notice that the HTML tag contains a manifest attribute that points to the Manifest.ashx generic handler. Internet Explorer simply ignores this attribute. Every other modern browser will download the manifest when the Default.aspx page is requested. Seeing the Offline Web Application in Action The experience of using an HTML5 Web Application is different with different browsers. When you first open the JavaScript Reference application with Firefox, you get the following warning: Notice that you are provided with the choice of whether you want to use the application offline or not. Browsers other than Firefox, such as Chrome and Safari, do not provide you with this choice. Chrome and Safari will create an offline cache automatically. If you click the Allow button then Firefox will download all of the files listed in the manifest. You can view the files contained in the Firefox offline application cache by typing about:cache in the Firefox address bar: You can view the actual items being cached by clicking the List Cache Entries link: The Offline Web Application experience is different in the case of Google Chrome. You can view the entries in the offline cache by opening the Developer Tools (hit Shift+CTRL+I), selecting the Storage tab, and selecting Application Cache: Notice that you view the status of the Application Cache. In the screen shot above, the status is UNCACHED which means that the files listed in the manifest have not been downloaded and cached yet. The different possible values for the status are included in the HTML5 Offline Web Application standard: UNCACHED – The Application Cache has not been initialized. IDLE – The Application Cache is not currently being updated. CHECKING – The Application Cache is being fetched and checked for updates. DOWNLOADING – The files in the Application Cache are being updated. UPDATEREADY – There is a new version of the Application. OBSOLETE – The contents of the Application Cache are obsolete. Summary In this blog entry, I provided a description of how you can use the HTML5 Offline Web Application feature in the context of an ASP.NET application. I described how this feature is used with the JavaScript Reference Application to store the entire application on a user’s computer. By taking advantage of this new feature of the HTML5 standard, you can improve the performance of your ASP.NET web applications by requiring users of your web application to download your application once and only once. Furthermore, you can enable users to take advantage of your applications anywhere -- regardless of whether or not they are connected to the Internet.

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• The HTG Guide to Using a Bluetooth Keyboard with Your Android Device

  - by Matt Klein

  Android devices aren’t usually associated with physical keyboards. But, since Google is now bundling their QuickOffice app with the newly-released Kit-Kat, it appears inevitable that at least some Android tablets (particularly 10-inch models) will take on more productivity roles. In recent years, physical keyboards have been rendered obsolete by swipe style input methods such as Swype and Google Keyboard. Physical keyboards tend to make phones thick and plump, and that won’t fly today when thin (and even flexible and curved) is in vogue. So, you’ll be hard-pressed to find smartphone manufacturers launching new models with physical keyboards, thus rendering sliders to a past chapter in mobile phone evolution. It makes sense to ditch the clunky keyboard phone in favor of a lighter, thinner model. You’re going to carry around in your pocket or purse all day, why have that extra bulk and weight? That said, there is sound logic behind pairing tablets with keyboards. Microsoft continues to plod forward with its Surface models, and while critics continue to lavish praise on the iPad, its functionality is obviously enhanced and extended when you add a physical keyboard. Apple even has an entire page devoted specifically to iPad-compatible keyboards. But an Android tablet and a keyboard? Does such a thing even exist? They do actually. There are docking keyboards and keyboard/case combinations, there’s the Asus Transformer family, Logitech markets a Windows 8 keyboard that speaks “Android”, and these are just to name a few. So we know that keyboard products that are designed to work with Android exist, but what about an everyday Bluetooth keyboard you might use with Windows or OS X? How-To Geek wanted look at how viable it is to use such a keyboard with Android. We conducted some research and examined some lists of Android keyboard shortcuts. Most of what we found was long outdated. Many of the shortcuts don’t even apply anymore, while others just didn’t work. Regardless, after a little experimentation and a dash of customization, it turns out using a keyboard with Android is kind of fun, and who knows, maybe it will catch on. Setting things up Setting up a Bluetooth keyboard with Android is very easy. First, you’ll need a Bluetooth keyboard and of course an Android device, preferably running version 4.1 (Jelly Bean) or higher. For our test, we paired a second-generation Google Nexus 7 running Android 4.3 with a Samsung Series 7 keyboard. In Android, enable Bluetooth if it isn’t already on. We’d like to note that if you don’t normally use Bluetooth accessories and peripherals with your Android device (or any device really), it’s best practice to leave Bluetooth off because, like GPS, it drains the device’s battery more quickly. To enable Bluetooth, simply go to “Settings” -> “Bluetooth” and tap the slider button to “On”. To set up the keyboard, make sure it is on and then tap “Bluetooth” in the Android settings. On the resulting screen, your Android device should automatically search for and hopefully find your keyboard. If you don’t get it right the first time, simply turn the keyboard on again and then tap “Search for Devices” to try again. If it still doesn’t work, make sure you have fresh batteries and the keyboard isn’t paired to another device. If it is, you will need to unpair it before it will work with your Android device (consult your keyboard manufacturer’s documentation or Google if you don’t know how to do this). When Android finds your keyboard, select it under “Available Devices” … … and you should be prompted to type in a code: If successful, you will see that device is now “Connected” and you’re ready to go. If you want to test things out, try pressing the “Windows” key (“Apple” or “Command”) + ESC, and you will be whisked to your Home screen. So, what can you do? Traditional Mac and Windows users know there’s usually a keyboard shortcut for just about everything (and if there isn’t, there’s all kinds of ways to remap keys to do a variety of commands, tasks, and functions). So where does Android fall in terms of baked-in keyboard commands? There answer to that is kind of enough, but not too much. There are definitely established combos you can use to get around, but they aren’t clear and there doesn’t appear to be any one authority on what they are. Still, there is enough keyboard functionality in Android to make it a viable option, if only for those times when you need to get something done (long e-mail or important document) and an on-screen keyboard simply won’t do. It’s important to remember that Android is, and likely always will be a touch-first interface. That said, it does make some concessions to physical keyboards. In other words, you can get around Android fairly well without having to lift your hands off the keys, but you will still have to tap the screen regularly, unless you add a mouse. For example, you can wake your device by tapping a key rather than pressing its power button. However, if your device is slide or pattern-locked, then you’ll have to use the touchscreen to unlock it – a password or PIN however, works seamlessly with a keyboard – other things like widgets and app controls and features, have to be tapped. You get the idea. Keyboard shortcuts and navigation As we said, baked-in keyboard shortcut combos aren’t necessarily abundant nor apparent. The one thing you can always do is search. Any time you want to Google something, start typing from the Home screen and the search screen will automatically open and begin displaying results. Other than that, here is what we were able to figure out: ESC = go back CTRL + ESC = menu CTRL + ALT + DEL = restart (no questions asked) ALT + SPACE = search page (say “OK Google” to voice search) ALT + TAB (ALT + SHIFT + TAB) = switch tasks Also, if you have designated volume function keys, those will probably work too. There’s also some dedicated app shortcuts like calculator, Gmail, and a few others: CMD + A = calculator CMD + C = contacts CMD + E = e-mail CMD + G = Gmail CMD + L = Calendar CMD + P = Play Music CMD + Y = YouTube Overall, it’s not a long comprehensive list and there’s no dedicated keyboard combos for the full array of Google’s products. Granted, it’s hard to imagine getting a lot of mileage out of a keyboard with Maps but with something like Keep, you could type out long, detailed lists on your tablet, and then view them on your smartphone when you go out shopping. You can also use the arrow keys to navigate your Home screen over shortcuts and open the app drawer. When something on the screen is selected, it will be highlighted in blue. Press “Enter” to open your selection. Additionally, if an app has its own set of shortcuts, e.g. Gmail has quite a few unique shortcuts to it, as does Chrome, some – though not many – will work in Android (not for YouTube though). Also, many “universal” shortcuts such as Copy (CTRL + C), Cut (CTRL + X), Paste (CTRL + V), and Select All (CTRL + A) work where needed – such as in instant messaging, e-mail, social media apps, etc. Creating custom application shortcuts What about custom shortcuts? When we were researching this article, we were under the impression that it was possible to assign keyboard combinations to specific apps, such as you could do on older Android versions such as Gingerbread. This no long seems to be the case and nowhere in “Settings” could we find a way to assign hotkey combos to any of our favorite, oft-used apps or functions. If you do want custom keyboard shortcuts, what can you do? Luckily, there’s an app on Google Play that allows you to, among other things, create custom app shortcuts. It is called External Keyboard Helper (EKH) and while there is a free demo version, the pay version is only a few bucks. We decided to give EKH a whirl and through a little experimentation and finally reading the developer’s how-to, we found we could map custom keyboard combos to just about anything. To do this, first open the application and you’ll see the main app screen. Don’t worry about choosing a custom layout or anything like that, you want to go straight to the “Advanced settings”: In the “Advanced settings” select “Application shortcuts” to continue: You can have up to 16 custom application shortcuts. We are going to create a custom shortcut to the Facebook app. We choose “A0”, and from the resulting list, Facebook. You can do this for any number of apps, services, and settings. As you can now see, the Facebook app has now been linked to application-zero (A0): Go back to the “Advanced settings” and choose “Customize keyboard mappings”: You will be prompted to create a custom keyboard layout so we choose “Custom 1”: When you choose to create a custom layout, you can do a great many more things with your keyboard. For example, many keyboards have predefined function (Fn) keys, which you can map to your tablet’s brightness controls, toggle WiFi on/off, and much more. A word of advice, the application automatically remaps certain keys when you create a custom layout. This might mess up some existing keyboard combos. If you simply want to add some functionality to your keyboard, you can go ahead and delete EKH’s default changes and start your custom layout from scratch. To create a new combo, select “Add new key mapping”: For our new shortcut, we are going to assign the Facebook app to open when we key in “ALT + F”. To do this, we press the “F” key while in the “Scancode” field and we see it returns a value of “33”. If we wanted to use a different key, we can press “Change” and scan another key’s numerical value. We now want to assign the “ALT” key to application “A0”, previously designated as the Facebook app. In the “AltGr” field, we enter “A0” and then “Save” our custom combo. And now we see our new application shortcut. Now, as long as we’re using our custom layout, every time we press “ALT + F”, the Facebook app will launch: External Keyboard Helper extends far beyond simple application shortcuts and if you are looking for deeper keyboard customization options, you should definitely check it out. Among other things, EKH also supports dozens of languages, allows you to quickly switch between layouts using a key or combo, add up to 16 custom text shortcuts, and much more! It can be had on Google Play for $2.53 for the full version, but you can try the demo version for free. More extensive documentation on how to use the app is also available. Android? Keyboard? Sure, why not? Unlike traditional desktop operating systems, you don’t need a physical keyboard and mouse to use a mobile operating system. You can buy an iPad or Nexus 10 or Galaxy Note, and never need another accessory or peripheral – they work as intended right out of the box. It’s even possible you can write the next great American novel on one these devices, though that might require a lot of practice and patience. That said, using a keyboard with Android is kind of fun. It’s not revelatory but it does elevate the experience. You don’t even need to add customizations (though they are nice) because there are enough existing keyboard shortcuts in Android to make it usable. Plus, when it comes to inputting text such as in an editor or terminal application, we fully advocate big, physical keyboards. Bottom line, if you’re looking for a way to enhance your Android tablet, give a keyboard a chance. Do you use your Android device for productivity? Is a physical keyboard an important part of your setup? Do you have any shortcuts that we missed? Sound off in the comments and let us know what you think.     

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• Stream Media and Live TV Across the Internet with Orb

  - by DigitalGeekery

  Looking for a way to stream your media collection across the Internet? Or perhaps watch and record TV remotely? Today we are going to look at how to do all that and more with Orb. Requirements Windows XP / Vista / 7 or Intel based Mac w/ OS X 10.5 or later. 1 GB RAM or more Pentium 4 2.4 GHz or higher / AMD Athlon 3200+ Broadband connections TV Tuner for streaming and recording live TV (optional) Note: Slower internet connections may result in stuttering during playback. Installation and Setup Download and install Orb on your home computer. (Download link below) You’ll want to take the defaults for the initial portion of the install. When we get to the Orb Account setup portion of the install is when we will have to enter information and make some decisions. Choose your language and click Next. We’ll need to create and user account and password. A valid email address is required as we’ll need to confirm the account later. Click Next.   Now you’ll want to choose your media sources. Orb will automatically look for folders that may contain media files. You can add or remove folders click on the (+) or (-) buttons. To remove a folder, click on it once to select it from the list and then click the minus (-) button. To add a folder, click the plus (+) button and browse for the folder. You can add local folders as well as shared folders from networked computers and USB attached storage. Note: Both the host computer running Orb and the networked computer will need to be running to access shared network folders remotely. When you’ve selected all your media files, click Next. Orb will proceed to index your media files… When the indexing is complete, click Next. Orb TV Setup Note: Streaming Live TV to Macs is not currently supported. If you have a TV tuner card connected to your PC, you can opt to configure Orb to stream live or recorded TV. Click Next  to configure TV. Or, choose Skip if you don’t wish to configure Orb for TV.   If you have a Digital tuner card, type in your Zip Code and click Get List to pull your channel listings. Select a TV provider from the list and click Next. If not, click Skip.   You can select or deselect any channels by checking or un-checking the box to each channel. Select Auto Scan to let Orb find more channels or disable the ones with no reception. Click Next when finished.   Next choose an analog provider, if necessary, and click Next.   Select “Yes” or “No” for a set top box and click Next. Just as we did with the Digital tuner, select or deselect any channels by checking or un-checking the box to each channel. Select Auto Scan to let Orb find more channels or disable the ones with no reception. Click Next when finished.   Now we’re finished with the setup. Click Close. Accessing your Media Remotely Media files are accessed through a web-based interface. Before we go any further, however, we’ll need to confirm our username and password. Check your inbox for an email from Orb Networks. Click the enclosed confirmation link. You’ll be prompted to enter the username and password you selected in your browser then click Next.   Your account will be confirmed. Now, we’re ready to enjoy our media remotely. To get started, point your browser to the MyCast website from your remote computer. (See link below) Enter your credentials and click Log In. Once logged in, you’ll be presented with the MyCast Home screen. By default you’ll see a handful of “channels” such as a TV program guide, random audio and photos, video favorites, and weather. You can add, remove, or customize channels. To add additional channels, click on Add Channels at the top right…   …and select from the dropdown list. To access your full media libraries, click Open Application at the top left and select from one of the options. Live and Recorded TV If you have a TV tuner card you configured for Orb, you’ll see your program guide on the TV / Webcams screen. To watch or record a show, click on the program listing to bring up a detail box. Then click the red button to record, or the green button to play. When recording a show, you’ll see a pulsating red icon at the top right of the listing in the program guide. If you want to watch Live TV, you may be prompted to choose your media player, depending on your browser and settings. Playback should begin shortly.   Note for Windows Media Center Users If you try to stream live TV in Orb while Windows Media Center is running on your PC, you’ll get an error message. Click the Stop MediaCenter button and then try again.   Audio On the Audio screen, you’ll find your music files indexed by genre, artist, and album. You can play a selection by clicking once and then clicking the green play button, or by simply double-clicking.   Playback will begin in the default media player for the streaming format.   Video Video works essentially the same as audio. Click on a selection and press the green play button, or double-click on the video title. Video playback will begin in the default media player for the streaming format.   Streaming Formats You can change the default streaming format in the control panel settings. To access the Control Panel, click on Open Applications  and select Control Panel. You can also click Settings at the top right.   Select General from the drop down list and then click on the Streaming Formats tab. You are provided four options. Flash, Windows Media, .SDP, and .PLS.   Creating Playlists To create playlists, drag and drop your media title to the playlist work area on the right, or click Add to playlist on the top menu. Click Save when finished.    Sharing your Media Orb allows you to share media playlists across the Internet with friends and family. There are a few ways to accomplish this. We’ll start by click the Share button at the bottom of the playlist work area after you’ve compiled your playlist. You’ll be prompted to choose a method by which to share your playlist. You’ll have the option to share your playlist publicly or privately. You can share publically through links, blogs, or on your Orb public profile.  By choosing the Public Profile option, Orb will automatically create a profile page for you with a URL like http://public.orb.com/username that anyone can easily access on the Internet. The private sharing option allows you to invite friends by email and requires recipients to register with Orb. You can also give your playlist a custom name, or accept the auto-generated title. Click OK when finished. Users who visit your public profile will be able to view and stream any of your shared playlists to their computer or supported device.   Portable Media Devices and Smartphones Orb can stream media to many portable devices and 3G phones. Streaming audio is supported on the iPhone and iPod Touch through the Safari browser. However, video and live TV streaming requires the Orb Live iPhone App.  Orb Live is available in the App store for $9.99. To stream media to your portable device, go to the MyCast website in your mobile browser and login. Browse for your media or playlist. Make a selection and play the media. Playback will begin. We found streaming music to both the Droid and the iPhone to work quite nicely. Video playback on the Droid, however, left a bit to be desired. The video looked good, but the audio tended to be out of sync. System Tray Control Panel By default Orb runs in the system tray on start up. To access the System Tray Control Panel, right-click on the Orb icon in the system tray and select Control Panel. Login with your Orb username and  password and click OK.   From here you can add or remove media sources, add manage accounts, change your password, and more. If you’d rather not run Orb on Startup, click the General icon.   Unselect the checkbox next to Start Orb when the system starts. Conclusion It may seem like a lot of steps, but getting Orb up and running isn’t terribly difficult. Orb is available for both Windows and Intel based Macs. It also supports streaming to many Game Consoles such as the Wii, PS3, and XBox 360. If you are running Windows 7 on multiple computers, you may want to check out our write-up on how to stream music and video over the Internet with Windows Media Player 12. Downloads Download Orb Logon to MyCast Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Stream Music and Video Over the Internet with Windows Media Player 12Enable Media Streaming in Windows Home Server to Windows Media PlayerStream Media from Windows 7 to XP with VLC Media PlayerShare Digital Media With Other Computers on a Home Network with Windows 7Automatically Start Windows 7 Media Center in Live TV Mode TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Looking for Good Windows Media Player 12 Plug-ins? Find Out the Celebrity You Resemble With FaceDouble Whoa ! Use Printflush to Solve Printing Problems Icelandic Volcano Webcams Open Multiple Links At One Go

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• ASP.NET Web Forms Extensibility: Providers

  - by Ricardo Peres

  Introduction This will be the first of a number of posts on ASP.NET extensibility. At this moment I don’t know exactly how many will be and I only know a couple of subjects that I want to talk about, so more will come in the next days. I have the sensation that the providers offered by ASP.NET are not widely know, although everyone uses, for example, sessions, they may not be aware of the extensibility points that Microsoft included. This post won’t go into details of how to configure and extend each of the providers, but will hopefully give some pointers on that direction. Canonical These are the most widely known and used providers, coming from ASP.NET 1, chances are, you have used them already. Good support for invoking client side, either from a .NET application or from JavaScript. Lots of server-side controls use them, such as the Login control for example. Membership The Membership provider is responsible for managing registered users, including creating new ones, authenticating them, changing passwords, etc. ASP.NET comes with two implementations, one that uses a SQL Server database and another that uses the Active Directory. The base class is Membership and new providers are registered on the membership section on the Web.config file, as well as parameters for specifying minimum password lengths, complexities, maximum age, etc. One reason for creating a custom provider would be, for example, storing membership information in a different database engine. 1: <membership defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 4: </providers> 5: </membership> Role The Role provider assigns roles to authenticated users. The base class is Role and there are three out of the box implementations: XML-based, SQL Server and Windows-based. Also registered on Web.config through the roleManager section, where you can also say if your roles should be cached on a cookie. If you want your roles to come from a different place, implement a custom provider. 1: <roleManager defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> 4: </providers> 5: </roleManager> Profile The Profile provider allows defining a set of properties that will be tied and made available to authenticated or even anonymous ones, which must be tracked by using anonymous authentication. The base class is Profile and the only included implementation stores these settings in a SQL Server database. Configured through profile section, where you also specify the properties to make available, a custom provider would allow storing these properties in different locations. 1: <profile defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 4: </providers> 5: </profile> Basic OK, I didn’t know what to call these, so Basic is probably as good as a name as anything else. Not supported client-side (doesn’t even make sense). Session The Session provider allows storing data tied to the current “session”, which is normally created when a user first accesses the site, even when it is not yet authenticated, and remains all the way. The base class and only included implementation is SessionStateStoreProviderBase and it is capable of storing data in one of three locations: In the process memory (default, not suitable for web farms or increased reliability); A SQL Server database (best for reliability and clustering); The ASP.NET State Service, which is a Windows Service that is installed with the .NET Framework (ok for clustering). The configuration is made through the sessionState section. By adding a custom Session provider, you can store the data in different locations – think for example of a distributed cache. 1: <sessionState customProvider=”MyProvider”> 2: <providers> 3: <add name=”MyProvider” type=”MyClass, MyAssembly” /> 4: </providers> 5: </sessionState> Resource A not so known provider, allows you to change the origin of localized resource elements. By default, these come from RESX files and are used whenever you use the Resources expression builder or the GetGlobalResourceObject and GetLocalResourceObject methods, but if you implement a custom provider, you can have these elements come from some place else, such as a database. The base class is ResourceProviderFactory and there’s only one internal implementation which uses these RESX files. Configuration is through the globalization section. 1: <globalization resourceProviderFactoryType="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Health Monitoring Health Monitoring is also probably not so well known, and actually not a good name for it. First, in order to understand what it does, you have to know that ASP.NET fires “events” at specific times and when specific things happen, such as when logging in, an exception is raised. These are not user interface events and you can create your own and fire them, nothing will happen, but the Health Monitoring provider will detect it. You can configure it to do things when certain conditions are met, such as a number of events being fired in a certain amount of time. You define these rules and route them to a specific provider, which must inherit from WebEventProvider. Out of the box implementations include sending mails, logging to a SQL Server database, writing to the Windows Event Log, Windows Management Instrumentation, the IIS 7 Trace infrastructure or the debugger Trace. Its configuration is achieved by the healthMonitoring section and a reason for implementing a custom provider would be, for example, locking down a web application in the event of a significant number of failed login attempts occurring in a small period of time. 1: <healthMonitoring> 2: <providers> 3: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 4: </providers> 5: </healthMonitoring> Sitemap The Sitemap provider allows defining the site’s navigation structure and associated required permissions for each node, in a tree-like fashion. Usually this is statically defined, and the included provider allows it, by supplying this structure in a Web.sitemap XML file. The base class is SiteMapProvider and you can extend it in order to supply you own source for the site’s structure, which may even be dynamic. Its configuration must be done through the siteMap section. 1: <siteMap defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 2: <providers><add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> 3: </providers> 4: </siteMap> Web Part Personalization Web Parts are better known by SharePoint users, but since ASP.NET 2.0 they are included in the core Framework. Web Parts are server-side controls that offer certain possibilities of configuration by clients visiting the page where they are located. The infrastructure handles this configuration per user or globally for all users and this provider is responsible for just that. The base class is PersonalizationProvider and the only included implementation stores settings on SQL Server. Add new providers through the personalization section. 1: <webParts> 2: <personalization defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 3: <providers> 4: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 5: </providers> 6: </personalization> 7: </webParts> Build The Build provider is responsible for compiling whatever files are present on your web folder. There’s a base class, BuildProvider, and, as can be expected, internal implementations for building pages (ASPX), master pages (Master), user web controls (ASCX), handlers (ASHX), themes (Skin), XML Schemas (XSD), web services (ASMX, SVC), resources (RESX), browser capabilities files (Browser) and so on. You would write a build provider if you wanted to generate code from any kind of non-code file so that you have strong typing at development time. Configuration goes on the buildProviders section and it is per extension. 1: <buildProviders> 2: <add extension=".ext" type="MyClass, MyAssembly” /> 3: </buildProviders> New in ASP.NET 4 Not exactly new since they exist since 2010, but in ASP.NET terms, still new. Output Cache The Output Cache for ASPX pages and ASCX user controls is now extensible, through the Output Cache provider, which means you can implement a custom mechanism for storing and retrieving cached data, for example, in a distributed fashion. The base class is OutputCacheProvider and the only implementation is private. Configuration goes on the outputCache section and on each page and web user control you can choose the provider you want to use. 1: <caching> 2: <outputCache defaultProvider="MyProvider"> 3: <providers> 4: <add name="MyProvider" type="MyClass, MyAssembly"/> 5: </providers> 6: </outputCache> 7: </caching> Request Validation A big change introduced in ASP.NET 4 (and refined in 4.5, by the way) is the introduction of extensible request validation, by means of a Request Validation provider. This means we are not limited to either enabling or disabling event validation for all pages or for a specific page, but we now have fine control over each of the elements of the request, including cookies, headers, query string and form values. The base provider class is RequestValidator and the configuration goes on the httpRuntime section. 1: <httpRuntime requestValidationType="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Browser Capabilities The Browser Capabilities provider is new in ASP.NET 4, although the concept exists from ASP.NET 2. The idea is to map a browser brand and version to its supported capabilities, such as JavaScript version, Flash support, ActiveX support, and so on. Previously, this was all hardcoded in .Browser files located in %WINDIR%\Microsoft.NET\Framework(64)\vXXXXX\Config\Browsers, but now you can have a class inherit from HttpCapabilitiesProvider and implement your own mechanism. Register in on the browserCaps section. 1: <browserCaps provider="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Encoder The Encoder provider is responsible for encoding every string that is sent to the browser on a page or header. This includes for example converting special characters for their standard codes and is implemented by the base class HttpEncoder. Another implementation takes care of Anti Cross Site Scripting (XSS) attacks. Build your own by inheriting from one of these classes if you want to add some additional processing to these strings. The configuration will go on the httpRuntime section. 1: <httpRuntime encoderType="MyClass, MyAssembly" /> Conclusion That’s about it for ASP.NET providers. It was by no means a thorough description, but I hope I managed to raise your interest on this subject. There are lots of pointers on the Internet, so I only included direct references to the Framework classes and configuration sections. Stay tuned for more extensibility!

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• Building a Windows Phone 7 Twitter Application using Silverlight

  - by ScottGu

  On Monday I had the opportunity to present the MIX 2010 Day 1 Keynote in Las Vegas (you can watch a video of it here).  In the keynote I announced the release of the Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (we’ll ship the final release of it next month) and the VS 2010 RC tools for Silverlight 4.  I also had the chance to talk for the first time about how Silverlight and XNA can now be used to build Windows Phone 7 applications. During my talk I did two quick Windows Phone 7 coding demos using Silverlight – a quick “Hello World” application and a “Twitter” data-snacking application.  Both applications were easy to build and only took a few minutes to create on stage.  Below are the steps you can follow yourself to build them on your own machines as well. [Note: In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] Building a “Hello World” Windows Phone 7 Application First make sure you’ve installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP – this includes the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone development tool (which will be free forever and is the only thing you need to develop and build Windows Phone 7 applications) as well as an add-on to the VS 2010 RC that enables phone development within the full VS 2010 as well. After you’ve downloaded and installed the Windows Phone Developer Tools CTP, launch the Visual Studio 2010 Express for Windows Phone that it installs or launch the VS 2010 RC (if you have it already installed), and then choose “File”->”New Project.”  Here, you’ll find the usual list of project template types along with a new category: “Silverlight for Windows Phone”. The first CTP offers two application project templates. The first is the “Windows Phone Application” template - this is what we’ll use for this example. The second is the “Windows Phone List Application” template - which provides the basic layout for a master-details phone application: After creating a new project, you’ll get a view of the design surface and markup. Notice that the design surface shows the phone UI, letting you easily see how your application will look while you develop. For those familiar with Visual Studio, you’ll also find the familiar ToolBox, Solution Explorer and Properties pane. For our HelloWorld application, we’ll start out by adding a TextBox and a Button from the Toolbox. Notice that you get the same design experience as you do for Silverlight on the web or desktop. You can easily resize, position and align your controls on the design surface. Changing properties is easy with the Properties pane. We’ll change the name of the TextBox that we added to username and change the page title text to “Hello world.” We’ll then write some code by double-clicking on the button and create an event handler in the code-behind file (MainPage.xaml.cs). We’ll start out by changing the title text of the application. The project template included this title as a TextBlock with the name textBlockListTitle (note that the current name incorrectly includes the word “list”; that will be fixed for the final release.)  As we write code against it we get intellisense showing the members available.  Below we’ll set the Text property of the title TextBlock to “Hello “ + the Text property of the TextBox username: We now have all the code necessary for a Hello World application.  We have two choices when it comes to deploying and running the application. We can either deploy to an actual device itself or use the built-in phone emulator: Because the phone emulator is actually the phone operating system running in a virtual machine, we’ll get the same experience developing in the emulator as on the device. For this sample, we’ll just press F5 to start the application with debugging using the emulator.  Once the phone operating system loads, the emulator will run the new “Hello world” application exactly as it would on the device: Notice that we can change several settings of the emulator experience with the emulator toolbar – which is a floating toolbar on the top right.  This includes the ability to re-size/zoom the emulator and two rotate buttons.  Zoom lets us zoom into even the smallest detail of the application: The orientation buttons allow us easily see what the application looks like in landscape mode (orientation change support is just built into the default template): Note that the emulator can be reused across F5 debug sessions - that means that we don’t have to start the emulator for every deployment. We’ve added a dialog that will help you from accidentally shutting down the emulator if you want to reuse it.  Launching an application on an already running emulator should only take ~3 seconds to deploy and run. Within our Hello World application we’ll click the “username” textbox to give it focus.  This will cause the software input panel (SIP) to open up automatically.  We can either type a message or – since we are using the emulator – just type in text.  Note that the emulator works with Windows 7 multi-touch so, if you have a touchscreen, you can see how interaction will feel on a device just by pressing the screen. We’ll enter “MIX 10” in the textbox and then click the button – this will cause the title to update to be “Hello MIX 10”: We provide the same Visual Studio experience when developing for the phone as other .NET applications. This means that we can set a breakpoint within the button event handler, press the button again and have it break within the debugger: Building a “Twitter” Windows Phone 7 Application using Silverlight Rather than just stop with “Hello World” let’s keep going and evolve it to be a basic Twitter client application. We’ll return to the design surface and add a ListBox, using the snaplines within the designer to fit it to the device screen and make the best use of phone screen real estate.  We’ll also rename the Button “Lookup”: We’ll then return to the Button event handler in Main.xaml.cs, and remove the original “Hello World” line of code and take advantage of the WebClient networking class to asynchronously download a Twitter feed. This takes three lines of code in total: (1) declaring and creating the WebClient, (2) attaching an event handler and then (3) calling the asynchronous DownloadStringAsync method. In the DownloadStringAsync call, we’ll pass a Twitter Uri plus a query string which pulls the text from the “username” TextBox. This feed will pull down the respective user’s most frequent posts in an XML format. When the call completes, the DownloadStringCompleted event is fired and our generated event handler twitter_DownloadStringCompleted will be called: The result returned from the Twitter call will come back in an XML based format.  To parse this we’ll use LINQ to XML. LINQ to XML lets us create simple queries for accessing data in an xml feed. To use this library, we’ll first need to add a reference to the assembly (right click on the References folder in the solution explorer and choose “Add Reference): We’ll then add a “using System.Xml.Linq” namespace reference at the top of the code-behind file at the top of Main.xaml.cs file: We’ll then add a simple helper class called TwitterItem to our project. TwitterItem has three string members – UserName, Message and ImageSource: We’ll then implement the twitter_DownloadStringCompleted event handler and use LINQ to XML to parse the returned XML string from Twitter.  What the query is doing is pulling out the three key pieces of information for each Twitter post from the username we passed as the query string. These are the ImageSource for their profile image, the Message of their tweet and their UserName. For each Tweet in the XML, we are creating a new TwitterItem in the IEnumerable<XElement> returned by the Linq query.  We then assign the generated TwitterItem sequence to the ListBox’s ItemsSource property: We’ll then do one more step to complete the application. In the Main.xaml file, we’ll add an ItemTemplate to the ListBox. For the demo, I used a simple template that uses databinding to show the user’s profile image, their tweet and their username. <ListBox Height="521" HorizonalAlignment="Left" Margin="0,131,0,0" Name="listBox1" VerticalAlignment="Top" Width="476"> <ListBox.ItemTemplate> <DataTemplate> <StackPanel Orientation="Horizontal" Height="132"> <Image Source="{Binding ImageSource}" Height="73" Width="73" VerticalAlignment="Top" Margin="0,10,8,0"/> <StackPanel Width="370"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding UserName}" Foreground="#FFC8AB14" FontSize="28" /> <TextBlock Text="{Binding Message}" TextWrapping="Wrap" FontSize="24" /> </StackPanel> </StackPanel> </DataTemplate> </ListBox.ItemTemplate> </ListBox> Now, pressing F5 again, we are able to reuse the emulator and re-run the application. Once the application has launched, we can type in a Twitter username and press the  Button to see the results. Try my Twitter user name (scottgu) and you’ll get back a result of TwitterItems in the Listbox: Try using the mouse (or if you have a touchscreen device your finger) to scroll the items in the Listbox – you should find that they move very fast within the emulator.  This is because the emulator is hardware accelerated – and so gives you the same fast performance that you get on the actual phone hardware. Summary Silverlight and the VS 2010 Tools for Windows Phone (and the corresponding Expression Blend Tools for Windows Phone) make building Windows Phone applications both really easy and fun.  At MIX this week a number of great partners (including Netflix, FourSquare, Seesmic, Shazaam, Major League Soccer, Graphic.ly, Associated Press, Jackson Fish and more) showed off some killer application prototypes they’ve built over the last few weeks.  You can watch my full day 1 keynote to see them in action. I think they start to show some of the promise and potential of using Silverlight with Windows Phone 7.  I’ll be doing more blog posts in the weeks and months ahead that cover that more. Hope this helps, Scott

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• Pluralsight Meet the Author Podcast on HTML5 Canvas Programming

  - by dwahlin

    In the latest installment of Pluralsight’s Meet the Author podcast series, Fritz Onion and I talk about my new course, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals.  In the interview I describe different canvas technologies covered throughout the course and a sample application at the end of the course that covers how to build a custom business chart from start to finish. Meet the Author:  Dan Wahlin on HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals   Transcript [Fritz] Hi. This is Fritz Onion. I’m here today with Dan Wahlin to talk about his new course HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals. Dan founded the Wahlin Group, which you can find at thewahlingroup.com, which specializes in ASP.NET, jQuery, Silverlight, and SharePoint consulting. He’s a Microsoft Regional Director and has been awarded Microsoft’s MVP for ASP.NET, Connected Systems, and Silverlight. Dan is on the INETA Bureau’s — Speaker’s Bureau, speaks at conferences and user groups around the world, and has written several books on .NET. Thanks for talking to me today, Dan. [Dan] Always good to talk with you, Fritz. [Fritz] So this new course of yours, HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals, I have to say that most of the really snazzy demos I’ve seen with HTML5 have involved Canvas, so I thought it would be a good starting point to chat with you about why we decided to create a course dedicated just to Canvas. If you want to kind of give us that perspective. [Dan] Sure. So, you know, there’s quite a bit of material out there on HTML5 in general, and as people that have done a lot with HTML5 are probably aware, a lot of HTML5 is actually JavaScript centric. You know, a lot of people when they first learn it, think it’s tags, but most of it’s actually JavaScript, and it just so happens that the HTML5 Canvas is one of those things. And so it’s not just, you know, a tag you add and it just magically draws all these things. You mentioned there’s a lot of cool things you can do from games to there’s some really cool multimedia applications out there where they integrate video and audio and all kinds of things into the Canvas, to more business scenarios such as charting and things along those lines. So the reason we made a course specifically on it is, a lot of the material out there touches on it but the Canvas is actually a pretty deep topic. You can do some pretty advanced stuff or easy stuff depending on what your application requirements are, and the API itself, you know, there’s over 30 functions just in the Canvas API and then a whole set of properties that actually go with that as well. So it’s a pretty big topic, and that’s why we created a course specifically tailored towards just the Canvas. [Fritz] Right. And let’s — let me just review the outline briefly here for everyone. So you start off with an introduction to getting started with Canvas, drawing with the HTML5 Canvas, then you talk about manipulating pixels, and you finish up with building a custom data chart. So I really like your example flow here. I think it will appeal to even business developers, right. Even if you’re not into HTML5 for the games or the media capabilities, there’s still something here for everyone I think working with the Canvas. Which leads me to another question, which is, where do you see the Canvas fitting in to kind of your day-to-day developer, people that are working business applications and maybe vanilla websites that aren’t doing kind of cutting edge stuff with interactivity with users? Is there a still a place for the Canvas in those scenarios? [Dan] Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of us — and I include myself here — over the last few years, the focus has generally been, especially if you’re, let’s say, a PHP or ASP.NET or Java type of developer, we’re kind of accustomed to working on the server side, and, you know, we kind of relied on Flash or Silverlight or these other plug-ins for the client side stuff when it was kind of fancy, like charts and graphs and things along those lines. With the what I call massive shift of applications, you know, mainly because of mobile, to more of client side, one of the big benefits I think from a maybe corporate standard way of thinking of things, since we do a lot of work with different corporations, is that, number one, rather than having to have the plug-in, which of course isn’t going to work on iPad and some of these other devices out there that are pretty popular, you can now use a built-in technology that all the modern browsers support, and that includes things like Safari on the iPad and iPhone and the Android tablets and things like that with their browsers, and actually render some really sophisticated charts. Whether you do it by scratch or from scratch or, you know, get a third party type of library involved, it’s just JavaScript. So it downloads fast so it’s good from a performance perspective; and when it comes to what you can render, it’s extremely robust. You can do everything from, you know, your basic circles to polygons or polylines to really advanced gradients as well and even provide some interactivity and animations, and that’s some of the stuff I touch upon in the class. In fact, you mentioned the last part of the outline there is building a custom data chart and that’s kind of gears towards more of the, what I’d call enterprise or corporate type developer. [Fritz] Yeah, that makes sense. And it’s, you know, a lot of the demos I’ve seen with HTML5 focus on more the interactivity and kind of game side of things, but the Canvas is such a diverse element within HTML5 that I can see it being applicable pretty much anywhere. So why don’t we talk a little bit about some of the specifics of what you cover? You talk about drawing and then manipulating pixels. You want to kind of give us the different ways of working with the Canvas and what some of those APIs provide for you? [Dan] Sure. So going all the way back to the start of the outline, we actually started off by showing different demonstrations of the Canvas in action, and we show some fun stuff — multimedia apps and games and things like that — and then also some more business scenarios; and then once you see that, hopefully it kinds of piques your interest and you go, oh, wow, this is actually pretty phenomenal what you can do. So then we start you off with, so how to you actually draw things. Now, there are some libraries out there that will draw things like graphs, but if you want to customize those or just build something you have from scratch, you need to know the basics, such as, you know, how do you draw circles and lines and arcs and Bezier curves and all those fancy types of shapes that a given chart may have on it or that a game may have in it for that matter. So we start off by covering what I call the core API functions; how do you, for instance, fill a rectangle or convert that to a square by setting the height and the width; how do you draw arcs or different types of curves and there’s different types supported such as I mentioned Bezier curves or quadratic curves; and then we also talk about how do you integrate text into it. You might have some images already that are just regular bitmap type images that you want to integrate, you can do that with a Canvas. And you can even sync video into the Canvas, which actually opens up some pretty interesting possibilities for both business and I think just general multimedia apps. Once you kind of get those core functions down for the basic shapes that you need to be able to draw on any type of Canvas, then we go a little deeper into what are the pixels that are there to manipulate. And that’s one of the important things to understand about the HTML5 Canvas, scalable vector graphics is another thing you can use now in the modern browsers; it’s vector based. Canvas is pixel based. And so we talk about how to do gradients, how can you do transforms, you know, how do you scale things or rotate things, which is extremely useful for charts ’cause you might have text that, you know, flips up on its side for a y-axis or something like that. And you can even do direct pixel manipulation. So it’s really, really powerful. If you want to get down to the RGBA level, you can do that, and I show how to do that in the course, and then kind of wrap that section up with some animation fundamentals. [Fritz] Great. Yeah, that’s really powerful stuff for programmatically rendering data to clients and responding to user inputs. Look forward to seeing what everyone’s going to come up with building this stuff. So great. That’s — that’s HTML5 Canvas Fundamentals with Dan Wahlin. Thanks very much, Dan. [Dan] Thanks again. I appreciate it.

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• Creating a Dynamic DataRow for easier DataRow Syntax

  - by Rick Strahl

  I've been thrown back into an older project that uses DataSets and DataRows as their entity storage model. I have several applications internally that I still maintain that run just fine (and I sometimes wonder if this wasn't easier than all this ORM crap we deal with with 'newer' improved technology today - but I disgress) but use this older code. For the most part DataSets/DataTables/DataRows are abstracted away in a pseudo entity model, but in some situations like queries DataTables and DataRows are still surfaced to the business layer. Here's an example. Here's a business object method that runs dynamic query and the code ends up looping over the result set using the ugly DataRow Array syntax:public int UpdateAllSafeTitles() { int result = this.Execute("select pk, title, safetitle from " + Tablename + " where EntryType=1", "TPks"); if (result < 0) return result; result = 0; foreach (DataRow row in this.DataSet.Tables["TPks"].Rows) { string title = row["title"] as string; string safeTitle = row["safeTitle"] as string; int pk = (int)row["pk"]; string newSafeTitle = this.GetSafeTitle(title); if (newSafeTitle != safeTitle) { this.ExecuteNonQuery("update " + this.Tablename + " set safeTitle=@safeTitle where pk=@pk", this.CreateParameter("@safeTitle",newSafeTitle), this.CreateParameter("@pk",pk) ); result++; } } return result; } The problem with looping over DataRow objecs is two fold: The array syntax is tedious to type and not real clear to look at, and explicit casting is required in order to do anything useful with the values. I've highlighted the place where this matters. Using the DynamicDataRow class I'll show in a minute this code can be changed to look like this:public int UpdateAllSafeTitles() { int result = this.Execute("select pk, title, safetitle from " + Tablename + " where EntryType=1", "TPks"); if (result < 0) return result; result = 0; foreach (DataRow row in this.DataSet.Tables["TPks"].Rows) { dynamic entry = new DynamicDataRow(row); string newSafeTitle = this.GetSafeTitle(entry.title); if (newSafeTitle != entry.safeTitle) { this.ExecuteNonQuery("update " + this.Tablename + " set safeTitle=@safeTitle where pk=@pk", this.CreateParameter("@safeTitle",newSafeTitle), this.CreateParameter("@pk",entry.pk) ); result++; } } return result; } The code looks much a bit more natural and describes what's happening a little nicer as well. Well, using the new dynamic features in .NET it's actually quite easy to implement the DynamicDataRow class. Creating your own custom Dynamic Objects .NET 4.0 introduced the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR) and opened up a whole bunch of new capabilities for .NET applications. The dynamic type is an easy way to avoid Reflection and directly access members of 'dynamic' or 'late bound' objects at runtime. There's a lot of very subtle but extremely useful stuff that dynamic does (especially for COM Interop scenearios) but in its simplest form it often allows you to do away with manual Reflection at runtime. In addition you can create DynamicObject implementations that can perform  custom interception of member accesses and so allow you to provide more natural access to more complex or awkward data structures like the DataRow that I use as an example here. Bascially you can subclass DynamicObject and then implement a few methods (TryGetMember, TrySetMember, TryInvokeMember) to provide the ability to return dynamic results from just about any data structure using simple property/method access. In the code above, I created a custom DynamicDataRow class which inherits from DynamicObject and implements only TryGetMember and TrySetMember. Here's what simple class looks like:/// <summary> /// This class provides an easy way to turn a DataRow /// into a Dynamic object that supports direct property /// access to the DataRow fields. /// /// The class also automatically fixes up DbNull values /// (null into .NET and DbNUll to DataRow) /// </summary> public class DynamicDataRow : DynamicObject { /// <summary> /// Instance of object passed in /// </summary> DataRow DataRow; /// <summary> /// Pass in a DataRow to work off /// </summary> /// <param name="instance"></param> public DynamicDataRow(DataRow dataRow) { DataRow = dataRow; } /// <summary> /// Returns a value from a DataRow items array. /// If the field doesn't exist null is returned. /// DbNull values are turned into .NET nulls. /// /// </summary> /// <param name="binder"></param> /// <param name="result"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool TryGetMember(GetMemberBinder binder, out object result) { result = null; try { result = DataRow[binder.Name]; if (result == DBNull.Value) result = null; return true; } catch { } result = null; return false; } /// <summary> /// Property setter implementation tries to retrieve value from instance /// first then into this object /// </summary> /// <param name="binder"></param> /// <param name="value"></param> /// <returns></returns> public override bool TrySetMember(SetMemberBinder binder, object value) { try { if (value == null) value = DBNull.Value; DataRow[binder.Name] = value; return true; } catch {} return false; } } To demonstrate the basic features here's a short test: [TestMethod] [ExpectedException(typeof(RuntimeBinderException))] public void BasicDataRowTests() { DataTable table = new DataTable("table"); table.Columns.Add( new DataColumn() { ColumnName = "Name", DataType=typeof(string) }); table.Columns.Add( new DataColumn() { ColumnName = "Entered", DataType=typeof(DateTime) }); table.Columns.Add(new DataColumn() { ColumnName = "NullValue", DataType = typeof(string) }); DataRow row = table.NewRow(); DateTime now = DateTime.Now; row["Name"] = "Rick"; row["Entered"] = now; row["NullValue"] = null; // converted in DbNull dynamic drow = new DynamicDataRow(row); string name = drow.Name; DateTime entered = drow.Entered; string nulled = drow.NullValue; Assert.AreEqual(name, "Rick"); Assert.AreEqual(entered,now); Assert.IsNull(nulled); // this should throw a RuntimeBinderException Assert.AreEqual(entered,drow.enteredd); } The DynamicDataRow requires a custom constructor that accepts a single parameter that sets the DataRow. Once that's done you can access property values that match the field names. Note that types are automatically converted - no type casting is needed in the code you write. The class also automatically converts DbNulls to regular nulls and vice versa which is something that makes it much easier to deal with data returned from a database. What's cool here isn't so much the functionality - even if I'd prefer to leave DataRow behind ASAP -  but the fact that we can create a dynamic type that uses a DataRow as it's 'DataSource' to serve member values. It's pretty useful feature if you think about it, especially given how little code it takes to implement. By implementing these two simple methods we get to provide two features I was complaining about at the beginning that are missing from the DataRow: Direct Property Syntax Automatic Type Casting so no explicit casts are required Caveats As cool and easy as this functionality is, it's important to understand that it doesn't come for free. The dynamic features in .NET are - well - dynamic. Which means they are essentially evaluated at runtime (late bound). Rather than static typing where everything is compiled and linked by the compiler/linker, member invokations are looked up at runtime and essentially call into your custom code. There's some overhead in this. Direct invocations - the original code I showed - is going to be faster than the equivalent dynamic code. However, in the above code the difference of running the dynamic code and the original data access code was very minor. The loop running over 1500 result records took on average 13ms with the original code and 14ms with the dynamic code. Not exactly a serious performance bottleneck. One thing to remember is that Microsoft optimized the DLR code significantly so that repeated calls to the same operations are routed very efficiently which actually makes for very fast evaluation. The bottom line for performance with dynamic code is: Make sure you test and profile your code if you think that there might be a performance issue. However, in my experience with dynamic types so far performance is pretty good for repeated operations (ie. in loops). While usually a little slower the perf hit is a lot less typically than equivalent Reflection work. Although the code in the second example looks like standard object syntax, dynamic is not static code. It's evaluated at runtime and so there's no type recognition until runtime. This means no Intellisense at development time, and any invalid references that call into 'properties' (ie. fields in the DataRow) that don't exist still cause runtime errors. So in the case of the data row you still get a runtime error if you mistype a column name:// this should throw a RuntimeBinderException Assert.AreEqual(entered,drow.enteredd); Dynamic - Lots of uses The arrival of Dynamic types in .NET has been met with mixed emotions. Die hard .NET developers decry dynamic types as an abomination to the language. After all what dynamic accomplishes goes against all that a static language is supposed to provide. On the other hand there are clearly scenarios when dynamic can make life much easier (COM Interop being one place). Think of the possibilities. What other data structures would you like to expose to a simple property interface rather than some sort of collection or dictionary? And beyond what I showed here you can also implement 'Method missing' behavior on objects with InvokeMember which essentially allows you to create dynamic methods. It's all very flexible and maybe just as important: It's easy to do. There's a lot of power hidden in this seemingly simple interface. Your move…© Rick Strahl, West Wind Technologies, 2005-2011Posted in CSharp  .NET   Tweet (function() { var po = document.createElement('script'); po.type = 'text/javascript'; po.async = true; po.src = 'https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js'; var s = document.getElementsByTagName('script')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();

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• [GEEK SCHOOL] Network Security 1: Securing User Accounts and Passwords in Windows

  - by Matt Klein

  This How-To Geek School class is intended for people who want to learn more about security when using Windows operating systems. You will learn many principles that will help you have a more secure computing experience and will get the chance to use all the important security tools and features that are bundled with Windows. Obviously, we will share everything you need to know about using them effectively. In this first lesson, we will talk about password security; the different ways of logging into Windows and how secure they are. In the proceeding lesson, we will explain where Windows stores all the user names and passwords you enter while working in this operating systems, how safe they are, and how to manage this data. Moving on in the series, we will talk about User Account Control, its role in improving the security of your system, and how to use Windows Defender in order to protect your system from malware. Then, we will talk about the Windows Firewall, how to use it in order to manage the apps that get access to the network and the Internet, and how to create your own filtering rules. After that, we will discuss the SmartScreen Filter – a security feature that gets more and more attention from Microsoft and is now widely used in its Windows 8.x operating systems. Moving on, we will discuss ways to keep your software and apps up-to-date, why this is important and which tools you can use to automate this process as much as possible. Last but not least, we will discuss the Action Center and its role in keeping you informed about what’s going on with your system and share several tips and tricks about how to stay safe when using your computer and the Internet. Let’s get started by discussing everyone’s favorite subject: passwords. The Types of Passwords Found in Windows In Windows 7, you have only local user accounts, which may or may not have a password. For example, you can easily set a blank password for any user account, even if that one is an administrator. The only exception to this rule are business networks where domain policies force all user accounts to use a non-blank password. In Windows 8.x, you have both local accounts and Microsoft accounts. If you would like to learn more about them, don’t hesitate to read the lesson on User Accounts, Groups, Permissions & Their Role in Sharing, in our Windows Networking series. Microsoft accounts are obliged to use a non-blank password due to the fact that a Microsoft account gives you access to Microsoft services. Using a blank password would mean exposing yourself to lots of problems. Local accounts in Windows 8.1 however, can use a blank password. On top of traditional passwords, any user account can create and use a 4-digit PIN or a picture password. These concepts were introduced by Microsoft to speed up the sign in process for the Windows 8.x operating system. However, they do not replace the use of a traditional password and can be used only in conjunction with a traditional user account password. Another type of password that you encounter in Windows operating systems is the Homegroup password. In a typical home network, users can use the Homegroup to easily share resources. A Homegroup can be joined by a Windows device only by using the Homegroup password. If you would like to learn more about the Homegroup and how to use it for network sharing, don’t hesitate to read our Windows Networking series. What to Keep in Mind When Creating Passwords, PINs and Picture Passwords When creating passwords, a PIN, or a picture password for your user account, we would like you keep in mind the following recommendations: Do not use blank passwords, even on the desktop computers in your home. You never know who may gain unwanted access to them. Also, malware can run more easily as administrator because you do not have a password. Trading your security for convenience when logging in is never a good idea. When creating a password, make it at least eight characters long. Make sure that it includes a random mix of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Ideally, it should not be related in any way to your name, username, or company name. Make sure that your passwords do not include complete words from any dictionary. Dictionaries are the first thing crackers use to hack passwords. Do not use the same password for more than one account. All of your passwords should be unique and you should use a system like LastPass, KeePass, Roboform or something similar to keep track of them. When creating a PIN use four different digits to make things slightly harder to crack. When creating a picture password, pick a photo that has at least 10 “points of interests”. Points of interests are areas that serve as a landmark for your gestures. Use a random mixture of gesture types and sequence and make sure that you do not repeat the same gesture twice. Be aware that smudges on the screen could potentially reveal your gestures to others. The Security of Your Password vs. the PIN and the Picture Password Any kind of password can be cracked with enough effort and the appropriate tools. There is no such thing as a completely secure password. However, passwords created using only a few security principles are much harder to crack than others. If you respect the recommendations shared in the previous section of this lesson, you will end up having reasonably secure passwords. Out of all the log in methods in Windows 8.x, the PIN is the easiest to brute force because PINs are restricted to four digits and there are only 10,000 possible unique combinations available. The picture password is more secure than the PIN because it provides many more opportunities for creating unique combinations of gestures. Microsoft have compared the two login options from a security perspective in this post: Signing in with a picture password. In order to discourage brute force attacks against picture passwords and PINs, Windows defaults to your traditional text password after five failed attempts. The PIN and the picture password function only as alternative login methods to Windows 8.x. Therefore, if someone cracks them, he or she doesn’t have access to your user account password. However, that person can use all the apps installed on your Windows 8.x device, access your files, data, and so on. How to Create a PIN in Windows 8.x If you log in to a Windows 8.x device with a user account that has a non-blank password, then you can create a 4-digit PIN for it, to use it as a complementary login method. In order to create one, you need to go to “PC Settings”. If you don’t know how, then press Windows + C on your keyboard or flick from the right edge of the screen, on a touch-enabled device, then press “Settings”. The Settings charm is now open. Click or tap the link that says “Change PC settings”, on the bottom of the charm. In PC settings, go to Accounts and then to “Sign-in options”. Here you will find all the necessary options for changing your existing password, creating a PIN, or a picture password. To create a PIN, press the “Add” button in the PIN section. The “Create a PIN” wizard is started and you are asked to enter the password of your user account. Type it and press “OK”. Now you are asked to enter a 4-digit pin in the “Enter PIN” and “Confirm PIN” fields. The PIN has been created and you can now use it to log in to Windows. How to Create a Picture Password in Windows 8.x If you log in to a Windows 8.x device with a user account that has a non-blank password, then you can also create a picture password and use it as a complementary login method. In order to create one, you need to go to “PC settings”. In PC Settings, go to Accounts and then to “Sign-in options”. Here you will find all the necessary options for changing your existing password, creating a PIN, or a picture password. To create a picture password, press the “Add” button in the “Picture password” section. The “Create a picture password” wizard is started and you are asked to enter the password of your user account. You are shown a guide on how the picture password works. Take a few seconds to watch it and learn the gestures that can be used for your picture password. You will learn that you can create a combination of circles, straight lines, and taps. When ready, press “Choose picture”. Browse your Windows 8.x device and select the picture you want to use for your password and press “Open”. Now you can drag the picture to position it the way you want. When you like how the picture is positioned, press “Use this picture” on the left. If you are not happy with the picture, press “Choose new picture” and select a new one, as shown during the previous step. After you have confirmed that you want to use this picture, you are asked to set up your gestures for the picture password. Draw three gestures on the picture, any combination you wish. Please remember that you can use only three gestures: circles, straight lines, and taps. Once you have drawn those three gestures, you are asked to confirm. Draw the same gestures one more time. If everything goes well, you are informed that you have created your picture password and that you can use it the next time you sign in to Windows. If you don’t confirm the gestures correctly, you will be asked to try again, until you draw the same gestures twice. To close the picture password wizard, press “Finish”. Where Does Windows Store Your Passwords? Are They Safe? All the passwords that you enter in Windows and save for future use are stored in the Credential Manager. This tool is a vault with the usernames and passwords that you use to log on to your computer, to other computers on the network, to apps from the Windows Store, or to websites using Internet Explorer. By storing these credentials, Windows can automatically log you the next time you access the same app, network share, or website. Everything that is stored in the Credential Manager is encrypted for your protection.

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• Recover Data Like a Forensics Expert Using an Ubuntu Live CD

  - by Trevor Bekolay

  There are lots of utilities to recover deleted files, but what if you can’t boot up your computer, or the whole drive has been formatted? We’ll show you some tools that will dig deep and recover the most elusive deleted files, or even whole hard drive partitions. We’ve shown you simple ways to recover accidentally deleted files, even a simple method that can be done from an Ubuntu Live CD, but for hard disks that have been heavily corrupted, those methods aren’t going to cut it. In this article, we’ll examine four tools that can recover data from the most messed up hard drives, regardless of whether they were formatted for a Windows, Linux, or Mac computer, or even if the partition table is wiped out entirely. Note: These tools cannot recover data that has been overwritten on a hard disk. Whether a deleted file has been overwritten depends on many factors – the quicker you realize that you want to recover a file, the more likely you will be able to do so. Our setup To show these tools, we’ve set up a small 1 GB hard drive, with half of the space partitioned as ext2, a file system used in Linux, and half the space partitioned as FAT32, a file system used in older Windows systems. We stored ten random pictures on each hard drive. We then wiped the partition table from the hard drive by deleting the partitions in GParted. Is our data lost forever? Installing the tools All of the tools we’re going to use are in Ubuntu’s universe repository. To enable the repository, open Synaptic Package Manager by clicking on System in the top-left, then Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Click on Settings > Repositories and add a check in the box labelled “Community-maintained Open Source software (universe)”. Click Close, and then in the main Synaptic Package Manager window, click the Reload button. Once the package list has reloaded, and the search index rebuilt, search for and mark for installation one or all of the following packages: testdisk, foremost, and scalpel. Testdisk includes TestDisk, which can recover lost partitions and repair boot sectors, and PhotoRec, which can recover many different types of files from tons of different file systems. Foremost, originally developed by the US Air Force Office of Special Investigations, recovers files based on their headers and other internal structures. Foremost operates on hard drives or drive image files generated by various tools. Finally, scalpel performs the same functions as foremost, but is focused on enhanced performance and lower memory usage. Scalpel may run better if you have an older machine with less RAM. Recover hard drive partitions If you can’t mount your hard drive, then its partition table might be corrupted. Before you start trying to recover your important files, it may be possible to recover one or more partitions on your drive, recovering all of your files with one step. Testdisk is the tool for the job. Start it by opening a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and typing in: sudo testdisk If you’d like, you can create a log file, though it won’t affect how much data you recover. Once you make your choice, you’re greeted with a list of the storage media on your machine. You should be able to identify the hard drive you want to recover partitions from by its size and label. TestDisk asks you select the type of partition table to search for. In most cases (ext2/3, NTFS, FAT32, etc.) you should select Intel and press Enter. Highlight Analyse and press enter. In our case, our small hard drive has previously been formatted as NTFS. Amazingly, TestDisk finds this partition, though it is unable to recover it. It also finds the two partitions we just deleted. We are able to change their attributes, or add more partitions, but we’ll just recover them by pressing Enter. If TestDisk hasn’t found all of your partitions, you can try doing a deeper search by selecting that option with the left and right arrow keys. We only had these two partitions, so we’ll recover them by selecting Write and pressing Enter. Testdisk informs us that we will have to reboot. Note: If your Ubuntu Live CD is not persistent, then when you reboot you will have to reinstall any tools that you installed earlier. After restarting, both of our partitions are back to their original states, pictures and all. Recover files of certain types For the following examples, we deleted the 10 pictures from both partitions and then reformatted them. PhotoRec Of the three tools we’ll show, PhotoRec is the most user-friendly, despite being a console-based utility. To start recovering files, open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in: sudo photorec To begin, you are asked to select a storage device to search. You should be able to identify the right device by its size and label. Select the right device, and then hit Enter. PhotoRec asks you select the type of partition to search. In most cases (ext2/3, NTFS, FAT, etc.) you should select Intel and press Enter. You are given a list of the partitions on your selected hard drive. If you want to recover all of the files on a partition, then select Search and hit enter. However, this process can be very slow, and in our case we only want to search for pictures files, so instead we use the right arrow key to select File Opt and press Enter. PhotoRec can recover many different types of files, and deselecting each one would take a long time. Instead, we press “s” to clear all of the selections, and then find the appropriate file types – jpg, gif, and png – and select them by pressing the right arrow key. Once we’ve selected these three, we press “b” to save these selections. Press enter to return to the list of hard drive partitions. We want to search both of our partitions, so we highlight “No partition” and “Search” and then press Enter. PhotoRec prompts for a location to store the recovered files. If you have a different healthy hard drive, then we recommend storing the recovered files there. Since we’re not recovering very much, we’ll store it on the Ubuntu Live CD’s desktop. Note: Do not recover files to the hard drive you’re recovering from. PhotoRec is able to recover the 20 pictures from the partitions on our hard drive! A quick look in the recup_dir.1 directory that it creates confirms that PhotoRec has recovered all of our pictures, save for the file names. Foremost Foremost is a command-line program with no interactive interface like PhotoRec, but offers a number of command-line options to get as much data out of your had drive as possible. For a full list of options that can be tweaked via the command line, open up a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal) and type in: foremost –h In our case, the command line options that we are going to use are: -t, a comma-separated list of types of files to search for. In our case, this is “jpeg,png,gif”. -v, enabling verbose-mode, giving us more information about what foremost is doing. -o, the output folder to store recovered files in. In our case, we created a directory called “foremost” on the desktop. -i, the input that will be searched for files. This can be a disk image in several different formats; however, we will use a hard disk, /dev/sda. Our foremost invocation is: sudo foremost –t jpeg,png,gif –o foremost –v –i /dev/sda Your invocation will differ depending on what you’re searching for and where you’re searching for it. Foremost is able to recover 17 of the 20 files stored on the hard drive. Looking at the files, we can confirm that these files were recovered relatively well, though we can see some errors in the thumbnail for 00622449.jpg. Part of this may be due to the ext2 filesystem. Foremost recommends using the –d command-line option for Linux file systems like ext2. We’ll run foremost again, adding the –d command-line option to our foremost invocation: sudo foremost –t jpeg,png,gif –d –o foremost –v –i /dev/sda This time, foremost is able to recover all 20 images! A final look at the pictures reveals that the pictures were recovered with no problems. Scalpel Scalpel is another powerful program that, like Foremost, is heavily configurable. Unlike Foremost, Scalpel requires you to edit a configuration file before attempting any data recovery. Any text editor will do, but we’ll use gedit to change the configuration file. In a terminal window (Applications > Accessories > Terminal), type in: sudo gedit /etc/scalpel/scalpel.conf scalpel.conf contains information about a number of different file types. Scroll through this file and uncomment lines that start with a file type that you want to recover (i.e. remove the “#” character at the start of those lines). Save the file and close it. Return to the terminal window. Scalpel also has a ton of command-line options that can help you search quickly and effectively; however, we’ll just define the input device (/dev/sda) and the output folder (a folder called “scalpel” that we created on the desktop). Our invocation is: sudo scalpel /dev/sda –o scalpel Scalpel is able to recover 18 of our 20 files. A quick look at the files scalpel recovered reveals that most of our files were recovered successfully, though there were some problems (e.g. 00000012.jpg). Conclusion In our quick toy example, TestDisk was able to recover two deleted partitions, and PhotoRec and Foremost were able to recover all 20 deleted images. Scalpel recovered most of the files, but it’s very likely that playing with the command-line options for scalpel would have enabled us to recover all 20 images. These tools are lifesavers when something goes wrong with your hard drive. If your data is on the hard drive somewhere, then one of these tools will track it down! Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Recover Deleted Files on an NTFS Hard Drive from a Ubuntu Live CDUse an Ubuntu Live CD to Securely Wipe Your PC’s Hard DriveReset Your Ubuntu Password Easily from the Live CDBackup Your Windows Live Writer SettingsAdding extra Repositories on Ubuntu TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 Awe inspiring, inter-galactic theme (Win 7) Case Study – How to Optimize Popular Wordpress Sites Restore Hidden Updates in Windows 7 & Vista Iceland an Insurance Job? Find Downloads and Add-ins for Outlook Recycle !

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• Understanding LINQ to SQL (11) Performance

  - by Dixin

  [LINQ via C# series] LINQ to SQL has a lot of great features like strong typing query compilation deferred execution declarative paradigm etc., which are very productive. Of course, these cannot be free, and one price is the performance. O/R mapping overhead Because LINQ to SQL is based on O/R mapping, one obvious overhead is, data changing usually requires data retrieving:private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { Product product = database.Products.Single(item => item.ProductID == id); // SELECT... product.UnitPrice = unitPrice; // UPDATE... database.SubmitChanges(); } } Before updating an entity, that entity has to be retrieved by an extra SELECT query. This is slower than direct data update via ADO.NET:private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (SqlConnection connection = new SqlConnection( "Data Source=localhost;Initial Catalog=Northwind;Integrated Security=True")) using (SqlCommand command = new SqlCommand( @"UPDATE [dbo].[Products] SET [UnitPrice] = @UnitPrice WHERE [ProductID] = @ProductID", connection)) { command.Parameters.Add("@ProductID", SqlDbType.Int).Value = id; command.Parameters.Add("@UnitPrice", SqlDbType.Money).Value = unitPrice; connection.Open(); command.Transaction = connection.BeginTransaction(); command.ExecuteNonQuery(); // UPDATE... command.Transaction.Commit(); } } The above imperative code specifies the “how to do” details with better performance. For the same reason, some articles from Internet insist that, when updating data via LINQ to SQL, the above declarative code should be replaced by:private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.ExecuteCommand( "UPDATE [dbo].[Products] SET [UnitPrice] = {0} WHERE [ProductID] = {1}", id, unitPrice); } } Or just create a stored procedure:CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[UpdateProductUnitPrice] ( @ProductID INT, @UnitPrice MONEY ) AS BEGIN BEGIN TRANSACTION UPDATE [dbo].[Products] SET [UnitPrice] = @UnitPrice WHERE [ProductID] = @ProductID COMMIT TRANSACTION END and map it as a method of NorthwindDataContext (explained in this post):private static void UpdateProductUnitPrice(int id, decimal unitPrice) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.UpdateProductUnitPrice(id, unitPrice); } } As a normal trade off for O/R mapping, a decision has to be made between performance overhead and programming productivity according to the case. In a developer’s perspective, if O/R mapping is chosen, I consistently choose the declarative LINQ code, unless this kind of overhead is unacceptable. Data retrieving overhead After talking about the O/R mapping specific issue. Now look into the LINQ to SQL specific issues, for example, performance in the data retrieving process. The previous post has explained that the SQL translating and executing is complex. Actually, the LINQ to SQL pipeline is similar to the compiler pipeline. It consists of about 15 steps to translate an C# expression tree to SQL statement, which can be categorized as: Convert: Invoke SqlProvider.BuildQuery() to convert the tree of Expression nodes into a tree of SqlNode nodes; Bind: Used visitor pattern to figure out the meanings of names according to the mapping info, like a property for a column, etc.; Flatten: Figure out the hierarchy of the query; Rewrite: for SQL Server 2000, if needed Reduce: Remove the unnecessary information from the tree. Parameterize Format: Generate the SQL statement string; Parameterize: Figure out the parameters, for example, a reference to a local variable should be a parameter in SQL; Materialize: Executes the reader and convert the result back into typed objects. So for each data retrieving, even for data retrieving which looks simple: private static Product[] RetrieveProducts(int productId) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { return database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductID == productId) .ToArray(); } } LINQ to SQL goes through above steps to translate and execute the query. Fortunately, there is a built-in way to cache the translated query. Compiled query When such a LINQ to SQL query is executed repeatedly, The CompiledQuery can be used to translate query for one time, and execute for multiple times:internal static class CompiledQueries { private static readonly Func<NorthwindDataContext, int, Product[]> _retrieveProducts = CompiledQuery.Compile((NorthwindDataContext database, int productId) => database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductID == productId).ToArray()); internal static Product[] RetrieveProducts( this NorthwindDataContext database, int productId) { return _retrieveProducts(database, productId); } } The new version of RetrieveProducts() gets better performance, because only when _retrieveProducts is first time invoked, it internally invokes SqlProvider.Compile() to translate the query expression. And it also uses lock to make sure translating once in multi-threading scenarios. Static SQL / stored procedures without translating Another way to avoid the translating overhead is to use static SQL or stored procedures, just as the above examples. Because this is a functional programming series, this article not dive into. For the details, Scott Guthrie already has some excellent articles: LINQ to SQL (Part 6: Retrieving Data Using Stored Procedures) LINQ to SQL (Part 7: Updating our Database using Stored Procedures) LINQ to SQL (Part 8: Executing Custom SQL Expressions) Data changing overhead By looking into the data updating process, it also needs a lot of work: Begins transaction Processes the changes (ChangeProcessor) Walks through the objects to identify the changes Determines the order of the changes Executes the changings LINQ queries may be needed to execute the changings, like the first example in this article, an object needs to be retrieved before changed, then the above whole process of data retrieving will be went through If there is user customization, it will be executed, for example, a table’s INSERT / UPDATE / DELETE can be customized in the O/R designer It is important to keep these overhead in mind. Bulk deleting / updating Another thing to be aware is the bulk deleting:private static void DeleteProducts(int categoryId) { using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.Products.DeleteAllOnSubmit( database.Products.Where(product => product.CategoryID == categoryId)); database.SubmitChanges(); } } The expected SQL should be like:BEGIN TRANSACTION exec sp_executesql N'DELETE FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[CategoryID] = @p0',N'@p0 int',@p0=9 COMMIT TRANSACTION Hoverer, as fore mentioned, the actual SQL is to retrieving the entities, and then delete them one by one:-- Retrieves the entities to be deleted: exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID], [t0].[ProductName], [t0].[SupplierID], [t0].[CategoryID], [t0].[QuantityPerUnit], [t0].[UnitPrice], [t0].[UnitsInStock], [t0].[UnitsOnOrder], [t0].[ReorderLevel], [t0].[Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[CategoryID] = @p0',N'@p0 int',@p0=9 -- Deletes the retrieved entities one by one: BEGIN TRANSACTION exec sp_executesql N'DELETE FROM [dbo].[Products] WHERE ([ProductID] = @p0) AND ([ProductName] = @p1) AND ([SupplierID] IS NULL) AND ([CategoryID] = @p2) AND ([QuantityPerUnit] IS NULL) AND ([UnitPrice] = @p3) AND ([UnitsInStock] = @p4) AND ([UnitsOnOrder] = @p5) AND ([ReorderLevel] = @p6) AND (NOT ([Discontinued] = 1))',N'@p0 int,@p1 nvarchar(4000),@p2 int,@p3 money,@p4 smallint,@p5 smallint,@p6 smallint',@p0=78,@p1=N'Optimus Prime',@p2=9,@p3=$0.0000,@p4=0,@p5=0,@p6=0 exec sp_executesql N'DELETE FROM [dbo].[Products] WHERE ([ProductID] = @p0) AND ([ProductName] = @p1) AND ([SupplierID] IS NULL) AND ([CategoryID] = @p2) AND ([QuantityPerUnit] IS NULL) AND ([UnitPrice] = @p3) AND ([UnitsInStock] = @p4) AND ([UnitsOnOrder] = @p5) AND ([ReorderLevel] = @p6) AND (NOT ([Discontinued] = 1))',N'@p0 int,@p1 nvarchar(4000),@p2 int,@p3 money,@p4 smallint,@p5 smallint,@p6 smallint',@p0=79,@p1=N'Bumble Bee',@p2=9,@p3=$0.0000,@p4=0,@p5=0,@p6=0 -- ... COMMIT TRANSACTION And the same to the bulk updating. This is really not effective and need to be aware. Here is already some solutions from the Internet, like this one. The idea is wrap the above SELECT statement into a INNER JOIN:exec sp_executesql N'DELETE [dbo].[Products] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [j0] INNER JOIN ( SELECT [t0].[ProductID], [t0].[ProductName], [t0].[SupplierID], [t0].[CategoryID], [t0].[QuantityPerUnit], [t0].[UnitPrice], [t0].[UnitsInStock], [t0].[UnitsOnOrder], [t0].[ReorderLevel], [t0].[Discontinued] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[CategoryID] = @p0) AS [j1] ON ([j0].[ProductID] = [j1].[[Products])', -- The Primary Key N'@p0 int',@p0=9 Query plan overhead The last thing is about the SQL Server query plan. Before .NET 4.0, LINQ to SQL has an issue (not sure if it is a bug). LINQ to SQL internally uses ADO.NET, but it does not set the SqlParameter.Size for a variable-length argument, like argument of NVARCHAR type, etc. So for two queries with the same SQL but different argument length:using (NorthwindDataContext database = new NorthwindDataContext()) { database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductName == "A") .Select(product => product.ProductID).ToArray(); // The same SQL and argument type, different argument length. database.Products.Where(product => product.ProductName == "AA") .Select(product => product.ProductID).ToArray(); } Pay attention to the argument length in the translated SQL:exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(1)',@p0=N'A' exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(2)',@p0=N'AA' Here is the overhead: The first query’s query plan cache is not reused by the second one:SELECT sys.syscacheobjects.cacheobjtype, sys.dm_exec_cached_plans.usecounts, sys.syscacheobjects.[sql] FROM sys.syscacheobjects INNER JOIN sys.dm_exec_cached_plans ON sys.syscacheobjects.bucketid = sys.dm_exec_cached_plans.bucketid; They actually use different query plans. Again, pay attention to the argument length in the [sql] column (@p0 nvarchar(2) / @p0 nvarchar(1)). Fortunately, in .NET 4.0 this is fixed:internal static class SqlTypeSystem { private abstract class ProviderBase : TypeSystemProvider { protected int? GetLargestDeclarableSize(SqlType declaredType) { SqlDbType sqlDbType = declaredType.SqlDbType; if (sqlDbType <= SqlDbType.Image) { switch (sqlDbType) { case SqlDbType.Binary: case SqlDbType.Image: return 8000; } return null; } if (sqlDbType == SqlDbType.NVarChar) { return 4000; // Max length for NVARCHAR. } if (sqlDbType != SqlDbType.VarChar) { return null; } return 8000; } } } In this above example, the translated SQL becomes:exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(4000)',@p0=N'A' exec sp_executesql N'SELECT [t0].[ProductID] FROM [dbo].[Products] AS [t0] WHERE [t0].[ProductName] = @p0',N'@p0 nvarchar(4000)',@p0=N'AA' So that they reuses the same query plan cache: Now the [usecounts] column is 2.

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• Lightning talk: Coderetreat

  - by Michael Williamson

  In the spirit of trying to encourage more deliberate practice amongst coders in Red Gate, Lauri Pesonen had the idea of running a coderetreat in Red Gate. Lauri and I ran the first one a few weeks ago: given that neither of us hadn’t even been to a coderetreat before, let alone run one, I think it turned out quite well. The participants gave positive feedback, saying that they enjoyed the day, wrote some thought-provoking code and would do it again. Sam Blackburn was one of the attendees, and gave a lightning talk to the other developers in one of our regular lightning talk sessions: In case you can’t watch the video, I’ve transcribed the talk below, although I’d recommend watching the video if you can — I didn’t have much time to do the transcribing! So, what is a coderetreat? So it’s not just something in Red Gate, there’s a website and everything, although it’s not a very big website. It calls itself a community network. The basic ideas behind coderetreat are: you’ve got one day, and you split it into one hour sections. You spend three quarters of that coding, and do a little retrospective at the end. You’re supposed to start fresh each, we were told to delete our code after every session. We were in pairs, swapping after each session, and we did the same task every time. In fact, Conway’s Game of Life is the only task mentioned anywhere that I find for coderetreat. So I don’t know what we’ll do next time, or if we’re meant to do the same thing again. There are some guiding principles which felt to us like restrictions, that you have to code in crazy ways to encourage better code. Final thing is that it’s supposed to be free for outsiders to join. It’s meant to be a kind of networking thing, where you link up with people from other companies. We had a pilot day with Michael and Lauri. Since it was basically the first time any of us had done anything like this, everybody was from Red Gate. We didn’t chat to anybody else for the initial one. The task was Conway’s Game of Life, which most of you have probably heard of it, all but one of us knew about it when did the coderetreat. I won’t got into the details of what it is, but it felt like the right size of task, basically one or two groups actually produced something working by the end of the day, and of course that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a day’s work to produce that because we were starting again every hour. The task really drives you more than trying to create good code, I found. It was really tempting to try and get it working rather than stick to the rules. But it’s really good to stop and try again because there are so many what-ifs when you’ve finished writing something, “what if I’d done it this way?”. You can answer all those questions at a coderetreat because it’s not about getting a product out the door, it’s about learning and playing with ideas. So we had all these different practices we were trying. I’ll try and go through most of these. Single responsibility is this idea that everything should do just one thing. It was the very first session, we were still trying to figure out how do you go about the Game of Life? So by the end of forty-five minutes hadn’t produced very much for that first session. We were still thinking, “Do we start with a board, how do we represent all these squares? It can be infinitely big, help, this is getting really difficult!”. So, most of us didn’t really get anywhere on the first one. Although it was interesting that some people started with the board, one group started with the FateDecider class that decides whether things live or die. A sort of god class, but in a good way. They managed to implement all of the rules without even defining how the squares were arranged or anything like that. Another thing we tried was TDD (test-driven development). I’m sure most of you know what TDD is: Watch a test, watch it fail for the right reason Write code to pass the test, watch it pass Refactor, check the test still passes Repeat! It basically worked, we were able to produce code, but we often found the tests defined the direction that code went, which is obviously the idea of TDD. But you tend to find that by the time you’ve even written your first assertion, which is supposed to be the very first thing you write, because you write your tests backwards from the assertions back to the initial conditions, you’ve already constrained the logic of the code in some way by the time you’ve done that. You then get to this situation of, “Well, we actually want to go in a slightly different direction. Can we do this?”. Can we write tests that don’t constrain the architecture? Wrapping up all primitives: it’s kind of turtles all the way down. We had a Size, which has a Width and Height, which both derive from Dimension. You’ve got pages of code before you’ve even done anything. No getters and setters (use tell don’t ask instead): mocks and stubs for tests are required if you want to assert that your results are what you think they should be. You can’t just check the internal state of the code. And people found that really challenging and it made them think in a different way which I think is really good. Not having mutable state: that was kind of confusing because we weren’t quite sure what fitted within that rule and what didn’t, and I think we were trying too hard to follow the rule rather than the guideline. No if-statements: supposed to use polymorphism instead, but polymorphism still requires a factory with conditional behaviour. We did something really crazy to get around this: public T If(bool condition, Func<T> left, Func<T> right) { var dict = new Dictionary<bool, Func<T>> {{true, left}, {false, right}}; return dict[condition].Invoke(); } That is not really polymorphism, is it? For-loops: you can always replace a for-loop with recursion, but it doesn’t tend to make it any more readable unless it’s the kind of task that really lends itself to that. So it was interesting, it was good practice, but it wouldn’t make it easier it’s the kind of tree-structure algorithm where that would help. Having a limit on the number of levels of indentation: again, I think it does produce very nice, clean code, but it wasn’t actually a challenge because you just extract methods. That’s quite a useful thing because you can apply that to real code and say, “Okay, should this method really be going crazy like this?” No talking: we hated that. It’s like there’s two of you at a computer, and one of you is doing the typing, what does the other guy do if they’re not allowed to talk. The answer is TDD ping-pong – one person writes the tests, and then the other person writes the code to pass the test. And that creates communication without actually having to have discussion about things which is kind of cool. No code comments: just makes no difference to anything. It’s a forty-five minute exercise, so what are you going to put comments in code for? Finally, this is my fault. I discovered an entertaining way of doing the calculation that was kind of cool (using convolutions over the state of the board). Unfortunately, it turns out to be really hard to implement in C#, so didn’t even manage to work out how to do that convolution in C#. It’s trivial in some high-level languages, but you need something matrix-orientated for it to really work. That’s most of it, really. The thoughts that people went away with: we put down our answers to questions like “What have you learnt?” and “What surprised you?”, “How are you going to do things differently?”, and most people said redoing the problem is really, really good for understanding it properly. People hate having a massive legacy codebase that they can’t change, so being able to attack something three different ways in an environment where the end-product isn’t important: that’s something people really enjoyed. Pair-programming: also people said that they wanted to do more of that, especially with TDD ping-pong, where you write the test and somebody else writes the code. Various people thought different things about immutables, but most people thought they were good, they promote functional programming. And TDD people found really hard. “Tell, don’t ask” people found really, really hard and really, really, really hard to do well. And the recursion just made things trickier to debug. But most people agreed that coderetreats are really cool, and we should do more of them.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Tuesday, April 27, 2010New ProjectsActive Directory User Properties Change: A complete application in VS 2005 and VB.NET, for Request Request in User Details in Active Directory, with flow to HR and then to IT for approval ...AVR Terminal: A Windows application for connecting to an AVR via RS232 serial or USB-to-COM FTDI ports. Works on Arduino, Bare Bones Board, and any custom board...Battle Droids: AVR-based Network Combat!: A Battle Droid is an AVR® microcontroller running the BattleDroid firmware. This firmware turns your AVR into a lean, mean, fighting machine, and ...Camp Foundation: Camp Foundationchakma: chakma is a question - answer based web application to make people get questions from anybody around the world and being able to answer them. c...Document.Editor: Document.Editor is a multitab text editor for Windows. It includes plain and rich text format support, multi tab interface so you can edit multiple...Dot Net Marche Music Store Demo Application: This is a demo application that the DotNetMarche user gorup (www.dotnetmarche.org) use to make experiments and prepare demos for our workshopselivators: a monitor which enables the user to view the movement of the elivators in a buildingExtended SSIS Package Execute: The SSIS package execute task is flawed as it does not support passing variables. Here we have a custom task that will pass items in a dataflow as...File tools: File toolsFileExplorer.NET: FileExplorer.NET is a .net usercontrol which tries to mimic the Windows FileExplorer treeview.Kazuku: ASP.NET MVC 2 Content Management SystemKSharp Ajax Control Toolkit Library: Built ontop of the Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax Control Toolkit, this library offers enhanced versions of the controls found in the Ajax Control Toolkit....Nitrous - An Aspx ViewEngine for ASP.NET MVC: Near drop-in replacement ASP.NET ViewEngine for MVC.Open Data Protocol - Client Libraries: This is an Open Source release of the .NET and Silverlight Client Libraries for the Open Data Protocol (OData). For more information on odata, see ...ORAYLIS BI.SmartDiff: BI.SmartDiff is a helper to connect the functionality of BIDS Helper – SmartDiff to TortoiseSVN. BIDS Helper – SmartDiff helps you to get more read...RicciWebSiteSystem: soon websiteSynapse:Silverlight A Simple Silverlight Framework: Synapse:Silverlight is a simplified framework for Silverlight. It's purpose is to help developers and designers produce basic LOB solutions that do...TestProjectMB: Testing Team Foundation ServerThoughtWorks Cruise Notification Interceptor: Cruise notification interceptorThreadSafeControls: ThreadSafeControls is a C# project that greatly simplifies the process of transitioning Windows Forms applications to a multithreaded environment b...Unscrambler: Unscrambler is a multitouch WPF word game built with MVVM Light in order to show how to use the touch maniupation and inertia features included in ...Web Utilities: web utilitiesNew Releases7zbackup - PowerShell Script to Backup Files with 7zip: 7zBackup v. 1.7.1 Stable: Bug Solved : Presence of junction.exe is wrongly referred to 7z.exeAVR Terminal: AVR Terminal v0.2: Here is an Alpha-almost-BETA release of the AVR Terminal. That being said, I use it almost daily and it shouldn't break anything on your system, b...Bistro FSharp Extensions: 0.9.7.0: This is the VS 2010 release of BistroFS extensions. This release focused on usability, adding key functionality such as resource aliasing and secur...Bojinx: Bojinx Dialog Management V1.0: Stable release of the Bojinx Dialog Management library.BOWIE: BOWIE 2010: This new version works on Outlook 2007/2010 and TFS 2008/2010 RTM. Details about all features in this version on the Home Page : http://bowie.code...Catharsis: Catharsis 2.5 on catarsa.com: The Catharsis framework has finally its own portal http://catarsa.com Example - documented steps to create Web-Application http://catarsa.com/Arti...Colorful Expression: Expression Blend 3: Alpha Version, Read Issues and Installing! Colorful Expression is an add-in for Expression Blend and Expression Design that brings you the Adobe K...Colorful Expression: Expression Blend 4: Read Issues and Installing! Colorful Expression is an add-in for Expression Blend and Expression Design that brings you the Adobe Kuler and ColorLo...Courier: Version 1.0: This release includes integration with the Reactive Framework for more elegant message handling and allowing more succinct client code. Full suite...CRM 4.0 Contract Utilities: Release 1.0: Project Description List of Contract Utilities (i.e. custom workflow actions) 1. Change contract status from Active to Draft 2. Copy Contract (with...Document.Editor: 0.9.0: Whats New?: New icon set Bug fix'sDotNetNuke® Blog: 04.00.00: Minimum Required DNN Version: 4.06.02General Code organization * Converted project to .NET 3.5 * Converted solution to Visual Stud...EPiAbstractions: EPiAbstractions 1.2: Updated for EPiServer CMS 6. Only features abstractions for EPiServer CMS. For abstractions for EPiServer.Common and EPiServer.Community use versio...Fluent ViewModel Configuration for WPF (MVVM): FluentViewModel Alpha2: Added support for view model validation using FluentValidation (http://fluentvalidation.codeplex.com/) Fixed exception from Blend while in design...GArphics: Beta v0.9: Beta v0.9. Practically all of the planned features have been implemented and are available to the users. For the version 1.0 mainly just some minor...HTML Ruby: 6.22.2.1: Fixed a bug where HTML Ruby's options window will generate entries in the error log when applying option changes (regression from 6.21.8)HTML Ruby: 6.22.3: Add/remove stop spacing event listener as needed for possible fix to 4620iTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.2.3768 Beta 3b: Beta 3 requires iTunes 9.1.0.79 or later A Librarian status panel showing active and queued Librarian scanners. This will be hidden behind the "bi...LiveUpload to Facebook: LiveUpload to Facebook 3.2.3: Version 3.2.3Become a fan on Facebook! Features Quickly and easily upload your photos and videos to Facebook, including any people tags added in W...Maintainance Schedule: Maintenance Scheduler: The first Alpha release of the project.NetSockets: NetSockets (1.2): The NetSockets library (DLL)NSIS Autorun: NSIS Autorun 0.1.2: NSIS Autorun 0.1.1 This release includes source code, application binary, and example materials.OpenSceneGraph glsl samples: OsgGlslSamples Win32 binaries: Project binary release for Windows. The effects shown are: Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, DoF with alpha channel, Fire effects, HDR, Light Ma...ORAYLIS BI.SmartDiff: ORAYLIS BI.SmartDiff 0.6.1: First public versionpatterns & practices - Windows Azure Guidance: Code Drop 4 - Content Complete: This release includes documentation and all code samples intended for this first guide. As before, this code release builds on the previous one an...Pex Custom Arithmetic Solver: Custom Solver Package: This is the custom solvers packaged together. To use simply include the dll in your project and add [assembly: PexCustomArithmeticSolver] to your P...PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn v08 x86: New FeatureFrom this version forward, PokeIn will define a way between the main page and client side automaticly based to security level. Add "pub...Proxi [Proxy Interface]: Proxi Release 1.0.0.426: Proxi Release 1.0.0.426QuestTracker: QuestTracker 0.3: This release includes recurring quests! Now you can set a quest to uncomplete itself every X minutes, hours, or days! And the quests still retain t...Rensea Image Viewer: RIV 0.4.5: RIV Fix Version. You would need .NET Framework 4.0 to make it run RIVU Improved Version. With separated RIV up-loader, to upload images to Renjian...SCC Switch Provider: Provides a GUI to Switch Source Code Control Provi: Transferred from GotDotNet Workplace. Initial public Release. Downloaded ~922 times from original post.sTASKedit: sTASKedit v0.7a (Alpha): + Fixed: XOR text encoding + Fixed: adding timed rewards missing values + Fixed: occupations in clone()Synapse:Silverlight A Simple Silverlight Framework: Synapse Silverlight Alpha Release: Initial Road-map is being defined.ThoughtWorks Cruise Notification Interceptor: 1.0.0: Initial release.UDC indexes parser: UDC indexex parser Beta 2: Добавлена возможность работать с распределением определителей как если бы генератор был бы LALR(2) То что осталось: Если текстовое дополнение начи...Unscrambler: Release 1.0: Here's the first release of Unscrambler.WinXound: WinXound 3.3.0 Beta 2 for Mac OsX: New: Code Repository (for UDO and personal code) New: Format Code - Added the ability to format only the selected text of the code New: Explore...WPF Inspirational Quote Management System: Release 1.2.2: - Fixed issue some users were having when the application is minimised.Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitSilverlight Toolkitpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelMost Active Projectspatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryRawrGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationParticle Plot PivotBlogEngine.NETNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleFarseer Physics EngineIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterN2 CMSDotNetZip Library

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• Uget tray icon not showing

  - by ArK

  Since I upgraded to Saucy, Uget is not showing in the system tray, although the Always show tray icon option in Uget settings is checked. P.S. this happens only with Uget, all the other Softwares have working tray icons (vlc,qbittorrent..) Here is the snapshot which shows the settings of Uget: sudo dpkg -l | grep -e "^rc" -e "^iU": rc account-plugin-generic-oauth 0.10bzr13.03.26-0ubuntu1.1 i386 GNOME Control Center account plugin for single signon - generic OAuth rc appmenu-gtk:i386 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 i386 Export GTK menus over DBus rc appmenu-gtk3:i386 12.10.3daily13.04.03-0ubuntu1 i386 Export GTK menus over DBus rc arora 0.11.0-0ubuntu1 i386 simple cross platform web browser rc buc 0.5.2-20 i386 BUC rc clementine 1.1.1+dfsg-2ubuntu1 i386 modern music player and library organizer rc epiphany-browser 3.6.1-2ubuntu1 i386 Intuitive GNOME web browser rc epiphany-browser-data 3.6.1-2ubuntu3 all Data files for the GNOME web browser rc fancontrol 1:3.3.3-1ubuntu1 all utilities to read temperature/voltage/fan sensors rc flaremonitor 1.0-5 i386 It is an advanced browser integration helper module of FlareGet rc google-chrome-stable 28.0.1500.95-r213514 i386 The web browser from Google rc hal 0.5.14-8ubuntu1 i386 Hardware Abstraction Layer rc hotot-gtk 1:0.9.8.5+git20120630.884797d-1 all lightweight microblogging client - GTK+ wrapper rc jockey-common 0.9.7-0ubuntu13 all user interface and desktop integration for driver management rc libanalitza4abi1 4:4.10.4-0ubuntu0.1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions rc libanalitza5 4:4.11.2-0ubuntu1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions rc libanalitzagui4abi2 4:4.10.4-0ubuntu0.1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions - GUI routines rc libanalitzaplot4 4:4.10.4-0ubuntu0.1 i386 library to work with mathematical expressions - plot routines rc libavcodec53:i386 6:0.8.6-1ubuntu2 i386 Libav codec library rc libavutil51:i386 6:0.8.6-1ubuntu2 i386 Libav utility library rc libbamf3-1:i386 0.4.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 i386 Window matching library - shared library rc libboost-iostreams1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 Boost.Iostreams Library rc libboost-program-options1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 program options library for C++ rc libboost-python1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 Boost.Python Library rc libboost-thread1.49.0 1.49.0-4 i386 portable C++ multi-threading rc libbrlapi0.5:i386 4.4-8ubuntu4 i386 braille display access via BRLTTY - shared library rc libcamel-1.2-40 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Evolution MIME message handling library rc libcolumbus0-0 0.4.0daily13.04.16~13.04-0ubuntu1 i386 error tolerant matching engine - shared library rc libdns95 1:9.9.2.dfsg.P1-2ubuntu2.1 i386 DNS Shared Library used by BIND rc libdvbpsi7 0.2.2-1 i386 library for MPEG TS and DVB PSI tables decoding and generating rc libebackend-1.2-5 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Utility library for evolution data servers rc libechonest2.0:i386 2.0.2-0ubuntu1 i386 Qt library for communicating with The Echo Nest platform rc libechonest2.1:i386 2.1.0-2 i386 Qt library for communicating with The Echo Nest platform rc libedata-book-1.2-15 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Backend library for evolution address books rc libedata-cal-1.2-18 3.6.4-0ubuntu1.1 i386 Backend library for evolution calendars rc libftgl2 2.1.3~rc5-4ubuntu1 i386 library to render text in OpenGL using FreeType rc libgc1c3:i386 1:7.2d-0ubuntu5 i386 conservative garbage collector for C and C++ rc libgnome-desktop-3-4 3.6.3-0ubuntu1 i386 Utility library for loading .desktop files - runtime files rc libgtksourceview-3.0-0:i386 3.6.3-0ubuntu1 i386 shared libraries for the GTK+ syntax highlighting widget rc libgweather-3-1 3.6.2-0ubuntu1 i386 GWeather shared library rc libhal-storage1 0.5.14-8ubuntu1 i386 Hardware Abstraction Layer - shared library for storage devices rc libhal1 0.5.14-8ubuntu1 i386 Hardware Abstraction Layer - shared library rc libharfbuzz0:i386 0.9.13-1 i386 OpenType text shaping engine rc libhd16 16.0-2.2 i386 Hardware identification system library rc libibus-1.0-0:i386 1.4.2-0ubuntu2 i386 Intelligent Input Bus - shared library rc libical0 0.48-2 i386 iCalendar library implementation in C (runtime) rc libimobiledevice3 1.1.4-1ubuntu6.2 i386 Library for communicating with the iPhone and iPod Touch rc libisc92 1:9.9.2.dfsg.P1-2ubuntu2.1 i386 ISC Shared Library used by BIND rc libkdegamesprivate1 4:4.10.2-0ubuntu1 i386 private shared library for KDE games rc libkeybinder0 0.3.0-1ubuntu1 i386 registers global key bindings for applications rc libkgapi0:i386 0.4.4-0ubuntu1 i386 Google API library for KDE rc liblastfm1:i386 1.0.7-2 i386 Last.fm web services library rc libnetfilter-queue1 1.0.2-1 i386 Netfilter netlink-queue library rc libnl1:i386 1.1-7ubuntu1 i386 library for dealing with netlink sockets rc libossp-uuid16 1.6.2-1.3 i386 OSSP uuid ISO-C and C++ - shared library rc libpackagekit-glib2-14:i386 0.7.6-3ubuntu1 i386 Library for accessing PackageKit using GLib rc libpoppler28:i386 0.20.5-1ubuntu3 i386 PDF rendering library rc libprojectm2 2.1.0+dfsg-1build1 i386 Advanced Milkdrop-compatible music visualization library rc libqxt-core0:i386 0.6.1-7 i386 extensions to Qt core classes (LibQxt) rc libqxt-gui0:i386 0.6.1-7 i386 extensions to Qt GUI classes (LibQxt) rc libraw5:i386 0.14.7-0ubuntu1.13.04.2 i386 raw image decoder library rc librhythmbox-core6 2.98-0ubuntu5 i386 support library for the rhythmbox music player rc librhythmbox-core7 3.0.1-0~13.10~ppa1 i386 support library for the rhythmbox music player rc libsnmp15 5.4.3~dfsg-2.7ubuntu1 i386 SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) library rc libsqlite0 2.8.17-8fakesync1 i386 SQLite shared library rc libsyncdaemon-1.0-1 4.2.0-0ubuntu1 i386 Ubuntu One synchronization daemon library rc libtiff4:i386 3.9.7-2ubuntu1 i386 Tag Image File Format (TIFF) library (old version) rc libunity-core-6.0-5 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 i386 Core library for the Unity interface. rc libva-wayland1:i386 1.2.1-0ubuntu0~raring i386 Video Acceleration (VA) API for Linux -- Wayland runtime rc libwayland0:i386 1.0.5-0ubuntu1 i386 wayland compositor infrastructure - shared libraries rc libwebp2:i386 0.1.3-3 i386 Lossy compression of digital photographic images. rc linux-image-3.8.0-19-generic 3.8.0-19.30 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-21-generic 3.8.0-21.32 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-22-generic 3.8.0-22.33 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-26-generic 3.8.0-26.38 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.8.0-27-generic 3.8.0-27.40 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.9.0-030900-generic 3.9.0-030900.201304291257 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.9.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-3.9.0-030900rc8-generic 3.9.0-030900rc8.201304211835 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.9.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-19-generic 3.8.0-19.30 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-21-generic 3.8.0-21.32 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-22-generic 3.8.0-22.33 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-26-generic 3.8.0-26.38 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc linux-image-extra-3.8.0-27-generic 3.8.0-27.40 i386 Linux kernel image for version 3.8.0 on 32 bit x86 SMP rc preload 0.6.4-2 i386 adaptive readahead daemon rc steam-launcher 1.0.0.39 all Launcher for the Steam software distribution service rc super-boot-manager 0.7.15 all Simple gui to configure Grub2, Burg and Plymouth. rc totem 3.6.3-0ubuntu6 i386 Simple media player for the GNOME desktop based on GStreamer rc transmission-gtk 2.77-0ubuntu1 i386 lightweight BitTorrent client (GTK interface) rc unity-common 7.0.0daily13.06.19~13.04-0ubuntu1 all Common files for the Unity interface. rc vino 3.6.2-0ubuntu4 i386 VNC server for GNOME rc wicd-daemon 1.7.2.4-4.1 all wired and wireless network manager - daemon rc wicd-gtk 1.7.2.4-4.1 all wired and wireless network manager - GTK+ client rc xscreensaver 5.15-2ubuntu1 i386 Automatic screensaver for X rc xscreensaver-data 5.15-3ubuntu1 i386 data files to be shared among screensaver frontends sudo dpkg -l | grep uget: ii uget 1.10.3-1 i386 easy-to-use download manager written in GTK+ sudo dpkg -l | grep indicator: ii gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Typelib files for libappindicator3-1. ii gir1.2-syncmenu-0.1 12.10.5+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator for synchronisation processes status - bindings ii indicator-applet-complete 12.10.2+13.10.20130924.2-0ubuntu1 i386 Clone of the GNOME panel indicator applet ii indicator-application 12.10.1daily13.01.25-0ubuntu1 i386 Application Indicators ii indicator-appmenu 13.01.0+13.10.20130930-0ubuntu1 i386 Indicator for application menus. ii indicator-bluetooth 0.0.6+13.10.20131016-0ubuntu1 i386 System bluetooth indicator. ii indicator-datetime 13.10.0+13.10.20131023.2-0ubuntu1 i386 Simple clock ii indicator-keyboard 0.0.0+13.10.20131010.1-0ubuntu1 i386 Keyboard indicator ii indicator-messages 13.10.1+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator that collects messages that need a response ii indicator-multiload 0.3-0ubuntu1 i386 Graphical system load indicator for CPU, ram, etc. ii indicator-power 12.10.6+13.10.20131008-0ubuntu1 i386 Indicator showing power state. ii indicator-printers 0.1.7daily13.03.01-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator showing active print jobs ii indicator-session 12.10.5+13.10.20131023.1-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator showing session management, status and user switching ii indicator-sound 12.10.2+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 System sound indicator. ii indicator-sync 12.10.5+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator for synchronisation processes status ii libappindicator1 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Application Indicators ii libappindicator3-1 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Application Indicators ii libindicator3-7 12.10.2+13.10.20130913-0ubuntu2 i386 panel indicator applet - shared library ii libindicator7 12.10.2+13.10.20130913-0ubuntu2 i386 panel indicator applet - shared library ii libsync-menu1:i386 12.10.5+13.10.20131011-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator for synchronisation processes status - libraries ii python-appindicator 12.10.1+13.10.20130920-0ubuntu2 i386 Python bindings for libappindicator ii sni-qt:i386 0.2.6-0ubuntu1 i386 indicator support for Qt ii telepathy-indicator 0.3.1daily13.06.19-0ubuntu1 i386 Desktop service to integrate Telepathy with the messaging menu.

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• Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths

  - by Renso

  Making Sense of ASP.NET Paths ASP.Net includes quite a plethora of properties to retrieve path information about the current request, control and application. There's a ton of information available about paths on the Request object, some of it appearing to overlap and some of it buried several levels down, and it can be confusing to find just the right path that you are looking for. To keep things straight I thought it a good idea to summarize the path options along with descriptions and example paths. I wrote a post about this a long time ago in 2004 and I find myself frequently going back to that page to quickly figure out which path I’m looking for in processing the current URL. Apparently a lot of people must be doing the same, because the original post is the second most visited even to this date on this blog to the tune of nearly 500 hits per day. So, I decided to update and expand a bit on the original post with a little more information and clarification based on the original comments. Request Object Paths Available Here's a list of the Path related properties on the Request object (and the Page object). Assume a path like http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx for the paths below where webstore is the name of the virtual. Request Property Description and Value ApplicationPath Returns the web root-relative logical path to the virtual root of this app. /webstore/ PhysicalApplicationPath Returns local file system path of the virtual root for this app. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore PhysicalPath Returns the local file system path to the current script or path. c:\inetpub\wwwroot\webstore\admin\paths.aspx Path FilePath CurrentExecutionFilePath All of these return the full root relative logical path to the script page including path and scriptname. CurrentExcecutionFilePath will return the ‘current’ request path after a Transfer/Execute call while FilePath will always return the original request’s path. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx AppRelativeCurrentExecutionFilePath Returns an ASP.NET root relative virtual path to the script or path for the current request. If in  a Transfer/Execute call the transferred Path is returned. ~/admin/paths.aspx PathInfo Returns any extra path following the script name. If no extra path is provided returns the root-relative path (returns text in red below). string.Empty if no PathInfo is available. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx/ExtraPathInfo RawUrl Returns the full root relative URL including querystring and extra path as a string. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 Url Returns a fully qualified URL including querystring and extra path. Note this is a Uri instance rather than string. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/admin/paths.aspx?sku=wwhelp40 UrlReferrer The fully qualified URL of the page that sent the request. This is also a Uri instance and this value is null if the page was directly accessed by typing into the address bar or using an HttpClient based Referrer client Http header. http://www.west-wind.com/webstore/default.aspx?Info Control.TemplateSourceDirectory Returns the logical path to the folder of the page, master or user control on which it is called. This is useful if you need to know the path only to a Page or control from within the control. For non-file controls this returns the Page path. /webstore/admin/ As you can see there’s a ton of information available there for each of the three common path formats: Physical Path is an OS type path that points to a path or file on disk. Logical Path is a Web path that is relative to the Web server’s root. It includes the virtual plus the application relative path. ~/ (Root-relative) Path is an ASP.NET specific path that includes ~/ to indicate the virtual root Web path. ASP.NET can convert virtual paths into either logical paths using Control.ResolveUrl(), or physical paths using Server.MapPath(). Root relative paths are useful for specifying portable URLs that don’t rely on relative directory structures and very useful from within control or component code. You should be able to get any necessary format from ASP.NET from just about any path or script using these mechanisms. ~/ Root Relative Paths and ResolveUrl() and ResolveClientUrl() ASP.NET supports root-relative virtual path syntax in most of its URL properties in Web Forms. So you can easily specify a root relative path in a control rather than a location relative path: <asp:Image runat="server" ID="imgHelp" ImageUrl="~/images/help.gif" /> ASP.NET internally resolves this URL by using ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif") to arrive at the root-relative URL of /webstore/images/help.gif which uses the Request.ApplicationPath as the basepath to replace the ~. By convention any custom Web controls also should use ResolveUrl() on URL properties to provide the same functionality. In your own code you can use Page.ResolveUrl() or Control.ResolveUrl() to accomplish the same thing: string imgPath = this.ResolveUrl("~/images/help.gif"); imgHelp.ImageUrl = imgPath; Unfortunately ResolveUrl() is limited to WebForm pages, so if you’re in an HttpHandler or Module it’s not available. ASP.NET Mvc also has it’s own more generic version of ResolveUrl in Url.Decode: <script src="<%= Url.Content("~/scripts/new.js") %>" type="text/javascript"></script> which is part of the UrlHelper class. In ASP.NET MVC the above sort of syntax is actually even more crucial than in WebForms due to the fact that views are not referencing specific pages but rather are often path based which can lead to various variations on how a particular view is referenced. In a Module or Handler code Control.ResolveUrl() unfortunately is not available which in retrospect seems like an odd design choice – URL resolution really should happen on a Request basis not as part of the Page framework. Luckily you can also rely on the static VirtualPathUtility class: string path = VirtualPathUtility.ToAbsolute("~/admin/paths.aspx"); VirtualPathUtility also many other quite useful methods for dealing with paths and converting between the various kinds of paths supported. One thing to watch out for is that ToAbsolute() will throw an exception if a query string is provided and doesn’t work on fully qualified URLs. I wrote about this topic with a custom solution that works fully qualified URLs and query strings here (check comments for some interesting discussions too). Similar to ResolveUrl() is ResolveClientUrl() which creates a fully qualified HTTP path that includes the protocol and domain name. It’s rare that this full resolution is needed but can be useful in some scenarios. Mapping Virtual Paths to Physical Paths with Server.MapPath() If you need to map root relative or current folder relative URLs to physical URLs or you can use HttpContext.Current.Server.MapPath(). Inside of a Page you can do the following: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("~/scripts/ww.jquery.js")); MapPath is pretty flexible and it understands both ASP.NET style virtual paths as well as plain relative paths, so the following also works. string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("scripts/silverlight.js"); as well as dot relative syntax: string physicalPath = Server.MapPath("../scripts/jquery.js"); Once you have the physical path you can perform standard System.IO Path and File operations on the file. Remember with physical paths and IO or copy operations you need to make sure you have permissions to access files and folders based on the Web server user account that is active (NETWORK SERVICE, ASPNET typically). Note the Server.MapPath will not map up beyond the virtual root of the application for security reasons. Server and Host Information Between these settings you can get all the information you may need to figure out where you are at and to build new Url if necessary. If you need to build a URL completely from scratch you can get access to information about the server you are accessing: Server Variable Function and Example SERVER_NAME The of the domain or IP Address wwww.west-wind.com or 127.0.0.1 SERVER_PORT The port that the request runs under. 80 SERVER_PORT_SECURE Determines whether https: was used. 0 or 1 APPL_MD_PATH ADSI DirectoryServices path to the virtual root directory. Note that LM typically doesn’t work for ADSI access so you should replace that with LOCALHOST or the machine’s NetBios name. /LM/W3SVC/1/ROOT/webstore Request.Url and Uri Parsing If you still need more control over the current request URL or  you need to create new URLs from an existing one, the current Request.Url Uri property offers a lot of control. Using the Uri class and UriBuilder makes it easy to retrieve parts of a URL and create new URLs based on existing URL. The UriBuilder class is the preferred way to create URLs – much preferable over creating URIs via string concatenation. Uri Property Function Scheme The URL scheme or protocol prefix. http or https Port The port if specifically specified. DnsSafeHost The domain name or local host NetBios machine name www.west-wind.com or rasnote LocalPath The full path of the URL including script name and extra PathInfo. /webstore/admin/paths.aspx Query The query string if any ?id=1 The Uri class itself is great for retrieving Uri parts, but most of the properties are read only if you need to modify a URL in order to change it you can use the UriBuilder class to load up an existing URL and modify it to create a new one. Here are a few common operations I’ve needed to do to get specific URLs: Convert the Request URL to an SSL/HTTPS link For example to take the current request URL and converted  it to a secure URL can be done like this: UriBuilder build = new UriBuilder(Request.Url); build.Scheme = "https"; build.Port = -1; // don't inject portUri newUri = build.Uri; string newUrl = build.ToString(); Retrieve the fully qualified URL without a QueryString AFAIK, there’s no native routine to retrieve the current request URL without the query string. It’s easy to do with UriBuilder however: UriBuilder builder = newUriBuilder(Request.Url); builder.Query = ""; stringlogicalPathWithoutQuery = builder.ToString();

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 31, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, March 31, 2010New ProjectsBase Class Libraries: The Base Class Libraries site hosts samples, previews, and prototypes from the BCL team. BB Scheduler - BroadBand Scheduler: Broadband Scheduler is highly useful as it helps the user to set the time when the computer will automatically enable the Broadband (Internet) conn...BFBC2 PRoCon: BFBC2 PRoCon makes it easier for Bad Company 2 GSP's and private server owners to administer their BFBC2 servers. It's developed in C# and targete...Business Process Management Virtual Environment (BPMVE): This BPMVE project has been separated into 3 different projects. BPMVE_DataStructure project contains all data structures (classes and attribute...Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test Steps: Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test StepsCint: CintContent Edit Extender for Ajax.Net: The Content Edit Extender is an Ajax.Net control extender that allows in-place editing of a div tag (panel). Double-click to edit, hit enter or tab...COV Game: Cov game is a worms like game made on Silverlight with Python server.Cybera: A continuing development project of the existing but now generally inactive former Cybera project.DotNetCRM Community Edition: DotNetCRM Community Edition is an open source, enterprise class CRM built on the .NET platform. It is designed to be extensible, configurable, data...EAV: A sample EAV pattern for SQL Server with: Tables and indexes Partial referential integrity Partial data typing Updatable views (like normal SQL table)EditRegion.MVC: EditRegion.MVC may be all you want, when you do not want a full CMS. It allows html areas to be edited by nominated users or roles. The API follo...Firestarter Modeller: Firestarter ModellerHabanero.Testability: Habanero.TestabilityProSoft CMS: CMS System - scalable over an undeclared amount of servers - publishing services - version control of sitesPS-Blog.net: This is my first project here on codeplex. I would like to write my own blog software. Any comments or critcs are welcome.ReleaseMe: ReleaseMe is a simple little tool I use to copy websites, and custom Window Services, from my development machine to a specified production machin...SAAS-RD: SAAS-RD: uma ferrameta utilizada para prover integração de SaaS com aplicações externasSample Web Application using Telerik's OpenAccess ORM: Sample Web Site Application Project that uses Telerik's OpenAccess ORM for data access.Sistema Facturacion: En el proyecto de Sistema de Facturacion se desarrollara una aplicacion para el total control de un establecimiento comercial Smooth Habanero: Smooth HabaneroSouthEast Conference 2011: For the Florida Institute of Technology IEEE Chapter regarding the Southeast Hardware Conference held in Nashville, TN 2011.SQL Server Bible Standards: A SQL Server Design and Development standards document. SSAS Profiler Trace Scheduler: AS Profiler Scheduler is a tool that will enable Scheduling of SQL AS Tracing using predefined Profiler Templates. For tracking different issues th...Symbolic Algebra: Another attempt to make an algebric system but to be natively in C# under the .net framework. Theocratic Ministry School System: This is an Open Source Theocratic Ministry School System designed for Jehovah's Witnesses. It will include much of the same features as the TMS ver...Weather Report WebControls: The First Release Version:1.0.10330.2334WPF 3D Labyrinth: A project for "Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms" subject at Kaunas University of Technology. Building a 3D labyrinth with a figure which ...WPF Zen Garden: This is intended to be a gallery for WPF Style sheets in the form of Css Zen Garden. New ReleasesAPSales CRM - Software as a Service: APSales 0.1.3: This version add some interesting features to the project: Implement "Filter By Additional Fields" in view edit Implement quick create function Im...Base Class Libraries: BigRational: BigRational builds on the BigInteger introduced in .NET Framework 4 to create an arbitrary-precision rational number type. A rational number is a ...Base Class Libraries: Long Path: The long path wrapper provides functionality to make it easier to work with paths that are longer than the current 259 character limit of the Syste...Base Class Libraries: PerfMonitor: PerfMonitor is a command-line tool for profiling the system using Event Tracing for Windows (ETW). PerfMonitor is built on top of the TraceEvent li...Base Class Libraries: TraceEvent: TraceEvent is an experimental library that greatly simplifies reading Event Tracing for Windows (ETW) events. It is used by the PerfMonitor tool. ...BB Scheduler - BroadBand Scheduler: Broadband Scheduler v2.0: - Broadband service has some of the cheap and best monthly plans for the users all over the nation. And some of the plans include unlimited night d...BuildTools - Toolset for automated builds: BuildTools 2.0 Mar 2010 Milestone: The Mar 2010 Milestone release is a contains a bug fixes for projects not explicitly setting the StartingDate property, and no longer breaks when t...Business Rule Engine BizUnit Test Steps: BRE BizUnit Test Steps Ver. 1.0: Version 1.0Claymore MVP: Claymore 1.1.0.0: Changelog Added Compact Framework support Added fluent interface to configure the library.Content Edit Extender for Ajax.Net: ContentEditExtender 1.0 for Ajax.Net: Complete with source control and test/example Website and Web Service. Built with Visual Studio 2008 with the 3.5 BCL. Control requires the AjaxCon...dylan.NET: dylan.NET v. 9.6: This stable version of the compiler for both .NET 3.5 and 4.0 adds the loading of numbers in a bult-in fashion. See code below: #refasm mscorlib...EAV: March 2010: The initial release as demoed at the SSWUG Virtual Conference Spring 2010Fax .NET: Fax .NET 1.0.1: FIX : bugs for x64 and WOW64 architecture. The zip file include : Binary file Demo executable file Help fileFluent Ribbon Control Suite: Fluent Ribbon Control Suite 1.0 for NET 4.0 RC: Includes: Fluent.dll (with .pdb and .xml) compiled with .NET 4.0 RC Test application compiled with .NET 4.0 RC SourcesIceChat: IceChat 2009 Alpha 12.1 Full Install: Build Alpha 12.1 - March 30 2010 Fix Nick Name Change for Tabs/Server List for Queries Fix for running Channel List Multiple Times, clears list n...Import Excel data to SharePoint List: Import Data from Spreadsheet to SP List V1.5 x64: Import from Spreadsheet to a SharePoint List is the missing facet to the WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 List features. SharePoint lets a user create a custom...LINQ to Twitter: LINQ to Twitter Beta v2.0.9: New items added since v1.1 include: Support for OAuth (via DotNetOpenAuth), secure communication via https, VB language support, serialization of ...mojoPortal: 2.3.4.1: see release notes on mojoportal.com http://www.mojoportal.com/mojoportal-2341-released.aspxocculo: test: Release build for testers.PowerShell ToodleDo Module: 0.1: Initial Development Release - Very rough build.Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.2: Fixed issue where app crash when performance counter disappear or becomes unavailable while the application is running. For now the exception is si...Quick Performance Monitor: Version 1.3: Add 'view last error'Rule 18 - Love your clipboard: Rule 18 (Visual Studio 2010 + .NET 4 RC Version): This is the second public beta for the first version of Rule 18. It has had a extensive private beta and been used in big presentations since the ...Selection Maker: Selection Maker 1.5: New Features:If the source folder does not exist,a dialog box will appear and ask the user if he/she wants to create that folder or if select anoth...sPATCH: sPatch v0.9a: + Fixed: wrong path to elementclient.exeSQL Server Bible Standards: March 2010: Initial release as presented at SSWUG Virtual Conference Spring 2010Survey - web survey & form engine: Source Code Documentation: Documentation.chm file as published with Nsurvey v. 1.9.1 - april 2005 Basic technical documentation and description of source code for developers...Theocratic Ministry School System: Theocratic Ministry School System - TMSS: This is the first release of TMSS. It is far from complete but demonstrates the possiablities of what can be done with Access 2007 using developer ...Weather Report WebControls: WeatherReport Controls: 本下载包含一个已经经过编译的二进制运行库和一个测试的WebApplication项目，是2010年3月30日发布的Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerASP.NET Ajax LibraryMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitAJAX Control ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)LiveUpload to FacebookASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesMost Active ProjectsRawrjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesBase Class LibrariesBlogEngine.NETManaged Extensibility FrameworkFarseer Physics EngineGraffiti CMSMicrosoft Biology FoundationLINQ to Twitterpatterns & practices – Enterprise Library

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, April 28, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Wednesday, April 28, 2010New ProjectsArgument Handler: This project aims to help the handling of arguments in command line programs.Bing for BlackBerry: Bing for BlackBerry is a SDK that allows intergration and searching Bing in there applications.C4F - GeoWallpaper: This is an extension for my MEF Utility Runner to change desktop wallpaper based on Flickr images geotagged with your current location. Uses Windo...CRM 4.0 Contract Utilities: List of Contract Utilities (i.e. custom workflow actions) 1. Change contract status from Active to Draft 2. Copy Contract (with custom start/end da...ELIS: Multimedia player based on WPFEnterprise Administration with Powershell: The EnterpriseShell aims to produce a powershell code library that will enable Enterprise Administrators to quickly reconfigure their IT infrastruc...ExposedObject: ExposedObject uses dynamic typing in C# to provide convenient access to private fields and methods from code outside of the class – for testing, ex...F# Project Extender: Installing F# Project Extender provides tools to better organize files in F# projects by allowing project subdirectories and separating file manage...Hack Framework: Code bundle with the internets brains connected into one piece of .Net frameworkKrypton XNA: Krypton allows users of the XNA framework to easily add 2D lighting to their games. Krypton is fast, as it utilizes the GPU and uses a vertex shade...Net Darts: Provides an easy way to calculate the score left to throw. Users can easily click on the score.PlayerSharp: PlayerSharp is a library written entirely in C# that allows you to communicate your C# programs with the Player Server by Brian Gerkey et al (http:...Ratpoid: RatpoidRedeemer Tower Defense: 2d tower defense game. It is developed with XNA technology, using .Net Visual Studio 2008 or .Net Visual Studio 2010SelfService: Simple self service projectSharePoint Exchange Calendar: a jQuery based calendar web part for displaying Exchange calendars within SharePoint.SharpORM, easy use Object & Relation Database mapping Library: AIM on: Object easy storeage, Create,Retrieve,Update,Delete User .NET Attribute marking or Xml Standalone Mapping eg. public class Somethin...Silverlight Calculator: Silverlight Calculator makes it easier for people to do simple math calculations. It's developed in C# Silverlight 2. Silverlight Calendar: Silverlight Calendar makes it easier for people to view a calendar in silverlight way. It's developed in C# Silverlight 2.SPSocialUtil for SharePoint 2010: SPSocialUtil makes it easier for delevoper to use Social Tag, Tag Cloud, BookMark, Colleague in SharePoint 2010. It's developed in C# with Visual S...Sublight: Sublight open source project is a simple metadata utility for view models in ASP.NET MVC 2Veda Auto Dealer Report: Create work item tasks for the Veda Auto Dealer ReportWPF Meta-Effects: WPF Meta-Effects makes it easier for shader effect developpers to develop and maintain shader code. You'll no longer have to write any HLSL, instea...New ReleasesBing for BlackBerry: Bing SDK for BlackBerry: There are four downloadable components: The library, in source code format, in its latest stable release. A "getting started" doc that will gui...DotNetNuke® Store: 02.01.34: What's New in this release? Bugs corrected: - Fixed a bug related to encryption cookie when DNN is used in Medium Trust environment. New Features:...Encrypted Notes: Encrypted Notes 1.6.4: This is the latest version of Encrypted Notes, with general improvements and bug fixes for 'Batch Encryption'. It has an installer that will create...EPiServer CMS Page Type Builder: Page Type Builder 1.2 Beta 2: For more information about this release check out this blog post.ExposedObject: ExposedObject 0.1: This is an initial release of the ExposedObject library that lets you conveniently call private methods and access private fields of a class.Extended SSIS Package Execute: Ver 0.01: Version 0.01 - 2008 Compatible OnlyF# Project Extender: V0.9.0.0 (VS2008): F# project extender for Visual Studio 2008. Initial ReleaseFileExplorer.NET: FileExplorer.NET 1.0: This is the first release of this project. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Please report any bugs that you may en...Fluent ViewModel Configuration for WPF (MVVM): FluentViewModel Alpha3: Overhaul of the configuration system Separation of the configuratior and service locator Added support for general services - using Castle Wind...Home Access Plus+: v4.1: v4.1 Change Log: booking system fixes/additions Uploader fixes Added excluded extensions in my computer Updated Config Tool Fixed an issue ...ILMerge-GUI, merge .NET assemblies: 1.9.0 BETA: Compatible with .NET 4.0 This is the first version of ILMerge-GUI working with .NET 4.0. The final version will be 2.0.0, to be released by mid May...iTuner - The iTunes Companion: iTuner 1.2.3769 Beta 3c: Given the high download rate and awesome feedback for Beta 3b, I decided to release this interim build with the following enhancements: Added new h...Jet Login Tool (JetLoginTool): In then Out - 1.5.3770.18310: Fixed: Will only attempt to logout if currently logged in Fixed: UI no longer blocks while waiting for log outKooboo CMS: Kooboo CMS 2.1.1.0: New features Add new API RssUrl to generate RSS link, this is an extension to UrlHelper. Add possibility to index and search attachment content ...Krypton XNA: Krypton v1.0: First release of Krypton. I've tried to throw together a small testbed, but just getting tortoisehq to work the first time around was a huge pain. ...LinkedIn® for Windows Mobile: LinkedIn for Windows Mobile v0.5: Added missing files to installer packageNito.KitchenSink: Version 7: New features (since Version 5) Fixed null reference bug in ExceptionExtensions. Added DynamicStaticTypeMembers and RefOutArg for dynamically (lat...Numina Application/Security Framework: Numina.Framework Core 51341: Added multiple methods to API and classic ASP libraryOpenIdPortableArea: 0.1.0.3 OpenIdPortableArea: OpenIdPortableArea.Release: DotNetOpenAuth.dll DotNetOpenAuth.xml MvcContrib.dll MvcContrib.xml OpenIdPortableArea.dll OpenIdPortableAre...Play-kanaler (Windows Media Center Plug-in): Playkanaler 1.0.5 Alpha: Playkanaler version 1.0.5 Alpha Skärmsläckar-fix. helt otestad!PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn v0.81 Library with ServerWatch Sample: Release Notes Functionality improved. Possible bugs fixed. Realtime server time sample addedSharpORM, easy use Object & Relation Database mapping Library: Vbyte.SharpOrm 1.0.2010.427: Vbyte.SharpOrm for Access & SQLServer.7z 1.0 alpha release for Access oledb provider and Sql Server 2000+.Silverlight 4.0 Popup Menu: Context Menu for Silverlight 4.0: - Markup items can now be added seperately using the AddItem method. Alternatingly all items can be placed inside a listbox which can then be added...Silverlight Calculator: SilverCalculator: SilverCalculator version 1.0 Live demoSilverlight Calendar: Silverlight Calendar: Silverlight Calendar version 1.0 Live demoSpeakup Desktop Frontend: Speakup Desktop Frontend v0.2a: This is new version of Speakup Desktop Frontend. It requires .net 4.0 to be installed before using it. In this release next changes were done: - ...TwitterVB - A .NET Twitter Library: Twitter-2.5: Adds xAuth support and increases TwitterLocation information (html help file is not up to date, will correct in a later version.)VCC: Latest build, v2.1.30427.5: Automatic drop of latest buildXP-More: 1.1: Added a parent VHD edit feature. Moved VM settings from double-click to a button, and rearranged the buttons' layout.Yasbg: It's Static 1.0: Many changes have been made from the previous release. Read the README! This release adds settings tab and fixes bugs. To run, first unzip, then...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS Managerpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryAJAX Control ToolkitSilverlight ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterParticle Plot PivotFarseer Physics EngineBlogEngine.NETDotNetZip LibrarySqlDiffFramework-A Visual Differencing Engine for Dissimilar Data Sources

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 27, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Monday, December 27, 2010Popular ReleasesRocket Framework (.Net 4.0): Rocket Framework for Windows V 1.0.0: Architecture is reviewed and adjusted in a way so that I can introduce the Web version and WPF version of this framework next. - Rocket.Core is introduced - Controller button functions revisited and updated - DB is renewed to suite the implemented features - Create New button functionality is changed - Add Question Handling featuresVCC: Latest build, v2.1.31226.0: Automatic drop of latest buildFxCop Integrator for Visual Studio 2010: FxCop Integrtor 1.1.0: New FeatureSearch violation information FxCop Integrator provides the violation search feature. You can find out specific violation information by simple search expression.Analyze with FxCop project file FxCop Integrator supports code analysis with FxCop project file. You can customize code analysis behavior (e.g. analyze specifid types only, use specific rules only, and so on). ImprovementImproved the code analysis result list to show more information (added Proejct and File column). Change...Flickr Wallpaper Rotator (for Windows desktop): Wallpaper Flickr 1.1: Some minor bugfixes (mostly covering when network connection is flakey, so I discovered them all while at my parents' house for Christmas).Mcopy API: McopyAPI v.1.0.0.2: changed display help "mcopyapi /?" and a few minor changedOPSM: OPSM v2.0: Updated version, 30%-40% faster than v1.0. Requires .NET Framework 2.0People's Note: People's Note 0.19: Added touch scrolling to the note view screen. To install: copy the appropriate CAB file onto your WM device and run it.HSS Core Framework: HSS Core v4.0.700.10: Release v4.0.700.10 December 25th, 2010 Upgrade Instructions from v4.0.700 to v4.0.700.10: (patch release) Uninstall v4.0.700 Install the new v4.0.700.10 Upgrade Instructions: (full upgrade from a version prior to v4.0.700) Uninstall your old version Update the Log Configuration, by changing the logging from Database to Machine Backup and then Truncate the hss logging tables Uninstall the HSSLOG Database using the HSSLOG Database install wizard Uninstall the HSS Core Framework Ins...NoSimplerAccounting: NoSimplerAccounting 6.0: -Fixed a bug in expense category report.NHibernate Mapping Generator: NHibernate Mapping Generator 2.0: Added support for Postgres (Thanks to Angelo)NewLife XCode: XCode v6.5.2010.1223 ????（????v3.5??）: XCode v6.5.2010.1223 ????，??： NewLife.Core ??? NewLife.Net ??? XControl ??? XTemplate ????，??C#?????? XAgent ???? NewLife.CommonEnitty ??????（???，XCode??????） XCode?? ?????????，??????????????????，?????95% XCode v3.5.2009.0714 ??，?v3.5?v6.0???????????????，?????????。v3.5???????????，??????????????。 XCoder ??XTemplate?????????，????????XCode??? XCoder_Src ???????（????XTemplate????），??????????????????MiniTwitter: 1.64: MiniTwitter 1.64 ???? ?? 1.63 ??? URL ??????????????VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.4.0: Please see changes: http://support.vivoware.com/project/ChangeLog.aspx?PROJID=48Umbraco CMS: Umbraco 4.6 Beta - codename JUNO: The Umbraco 4.6 beta (codename JUNO) release contains many new features focusing on an improved installation experience, a number of robust developer features, and contains more than 89 bug fixes since the 4.5.2 release. Improved installer experience Updated Starter Kits (Simple, Blog, Personal, Business) Beautiful, free, customizable skins included Skinning engine and Skin customization (see Skinning Documentation Kit) Default dashboards on install with hide option Updated Login t...SSH.NET Library: 2010.12.23: This release includes some bug fixes and few new fetures. Fixes Allow to retrieve big directory structures ssh-dss algorithm is fixed Populate sftp file attributes New Features Support for passhrase when private key is used Support added for diffie-hellman-group14-sha1,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha256 and diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1 key exchange algorithms Allow to provide multiple key files for authentication Add support for "keyboard-interactive" authentication method...ASP.NET MVC SiteMap provider: MvcSiteMapProvider 2.3.0: Using NuGet?MvcSiteMapProvider is also listed in the NuGet feed. Learn more... Like the project? Consider a donation!Donate via PayPal via PayPal. Release notesThis will be the last release targeting ASP.NET MVC 2 and .NET 3.5. MvcSiteMapProvider 3.0.0 will be targeting ASP.NET MVC 3 and .NET 4 Web.config setting skipAssemblyScanOn has been deprecated in favor of excludeAssembliesForScan and includeAssembliesForScan ISiteMapNodeUrlResolver is now completely responsible for generating th...Media Companion: Media Companion 3.400: Extract the entire archive to a folder which has user access rights, eg desktop, documents etc. A manual is included to get you startedMulticore Task Framework: MTF 1.0.1: Release 1.0.1 of Multicore Task Framework.SQL Monitor - tracking sql server activities: SQL Monitor 3.0 alpha 7: 1. added script save/load in user query window 2. fixed problem with connection dialog when choosing windows auth but still ask for user name 3. auto open user table when double click one table node 4. improved alert message, added log only methodEnhSim: EnhSim 2.2.6 ALPHA: 2.2.6 ALPHAThis release supports WoW patch 4.03a at level 85 To use this release, you must have the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=A7B7A05E-6DE6-4D3A-A423-37BF0912DB84 To use the GUI you must have the .NET 4.0 Framework installed. This can be downloaded from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=9cfb2d51-5ff4-4491-b0e5-b386f32c0992 - Fixing up some r...New ProjectsActiveDirectory Object Model Library: The ActiveDirectory Object Model Library, which can operate the AD easily.Allspark: Allspark is an BI focused sharing space.Calendar Control for WP7: Calendar Control for Wp7 (Windows Phone 7). I needed a calendar control for my WP7 app and since WP7 did not have any and I couldn't find anything on the internet I decided to write my own. Please feel free to use it in your project and share if you have improved on it.CryptoPad: CryptoPad is a simple notepad like application that works with encrypted files. Users can open,edit and save encrypted files using CrypoPad without andy other application, everythning is easy and transparent.Entity Visualizer: Entity Framework Debugger VisualizerHTML-IDEx: HTML-IDEx is meant to be an open-source lightweight WYSIWYG HTML editor in which the user can see what they are doing in realtime. Comparable to my other project, Brandons HTML IDE, I'm hoping this to be a huge success.IL Inject: Aspect-oriented programming based on the injection of IL instruction in the methods of an assembly that is marked by attributesIntegração no Trabalho: Este projeto será desenvolvido para ser possível a integração entre funcionarios de uma empresa. O programa funcionará em rede e através dele será possível cadastrar projetos, atividades e seus colegas poderão comentar, criticar e dar dicas nos outros projetos .Knexsys Project: Knexsys, also know as KKD (Knexsys Knowledge Discovery), is a research program that aims to study the capabilities of SQL Server and the .NET framework to implement a rule production engine to mine real-time data. It's developed in C#.mysvn: This project host including some of my own projects. I am interested in WPF and RIA. Furthermore, I want to learn more about C, C++, Java, PHP, Python.OpenTwitter: Twitter clone made with C# and LINQ. this is only a webservice, there is no client for it, the main idea behind opentwitter is to provide a framework that you can use with your own clients ( mobile devices, web pages, etc ) and data provider ( xml, sql server, oracle, etc ).OPSM: OPSM Miner & information projectOutlook UI Tools: Changes to the Outlook UI to make it more usable: * Allow reply to address a recipient instead of the sender * Keep meeting reminders from popping up when overdue many daysSimpleUploadTo: Simple UploadToTFS 4 FPSE: Allow the ability for FrontPage Server Extensions to use TFS as a source control repository.TFS CheckInNotifier: Team Foundation Server 2010 Check-in event notifier desktop application.Universe.WCF.Behaviors: Universe.WCF.Behaviors provides behaviors: - Easy migration from Remoting - Transparent delivery - Traffic Statistics - WCF Streaming Adaptor for BinaryWriter and TextWriter - etc vebshop2: vebshop2Windows Weibo all in one for Sina Sohu and QQ: Windows Weibo all in one for Sina Sohu and QQ.

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• When Your Boss Doesn't Want you to Succeed

  - by Phil Factor

  You're working hard to get an application finished. You are programming long into the evenings sometimes, and eating sandwiches at your desk instead of taking a lunch break. Then one day you glance up at the IT manager, serene in his mysterious round of meetings, and think 'Does he actually care whether this project succeeds or not?'. The question may seem absurd. Of course the project must succeed. The truth, as always, is often far more complex. Your manager may even be doing his best to make sure you don't succeed. Why? There have always been rich pickings for the unscrupulous in IT.  In extreme cases, where administrators struggle with scarcely-comprehended technical issues, huge sums of money can be lost and gained without any perceptible results. In a very few cases can fraud be proven: most of the time, the intricacies of the 'game' are such that one can do little more than harbor suspicion.  Where does over-enthusiastic salesmanship end and fraud begin? The Business of Information Technology provides rich opportunities for White-collar crime. The poor developer has his, or her, hands full with the task of wrestling with the sheer complexity of building an application. He, or she, has no time for following the complexities of the chicanery of the management that is directing affairs.  Most likely, the developers wouldn't even suspect that their company management had ulterior motives. I'll illustrate what I mean with an entirely fictional, hypothetical, example. The Opportunist and the Aged Charities often do good, unexciting work that is funded by the income from a bequest that dates back maybe hundreds of years.  In our example, it isn't exciting work, for it involves the welfare of elderly people who have fallen on hard times.  Volunteers visit, giving a smile and a chat, and check that they are all right, but are able to spend a little money on their discretion to ameliorate any pressing needs for these old folk.  The money is made to work very hard and the charity averts a great deal of suffering and eases the burden on the state. Daisy hears the garden gate creak as Mrs Rainer comes up the path. She looks forward to her twice-weekly visit from the nice lady from the trust. She always asked ‘is everything all right, Love’. Cheeky but nice. She likes her cheery manner. She seems interested in hearing her memories, and talking about her far-away family. She helps her with those chores in the house that she couldn’t manage and once even paid to fill the back-shed with coke, the other year. Nice, Mrs. Rainer is, she thought as she goes to open the door. The trustees are getting on in years themselves, and worry about the long-term future of the charity: is it relevant to modern society? Is it likely to attract a new generation of workers to take it on. They are instantly attracted by the arrival to the board of a smartly dressed University lecturer with the ear of the present Government. Alain 'Stalin' Jones is earnest, persuasive and energetic. The trustees welcome him to the board and quickly forgive his humorless political-correctness. He talks of 'diversity', 'relevance', 'social change', 'equality' and 'communities', but his eye is on that huge bequest. Alain first came to notice as a Trotskyite union official, who insinuated himself into one of the duller Trades Unions and turned it, through his passionate leadership, into a radical, headline-grabbing organization.  Middle age, and the rise of European federal socialism, had brought him quiet prosperity and charcoal suits, an ear in the current government, and a wide influence as a member of various Quangos (government bodies staffed by well-paid unelected courtiers).  He was employed as a 'consultant' by several organizations that relied on government contracts. After gaining the confidence of the trustees, and showing a surprising knowledge of mundane processes and the regulatory framework of charities, Alain launches his plan.  The trust will expand their work by means of a bold IT initiative that will coordinate the interventions of several 'caring agencies', and provide  emergency cover, a special Website so anxious relatives can see how their elderly charges are doing, and a vastly more efficient way of coordinating the work of the volunteer carers. It will also provide a special-purpose site that gives 'social networking' facilities, rather like Facebook, to the few elderly folk on the lists with access to the internet. The trustees perk up. Their own experience of the internet is restricted to the occasional scanning of railway timetables, but they can see that it is 'relevant'. In his next report to the other trustees, Alain proudly announces that all this glamorous and exciting technology can be paid for by a grant from the government. He admits darkly that he has influence. True to his word, the government promises a grant of a size that is an order of magnitude greater than any budget that the trustees had ever handled. There was the understandable proviso that the company that would actually do the IT work would have to be one of the government's preferred suppliers and the work would need to be tendered under EU competition rules. The only company that tenders, a multinational IT company with a long track record of government work, quotes ten million pounds for the work. A trustee questions the figure as it seems enormous for the reasonably trivial internet facilities being built, but the IT Salesmen dazzle them with presentations and three-letter acronyms until they subside into quiescent acceptance. After all, they can’t stay locked in the Twentieth century practices can they? The work is put in hand with a large project team, in a splendid glass building near west London. The trustees see rooms of programmers working diligently at screens, and who talk with enthusiasm of the project. Paul, the project manager, looked through his resource schedule with growing unease. His initial excitement at being given his first major project hadn’t lasted. He’d been allocated a lackluster team of developers whose skills didn’t seem right, and he was allowed only a couple of contractors to make good the deficit. Strangely, the presentation he’d given to his management, where he’d saved time and resources with a OTS solution to a great deal of the development work, and a sound conservative architecture, hadn’t gone down nearly as big as he’d hoped. He almost got the feeling they wanted a more radical and ambitious solution. The project starts slipping its dates. The costs build rapidly. There are certain uncomfortable extra charges that appear, such as the £600-a-day charge by the 'Business Manager' appointed to act as a point of liaison between the charity and the IT Company.  When he appeared, his face permanently split by a 'Mr Sincerity' smile, they'd thought he was provided at the cost of the IT Company. Derek, the DBA, didn’t have to go to the server room quite some much as he did: but It got him away from the poisonous despair of the development group. Wave after wave of events had conspired to delay the project.  Why the management had imposed hideous extra bureaucracy to cover ISO 9000 and 9001:2008 accreditation just as the project was struggling to get back on-schedule was  beyond belief.  Then  the Business manager was coming back with endless changes in scope, sorrowing saying that the Trustees were very insistent, though hopelessly out in touch with the reality of technical challenges. Suddenly, the costs mount to the point of consuming the government grant in its entirety. The project remains tantalizingly just out of reach. Alain Jones gives an emotional rallying speech at the trustees review meeting, urging them not to lose their nerve. Sadly, the trustees dip into the accumulated capital of the trust, the seed-corn of all their revenues, in order to save the IT project. A few months later it is all over. The IT project is never delivered, even though it had seemed so incredibly close.  With the trust's capital all gone, the activities it funded have to be terminated and the trust becomes just a shell. There aren't even the funds to mount a legal challenge against the IT company, even had the trust's solicitor advised such a foolish thing. Alain leaves as suddenly as he had arrived, only to pop up a few months later, bronzed and rested, at another charity. The IT workers who were permanent employees are dispersed to other projects, and the contractors leave to other contracts. Within months the entire project is but a vague memory. One or two developers remain  puzzled that their managers had been so obstructive when they should have welcomed progress toward completion of the project, but they put it down to incompetence and testosterone. Few suspected that they were actively preventing the project from getting finished. The relationships between the IT consultancy, and the government of the day are intricate, and made more complex by the Private Finance initiatives and political patronage.  The losers in this case were the taxpayers, and the beneficiaries of the trust, and, perhaps the soul of the original benefactor of the trust, whose bid to give his name some immortality had been scuppered by smooth-talking white-collar political apparatniks.  Even now, nobody is certain whether a crime was ever committed. The perfect heist, I guess. Where’s the victim? "I hear that Daisy’s cottage is up for sale. She’s had to go into a care home.  She didn’t want to at all, but then there is nobody to keep an eye on her since she had that minor stroke a while back.  A charity used to help out. The ‘social’ don’t have the funding, evidently for community care. Yes, her old cat was put down. There was a good clearout, and now the house is all scrubbed and cleared ready for sale. The skip was full of old photos and letters, memories. No room in her new ‘home’."

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 16, 2010

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, April 16, 2010New Projects[C#] UML Touch: This project is my master thesis project for Msc Software Engineering at Oxford Brookes univesity. The goal of this project is to develop a UML Edi...3D Chart Reports, using ASP.NET 2.0: Project focuses on the visibility of internal supply chain management process. The objective is materialized, using MSChart and hence provides asse...Active Directory Health: ActiveDirectoryHealth (ADHealth) Aim: To create a suite of tools to allow an Active Directory administrator monitor and identify problems, particu...Art4Desktop: Aplicação desktop simplesAuto Increment field for any entity in MS CRM: Auto Increment field for any entity in MS CRM will add an attribute in any entity which will be auto increment type.Convection Game Engine (Basic Edition): A basic 2D game engine written in C# using XNA 3.1CSharp Intellisense: VS 2010 IntelliSense plug-in Provides custom IntelliSense for the CSharp Editor that is capable to filter out events, preoperties or methods. ...EP: Generic platform for enterprise applications developed on .NETFile Change Checker: A simple windows form application that checks and copies all modified files given a specified date. It aims to help developers that use Visual Stu...Folder: Folder is a puzzle platformer game, which provides you a whole new experience. You can fold objects in game play; a wall becomes a road, a high sti...Industrial Dashboard: WCF service that allows executing SQL Server stored procedures straight from javascript code, enabling sending and receiving structured data withou...kafrilion: Open Source Platform GameLogikBug.Injection: LogikBug.Injection is an IOC container and is very light weight. It is very simple to use and yet very roboust, there are many options and ways to ...MongoMvc: NoSql with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC. For more details check out the blog post http://weblogs.asp.net/shijuvarghese/archive/2010/04/16/nosql-wi...MOSSDAL: MOSS Data Access Layer for data from the Sharepoint Lists Service: MOSSDAL is a lightweight framework for working with Sharepoint MOSS List data using the List web Service. It can be used with silverlight or regul...Should: This is a set of test framework agnostic extensions assetion extensions. This project was born because test runners Should be independent of the...Software Localization Tool: summaryTIMETABLEASY: planning managerTR9: implementions of t9 technologies from mobile device to personal computer and laptopTrp net tools: net toolTwep: Twep is a JavaScript lib.Using PowerPivot to analyze MS Dynamics NAV: Project show how to prepare MS Dynamics NAV data for analyzing in PowerPivot for Excel. Project include Data Warehouse demo database, sql procedure...vmware virtual mashines management system for education: System for management many classes with PC and VMware virtual mashines (bad english,sorry)WebSite: Mr. John's projectsWebtrends DX and DC Services Libraries: This project is setup to provide assemblies to simplify access to the REST based DX and DC Web Services that Webtrends Provides. For access you ne...YetAnotherFileRenamer: Searches a directory and/or sub-directories for files matching a certain extension and copies and renames them to the same folder. The intent is a...New Releases3D Chart Reports, using ASP.NET 2.0: Beta iscm1.0.0.1: Its first release, might be a tolerant to bugs.A Guide to Parallel Programming: Drop 2 - Guide Chapters 2 and 5, accompanying code: This is Drop 2 with just the Guide Chapters 2 and 5 and the accompanying code samples. This drop requires Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 or later in ord...AnimeJ: AnimeJ 1.1: This new release features reversible animations. It is fully backward compatible, and by simply specifying an additional parameter to Run() you can...AutoPoco: AutoPoco 0.4: A load of additions to the convention system Inheritance precedence added And a pile of extra data sourcesCSharp Intellisense: V1.5: CSharpIntellisensePresenter(Free) Created by: Bnaya Eshet (Bnaya Eshet (credit to Karl Shifflett)) Last Updated: Tuesday, April 13, 2010 Version...DevTreks -social budgeting that improves lives and livelihoods: Social Budgeting Web Software, DevTreks alpha 4: Alpha 4 upgrades all story-telling with one very basic, simple, 'story' data pattern, schema, and stylesheet. Basic, simple, stories and eBook pa...ESPEHA: Espeha 4.3: Deletion of categories and tasks via F8 Saving on CtrlS, CtrlShiftS Navigating to search on CtrlF Hiding on CtrlQ, CtrlX, CtrlH, Q, X, H + Drag ...Folder Bookmarks: Folder Bookmarks 1.4.4: This is the latest version of Folder Bookmarks (1.4.4), with general improvements. It has an installer - it will create a directory 'CPascoe' in My...HouseFly controls: HouseFly controls alpha 0.9.1: Version 0.9.1 alpha release of HouseFly controlsIndustrial Dashboard: 2.0 Beta: 2.0 Beta includes : IndustrialDashboard Framework Sample widgets : TabularReport, DropDownPicker, DatePicker, ScopePicker Sample html pageskdar: KDAR 0.0.20: KDAR - Kernel Debugger Anti Rootkit - signature's bases updated - many bugs fixedLogikBug.Injection: Initial Release: This project is dependent upon Microsoft.Practices.ServiceLocation.IServiceLocator and must be referenced when referencing LogikBug.Injection.Mesopotamia Experiment: Mesopotamia 1.2.72: New Features - Select organims to load in sim or in hw mode Fixes - fixed robotics engine not shutting down properly - selects new robotics port o...MobySharp: MobySharp 1.1: Fixed GetComments Added the new Likes featureMongoMvc: NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC: A demo on NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC. To run the demo application do the ollowing actions. 1. Create a directory call C:\data\...NetMassDownloader: Release 1.6.0.0: Mass Downloader For .Net Framework which allows you do download .Net Framework source code all at once.Offline debugging for VS2005 , VS2008 , Code...Nito.KitchenSink: Version 4: Features added in this release: PDBs are source-indexed to CodePlex, so it should be possible to step through the code (with on-demand downloads) w...Nito.KitchenSink: Version 5: The only feature for this release is support of the .NET 4.0 platform. Dependencies Nito.Linq 0.4 Beta (released 2010-04-15) Rx 1.0.2441.0 (rele...Nito.LINQ: Beta (v0.4): Rx version The "with Rx" versions of Nito.LINQ are built against Rx 1.0.2441.0, released 2010-04-15. Breaking changes IEnumerable<T>.Min and IEnum...N-Twill Twitter Client for VB.NET: NTWILL PROJECT 15-abril-2010: Este archivo es un Zip que contiene el proyecto hasta este punto editado... tiene algunas que otras funciones, pero lo cuelgo para tener un referen...PanBrowser: 1.2.0: added screensaver support, hit a key to exit, up/down keys cycle through images.PersianDateTimePicker, PersianMonthCalendar: PersianDatetimePicker,PersianMonthCalendar: PersianDatetimePicker,PersianMonthCalendar 1.1 releasesPokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn Library v03: New Features! Client MessageLog Management Added CrossBrowser Script Injector Added to work with non ajax supported browsers and activeX disabled...PokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn Sample VS09: Sample Project of PokeIn VS09. Contains version 0.3 of LibraryPokeIn Comet Ajax Library: PokeIn Sample VS10: Sample Visual Studio 10 project for PokeIn. Contains v03 Library of PokeInSilverlight Toolkit: April 2010: Suggestions? Features? Questions? Ask questions in our Silverlight Toolkit forum on Silverlight.net. The forum is the best resource for Silverlig...Software Localization Tool: SharpSLT 0.9: This is the first release of SharpSLT. Features Framework: .Net 3.5 UI language: English Works as standalone and External Tool for Visual C# Ex...Star Trooper for XNA 2D Tutorial: Lesson two content: Here is Lesson two original content for the StarTrooper 2D XNA tutorial. The blog tutorial has now started over on http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgen...StyleCop for ReSharper: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.0.14714.1: StyleCop for ReSharper 5.0.14714.1 o StyleCop 4.3.3.0 o ReSharper 5.0.1659.36 o Visual Studio 2008 / Visual Studio 2010 Installation Instructi...TaskUnZip for SSIS: TaskUnZip for SSIS 1.1.1.0 (beta 2): Ver. 1.1.1.0 (beta2) Bug: Correct installation bug. Add: Support SQL SERVER 2008 / 2005 Minor corrections Ver. 1.1.0.0 (Tnx to: Kevin Wendler)...TaskUnZip for SSIS: TaskUnZip for SSIS 1.2.0.0: Ver. 1.2.0.0 Add: Support SQL SERVER 2008 / 2005. Add: recursive compress.* Add: filter option for extract e compress file.* Add: Test archiv...Test Project (ignore): abcde: aaaaadaTR9: TR9 Beta: this setup is first release of the program.TR9: TR9 Source Code: TR9 Source CodeUsing PowerPivot to analyze MS Dynamics NAV: GL sql procedures and demo DB: For using sql procedures and creating DW database, please see Documentation.VivoSocial: VivoSocial 7.1.1: Version 7.1.1 of VivoSocial has been released. If you experienced any issues with the previous version, please update your modules to the 7.1.1 rel...WPF Inspirational Quote Management System: Release 1.1.1: - Changed to only allow one running instance a time. - Custom icon in system tray popup removed for now as this breaks when text size is set to gr...WPF ShaderEffect Generator: WPF ShaderEffect Generator 1.6.1: Just a minor release to fix the problem with resource Uri generation in the C# Shadereffect files. ChangesThe Uri should be correctly generated no...Most Popular ProjectsRawrWBFS ManagerAJAX Control ToolkitMicrosoft SQL Server Product Samples: DatabaseSilverlight ToolkitWindows Presentation Foundation (WPF)ASP.NETMicrosoft SQL Server Community & SamplesPHPExcelpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryMost Active ProjectsRawrpatterns & practices – Enterprise LibraryGMap.NET - Great Maps for Windows Forms & PresentationIndustrial DashboardFarseer Physics EngineIonics Isapi Rewrite FilterNB_Store - Free DotNetNuke Ecommerce Catalog ModuleBlogEngine.NETjQuery Library for SharePoint Web ServicesDotRas

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• The Internet of Things & Commerce: Part 2 -- Interview with Brian Celenza, Commerce Innovation Strategist

  - by Katrina Gosek, Director | Commerce Product Strategy-Oracle

  Internet of Things & Commerce Series: Part 2 (of 3) Welcome back to the second installation of my three part series on the Internet of Things & Commerce. A few weeks ago, I wrote “The Next 7,000 Days” about how we’ve become embedded in a digital architecture in the last 7,000 days since the birth of the internet – an architecture that everyday ties the massive expanse of the internet evermore closely with our physical lives. This blog series explores how this new blend of virtual and material will change how we shop and how businesses sell. Now enjoy reading my interview with Brian Celenza, one of the chief strategists in our Oracle Commerce innovation group. He comments on the past, present, and future of the how the growing Internet of Things relates and will relate to the buying and selling of goods on and offline. -------------------------------------------- QUESTION: You probably have one of the coolest jobs on our team, Brian – and frankly, one of the coolest jobs in our industry. As part of the innovation team for Oracle Commerce, you’re regularly working on bold features and groundbreaking commerce-focused experiences for our vision demos. As you look back over the past couple of years, what is the biggest trend (or trends) you’ve seen in digital commerce that started to bring us closer to this idea of what people are calling an “Internet of Things”? Brian: Well as you look back over the last couple of years, the speed at which change in our industry has moved looks like one of those blurred movement photos – you know the ones where the landscape blurs because the observer is moving so quickly your eye focus can’t keep up. But one thing that is absolutely clear is that the biggest catalyst for that speed of change – especially over the last three years – has been mobile. Mobile technology changed everything. Over the last three years the entire thought process of how to sell on (and offline) has shifted because of mobile technology advances. Particularly for eCommerce professionals who have started to move past the notion of “channels” for selling goods to this notion of “Mobile First”… then the Web site. Or more accurately, that everything – smartphones, web, store, tablet – is just one channel or has to act like one singular access point to the same product catalog, information and content. The most innovative eCommerce professionals realized some time ago that it’s not ideal to build an eCommerce Web site and then build everything on top of or off of it. Rather, they want to build an eCommerce API and then integrate it will all other systems. To accomplish this, they are leveraging all the latest mobile technologies or possibilities mobile technology has opened up: 4G and LTE, GPS, bluetooth, touch screens, apps, html5… How has this all started to come together for shopping experiences on and offline? Well to give you a personal example, I remember visiting an Apple store a few years ago and being amazed that I didn’t have to wait in line because a store associate knew everything about me from my ID – right there on the sales floor – and could check me out anywhere. Then just a few months later (when like any good addict) I went back to get the latest and greatest new gadget, I felt like I was stealing it because I could check myself out with my smartphone. I didn’t even need to see a sales associate OR go to a cash register. Amazing. And since then, all sort sorts of companies across all different types of industries – from food service to apparel –  are starting to see mobile payments in the billions of dollars now thanks not only to the convenience factor but to smart loyalty rewards programs as well. These are just some really simple current examples that come to mind. So many different things have happened in the last couple of years, it’s hard to really absorb all of the quickly – because as soon as you do, everything changes again! Just like that blurry speed photo image. For eCommerce, however, this type of new environment underscores the importance of building an eCommerce API – a platform that has services you can tap in to and build on as the landscape changes at a fever pitch. It’s a mobile first perspective. A web service perspective – particularly if you are thinking of how to engage customers across digital and physical spaces. —— QUESTION: Thanks for bringing us into the present – some really great examples you gave there to put things into perspective. So what do you see as the biggest trend right now around the “Internet of Things” – and what’s coming next few years? Brian: Honestly, even sitting where I am in the innovation group – it’s hard to look out even 12 months because, well, I don’t even think we’ve fully caught up with what is possible now. But I can definitely say that in the last 12 months and in the coming 12 months, in the technology and eCommerce world it’s all about iBeacons. iBeacons are awesome tools we have right now to tie together physical and digital shopping experiences. They know exactly where you are as a shopper and can communicate that to businesses. Currently there seem to be two camps of thought around iBeacons. First, many people are thinking of them like an “indoor GPS”, which to be fair they literally are. The use case this first camp envisions for iBeacons is primarily for advertising and marketing. So they use iBeacons to push location-based promotions to customers if they are close to a store or in a store. You may have seen these types of mobile promotions start to pop up occasionally on your smart phone as you pass by a store you’ve bought from in the past. That’s the work of iBeacons. But in my humble opinion, these promotions probably come too early in the customer journey and although they may be well timed and work to “convert” in some cases, I imagine in most they are just eroding customer trust because they are kind of a “one-size-fits-all” solution rather than one that is taking into account what exactly the customer might be looking for in that particular moment. Maybe they just want more information and a promotion is way too soon for that type of customer. The second camp is more in line with where my thinking falls. In this case, businesses take a more sensitive approach with iBeacons to customers’ needs. Instead of throwing out a “one-size-fits-all” to any passer by with iBeacons, the use case is more around looking at the physical proximity of a customer as an opportunity to provide a service: show expert reviews on a product they may be looking at in a particular aisle of a store, offer the opportunity to compare prices (and then offer a promotion), signal an in-store associate if a customer has been in the store for more than 10 minutes in one place. These are all less intrusive more value-driven uses of iBeacons. And they are more about building customer trust through service. To take this example a bit further into the future realm of “Big Data” and “Internet of Things” businesses could actually use the Oracle Commerce Platform and iBeacons to “silently” track customer movement w/in the store to provide higher quality service. And this doesn’t have to be creepy or intrusive. Simply if a customer has been in a particular department or aisle for more than a 5 or 10 minutes, an in-store associate could come over an offer some assistance already knowing customer preferences from their online profile and maybe even seeing the items in a shopping cart they started at home. None of this has to be revealed to the customer, but it certainly could boost the level of service an in-store sales associate could provide. Or, in another futuristic example, stores could use the digital footprint of the physical store transmitted by iBeacons to generate heat maps of the store that could be tracked over time. Imagine how much you could find out about which parts of the store are more busy during certain parts of the day or seasons. This could completely revolutionize how physical merchandising is deployed or where certain high value / new items are placed. And / or this use of iBeacons could also help businesses figure out if customers are getting held up in certain parts of the store during busy days like Black Friday. If long lines are causing customers to bounce from a physical store and leave those holiday gifts behind, maybe having employees with mobile check as an option could remove the cash register bottleneck. But going to back to my original statement, it’s all still very early in the story for iBeacons. The hardware manufacturers are still very new and there is still not one clear standard.  Honestly, it all goes back to building and maintaining an extensible and flexible platform for anywhere engagement. What you’re building today should allow you to rapidly take advantage of whatever unimaginable use cases wait around the corner. ------------------------------------------------------ I hope you enjoyed the brief interview with Brian. It’s really awesome to have such smart and innovation-minded individuals on our Oracle Commerce innovation team. Please join me again in a few weeks for Part 3 of this series where I interview one of the product managers on our team about how the blending of digital and in-store selling in influencing our product development and vision.

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• Experience your music in a whole new way with Zune for PC

  - by Matthew Guay

  Tired of the standard Media Player look and feel, and want something new and innovative?  Zune offers a fresh, new way to enjoy your music, videos, pictures, and podcasts, whether or not you own a Zune device. Microsoft started out on a new multimedia experience for PCs and mobile devices with the launch of the Zune several years ago.  The Zune devices have been well received and noted for their innovative UI, and the Zune HD’s fluid interface is the foundation for the widely anticipated Windows Phone 7.  But regardless of whether or not you have a Zune Device, you can still use the exciting new UI and services directly from your PC.  Zune for Windows is a very nice media player that offers a music and video store and wide support for multimedia formats including those used in Apple products.  And if you enjoy listening to a wide variety of music, it also offers the Zune Pass which lets you stream an unlimited number of songs to your computer and download 10 songs for keeps per month for $14.99/month. Or you can do a pre-paid music card as well.  It does all this using the new Metro UI which beautifully shows information using text in a whole new way.  Here’s a quick look at setting up and using Zune on your PC. Getting Started Download the installer (link below), and run it to begin setup.  Please note that Zune offers a separate version for computers running the 64 bit version of Windows Vista or 7, so choose it if your computer is running these. Once your download is finished, run the installer to setup Zune on your computer.  Accept the EULA when prompted. If there are any updates available, they will automatically download and install during the setup.  So, if you’re installing Zune from a disk (for example, one packaged with a Zune device), you don’t have to worry if you have the latest version.  Zune will proceed to install on your computer.   It may prompt you to restart your computer after installation; click Restart Now so you can proceed with your Zune setup.  The reboot appears to be for Zune device support, and the program ran fine otherwise without rebooting, so you could possibly skip this step if you’re not using a Zune device.  However, to be on the safe side, go ahead and reboot. After rebooting, launch Zune.  It will play a cute introduction video on first launch; press skip if you don’t want to watch it. Zune will now ask you if you want to keep the default settings or change them.  Choose Start to keep the defaults, or Settings to customize to your wishes.  Do note that the default settings will set Zune as your default media player, so click Settings if you wish to change this. If you choose to change the default settings, you can change how Zune finds and stores media on your computer.  In Windows 7, Zune will by default use your Windows 7 Libraries to manage your media, and will in fact add a new Podcasts library to Windows 7. If your media is stored on another location, such as on a server, then you can add this to the Library.  Please note that this adds the location to your system-wide library, not just the Zune player. There’s one last step.  Enter three of your favorite artists, and Zune will add Smart DJ mixes to your Quickplay list based on these.  Some less famous or popular artists may not be recognized, so you may have to try another if your choice isn’t available.  Or, you can click Skip if you don’t want to do this right now. Welcome to Zune!  This is the default first page, QuickPlay, where you can easily access your pinned and new items.   If you have a Zune account, or would like to create a new one, click Sign In on the top. Creating a new account is quick and simple, and if you’re new to Zune, you can try out a 14 day trial of Zune Pass for free if you want. Zune allows you to share your listening habits and favorites with friends or the world, but you can turn this off or change it if you like. Using Zune for Windows To access your media, click the Collection link on the top left.  Zune will show all the media you already have stored on your computer, organized by artist and album. Right-click on any album, and you choose to have Zune find album art or do a variety of other tasks with the media.   When playing media, you can view it in several unique ways.  First, the default Mix view will show related tracks to the music you’re playing from Smart DJ.  You can either play these fully if you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, or otherwise you can play 30 second previews. Then, for many popular artists, Zune will change the player background to show pictures and information in a unique way while the music is playing.  The information may range from history about the artist to the popularity of the song being played.   Zune also works as a nice viewer for the pictures on your computer. Start a slideshow, and Zune will play your pictures with nice transition effects and music from your library. Zune Store The Zune Store offers a wide variety of music, TV shows, and videos for purchase.  If you’re a Zune Pass subscriber, you can listen to or download any song without purchasing it; otherwise, you can preview a 30 second clip first. Zune also offers a wide selection of Podcasts you can subscribe to for free. Using Zune for PC with a Zune Device If you have a Zune device attached to your computer, you can easily add media files to it by simply dragging them to the Zune device icon in the left corner.  In the future, this will also work with Windows Phone 7 devices. If you have a Zune HD, you can also download and add apps to your device. Here’s the detailed information window for the weather app.  Click Download to add it to your device.   Mini Mode The Zune player generally takes up a large portion of your screen, and is actually most impressive when run maximized.  However, if you’re simply wanting to enjoy your tunes while you’re using your computer, you can use the Mini mode to still view music info and control Zune in a smaller mode.  Click the Mini Player button near the window control buttons in the top right to activate it. Now Zune will take up much less of your desktop.  This window will stay on top of other windows so you can still easily view and control it. Zune will display an image of the artist if one is available, and this shows up in Mini mode more often than it does in the full mode. And, in Windows 7, you could simply minimize Zune as you can control it directly from the taskbar thumbnail preview.   Even more controls are available from Zune’s jumplist in Windows 7.  You can directly access your Quickplay links or choose to shuffle all music without leaving the taskbar. Settings Although Zune is designed to be used without confusing menus and settings, you can tweak the program to your liking from the settings panel.  Click Settings near the top left of the window. Here you can change file storage, types, burn, metadata, and many more settings.  You can also setup Zune to stream media to your XBOX 360 if you have one.   You can also customize Zune’s look with a variety of modern backgrounds and gradients. Conclusion If you’re ready for a fresh way to enjoy your media, Zune is designed for you.  It’s innovative UI definitely sets it apart from standard media players, and is very pleasing to use.  Zune is especially nice if your computer is using XP, Vista Home Basic, or 7 Starter as these versions of Windows don’t include Media Center.  Additionally, the mini player mode is a nice touch that brings a feature of Windows 7’s Media Player to XP and Vista.  Zune is definitely one of our favorite music apps.  Try it out, and get a fresh view of your music today! Link Download Zune for Windows Similar Articles Productive Geek Tips Redeem Pre-paid Zune Card Points for Zune Marketplace MediaUpdate Your Zune Player SoftwaredoubleTwist is an iTunes Alternative that Supports Several DevicesFind Free or Cheap Indie Music at Amie StreetAmie Street Downloader Makes Purchasing Music Easier TouchFreeze Alternative in AutoHotkey The Icy Undertow Desktop Windows Home Server – Backup to LAN The Clear & Clean Desktop Use This Bookmarklet to Easily Get Albums Use AutoHotkey to Assign a Hotkey to a Specific Window Latest Software Reviews Tinyhacker Random Tips DVDFab 6 Revo Uninstaller Pro Registry Mechanic 9 for Windows PC Tools Internet Security Suite 2010 The Ultimate Guide For YouTube Lovers Will it Blend? iPad Edition Penolo Lets You Share Sketches On Twitter Visit Woolyss.com for Old School Games, Music and Videos Add a Custom Title in IE using Spybot or Spyware Blaster When You Need to Hail a Taxi in NYC

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• Does HTML 5 &ldquo;Rich vs. Reach&rdquo; a False Choice?

  - by andrewbrust

  The competition between the Web and proprietary rich platforms, including Windows, Mac OS, iPhone/iPad, Adobe’s Flash/AIR and Microsoft’s Silverlight, is not new. But with the emergence of HTML 5 and imminent support for it in the next release of the major Web browsers, the battle is heating up. And with the announcements made Wednesday at Google's I/O conference, it's getting kicked up yet another notch. The impact of this platform battle on companies in the media and advertising world, and the developers who serve them, is significant. The most prominent question is whether video and rich media online will shift towards pure HTML and away from plug-ins like Flash and Silverlight. In fact, certain features in HTML 5 make it suitable for development for line of business applications as well, further threatening those plug-in technologies. So what's the deal? Is this real or hype? To answer that question, I've done my own research into HTML 5's features and talked to several media-focused, New York area developers to get their opinions. I present my findings to you in this post. Before bearing down into HTML 5 specifics and practitioners’ quotes, let's set the context. To understand what HTML 5 can do, take a look at this video of Sports Illustrated’s HTML 5 prototype. This should start to get you bought into the idea that HTML 5 could be a game-changer. Next, if you happen to have installed the beta version of Google's Chrome 5 browser, take a look at the page linked to below, and in that page, click on any of the game thumbnails to see what's possible, without a plug-in, in this brave new world. (Note, although the instructions for each game tell you to press the A key to start, press the Z key instead.). Here's the link: http://www.kesiev.com/akihabara As an adjunct to what's enabled by HTML 5, consider the various transforms that are part of CSS 3. If you're running Safari as your browser, the following link will showcase this live; if not, you'll see a bitmap that will give you an idea of what's possible: http://webkit.org/blog/386/3d-transforms Are you starting to get the picture (literally)? What has up until now required browser plug-ins and other patches to HTML, most typically Flash, will soon be renderable, natively, in all major browsers. Moreover, it's looking likely that developers will be able to deliver such content and experiences in these browsers using one base of markup and script code (using straight JavaScript and/or jQuery), without resorting to browser-specific code and workarounds. If you're skeptical of this, I wouldn't blame you, especially with respect to Microsoft's Internet Explorer. However, i can tell you with confidence that even Microsoft is dedicated to full-on HTML 5 support in version 9 of that browser, which is currently under development. So what’s new in HTML 5, specifically, that makes sites like this possible?  The specification documents go into deep detail, and there’s no sense in rehashing them here, but a summary is probably in order.   Here is a non-authoritative, but useful, list of the major new feature areas in HTML 5: 2D drawing capabilities and 3D transforms. 2D drawing instructions can be embedded statically into a Web page; application interactivity and animation can be achieved through script.  As mentioned above, 3D transforms are technically part of version 3 of the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) spec, rather than HTML 5, but they can nonetheless be thought of as part of the bundle.  They allow for rendering of 3D images and animations that, together with 2D drawing, make HTML-based games much more feasible than they are presently, as the links above demonstrate. Embedded audio and video. A media player can appear directly in a rendered Web page, using HTML markup and no plug-ins. Alternately, player controls can be hidden and the content can play automatically. Major enhancements to form-based input. This includes such things as specification of required fields, embedding of text “hints” into a control, limiting valid input on a field to dates, email addresses or a list of values.  There’s more to this, but the gist is that line-of-business applications, with complicated input and data validation, are supported directly Offline caching, local storage and client-side SQL database. These facilities allow Web applications to function more like native apps, even if no internet connection is available. User-defined data. Data (or metadata – data about data) can easily be embedded statically and/or retrieved and updated with Javascript code. This avoids having to embed that data in a separate file, or within script code. Taken together, these features position HTML to compete with, and perhaps overtake, Adobe’s Flash/AIR (and Microsoft’s Silverlight) as a viable Web platform for media, RIAs (rich internet applications – apps that function more like desktop software than Web sites) and interactive Web content, including games. What do players in the media world think about this?  From the embedded video above, we know what Sports Illustrated (and, therefore, Time Warner) think.  Hulu, the major Internet site for broadcast TV content, is on record as saying HTML5 video does not pass muster with them, at least not yet.  YouTube, on the other hand, already has an experimental HTML 5-based version of their site.  TechCrunch has reported that NetFlix is flirting with HTML 5 too, especially as it pertains to embedded browsers in TV-based devices.  And the New York Times’ Web site now embeds some video clips without resorting to Flash.  They have to – otherwise iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users couldn’t see them in the Mobile Safari browser. What do media-focused developers think about all this?  I talked to several to get their opinions. Michael Pinto is CEO and Founder of Very Memorable Design whose primary focus has been to help marketing directors get traction online.  The firm’s client roster includes the likes Time, Inc., Scholastic and PBS.  Pinto predicts that “More and more microsites that were done entirely in Flash will be done more and more using jQuery. I can also see slideshows and video now being done without Flash. However if you needed to create a game or highly interactive activity Flash would still be the way to go for the web.” A dissenting view comes from Jesse Erlbaum, CEO of The Erlbaum Group, LLC, which serves numerous clients in the magazine publishing sector.  When I asked Erlbaum whether he thought HTML 5 and jQuery/JavaScript would steal significant market share from Flash, he responded “Not at all!  In particular, not for media and advertising customers!  These sectors are not generally in the business of making highly functional applications, which is the one place where HTML5/jQuery/etc really shines.” Ironically, Pinto’s firm is a heavy user of Flash for its projects and Erlbaum’s develops atop the “LAMP” (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Perl) stack.  For whatever reason, each firm seems to see the other’s toolset as a more viable choice.  But both agree that the developer tool story around HTML 5 is deficient.  Pinto explains “What’s lost with [HTML 5 and Javascript] techniques is that there isn’t a single widely favored easy-to-use tool of choice for authoring. So with Flash you can get up and running right away and not worry about what is different from one browser to the next.“  Erlbaum agrees, saying: “HTML5/Javascript lacks a sophisticated integrated development environment (IDE) which is an essential part of Flash.  If what someone is trying to make is primarily animation, it's a waste of time…to do this in Javascript.  It can be done much more easily in Flash, and with greater cross-browser compatibility and consistency due to the ubiquity of Flash.” Adobe (maker of Flash since its 2005 acquisition of Macromedia) likely agrees.  And for better or worse, they’ve decided to address this shortcoming of HTML 5, even at risk of diminishing their Flash platfrom. Yesterday Adobe announced that their hugely popular Deamweaver Web design authoring tool would directly support HTML 5 and CSS 3 development.  In fact, the Adobe Dreamweaver CS5 HTML5 Pack is downloadable now from Adobe Labs. Maybe Adobe is bowing to pressure from ardent Web professionals like Scott Kellum, Lead Designer at Channel V Media,  a digital and offline branding firm, serving the media and marketing sectors, among others.  Kellum told me that HTML 5 “…will definitely move people away from Flash. It has many of the same functionalities with faster load times and better accessibility. HTML5 will help Flash as well: with the new caching methods you can now even run Flash apps offline.” Although all three Web developers I interviewed would agree that Flash is still required for more sophisticated applications, Kellum seems to have put his finger on why HTML 5 may nonetheless dominate.  In his view, much of the Web development out there has little need for high-end capabilities: “Most people want to add a little punch to a navigation bar or some video and now you can get the biggest bang for your buck with HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript.” I’ve already mentioned that Google’s ongoing I/O conference, at the Moscone West center in San Francisco, is driving the HTML 5 news cycle, big time.  And Google made many announcements of their own, including the open sourcing of their VP8 video codec, new enterprise-oriented capabilities for its App Engine cloud offering, and the creation of the Chrome Web Store, which the company says will make it easier to find and “install” Web applications, in a fashion similar to  the way users procure native apps on various mobile platforms. HTML 5 looks to be disruptive, especially to the media world.  And even if the technology ends up disappointing, the chatter around it alone is causing big changes in the technology world.  If the richness it promises delivers, then magazine publishers and non-text digital advertisers may indeed have a platform for creating compelling content that loads quickly, is standards-based and will render identically in (the newest versions of) all major Web browsers.  Can this development in the digital arena save the titans of the print world?  I can’t predict, but it’s going to be fun to watch, and the competitive innovation from all players in both industries will likely be immense.

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• Software Engineering Practices &ndash; Different Projects should have different maturity levels

  - by Dylan Smith

  I’ve had a lot of discussions at the office lately about the drastically different sets of software engineering practices used on our various projects, if what we are doing is appropriate, and what factors should you be considering when determining what practices are most appropriate in a given context. I wanted to write up my thoughts in a little more detail on this subject, so here we go: If you compare any two software projects (specifically comparing their codebases) you’ll often see very different levels of maturity in the software engineering practices employed. By software engineering practices, I’m specifically referring to the quality of the code and the amount of technical debt present in the project. Things such as Test Driven Development, Domain Driven Design, Behavior Driven Development, proper adherence to the SOLID principles, etc. are all practices that you would expect at the mature end of the spectrum. At the other end of the spectrum would be the quick-and-dirty solutions that are done using something like an Access Database, Excel Spreadsheet, or maybe some quick “drag-and-drop coding”. For this blog post I’m going to refer to this as the Software Engineering Maturity Spectrum (SEMS). I believe there is a time and a place for projects at every part of that SEMS. The risks and costs associated with under-engineering solutions have been written about a million times over so I won’t bother going into them again here, but there are also (unnecessary) costs with over-engineering a solution. Sometimes putting multiple layers, and IoC containers, and abstracting out the persistence, etc is complete overkill if a one-time use Access database could solve the problem perfectly well. A lot of software developers I talk to seem to automatically jump to the very right-hand side of this SEMS in everything they do. A common rationalization I hear is that it may seem like a small trivial application today, but these things always grow and stick around for many years, then you’re stuck maintaining a big ball of mud. I think this is a cop-out. Sure you can’t always anticipate how an application will be used or grow over its lifetime (can you ever??), but that doesn’t mean you can’t manage it and evolve the underlying software architecture as necessary (even if that means having to toss the code out and re-write it at some point…maybe even multiple times). My thoughts are that we should be making a conscious decision around the start of each project approximately where on the SEMS we want the project to exist. I believe this decision should be based on 3 factors: 1. Importance - How important to the business is this application? What is the impact if the application were to suddenly stop working? 2. Complexity - How complex is the application functionality? 3. Life-Expectancy - How long is this application expected to be in use? Is this a one-time use application, does it fill a short-term need, or is it more strategic and is expected to be in-use for many years to come? Of course this isn’t an exact science. You can’t say that Project X should be at the 73% mark on the SEMS and expect that to be helpful. My point is not that you need to precisely figure out what point on the SEMS the project should be at then translate that into some prescriptive set of practices and techniques you should be using. Rather my point is that we need to be aware that there is a spectrum, and that not everything is going to be (or should be) at the edges of that spectrum, indeed a large number of projects should probably fall somewhere within the middle; and different projects should adopt a different level of software engineering practices and maturity levels based on the needs of that project. To give an example of this way of thinking from my day job: Every couple of years my company plans and hosts a large event where ~400 of our customers all fly in to one location for a multi-day event with various activities. We have some staff whose job it is to organize the logistics of this event, which includes tracking which flights everybody is booked on, arranging for transportation to/from airports, arranging for hotel rooms, name tags, etc The last time we arranged this event all these various pieces of data were tracked in separate spreadsheets and reconciliation and cross-referencing of all the data was literally done by hand using printed copies of the spreadsheets and several people sitting around a table going down each list row by row. Obviously there is some room for improvement in how we are using software to manage the event’s logistics. The next time this event occurs we plan to provide the event planning staff with a more intelligent tool (either an Excel spreadsheet or probably an Access database) that can track all the information in one location and make sure that the various pieces of data are properly linked together (so for example if a person cancels you only need to delete them from one place, and not a dozen separate lists). This solution would fall at or near the very left end of the SEMS meaning that we will just quickly create something with very little attention paid to using mature software engineering practices. If we examine this project against the 3 criteria I listed above for determining it’s place within the SEMS we can see why: Importance – If this application were to stop working the business doesn’t grind to a halt, revenue doesn’t stop, and in fact our customers wouldn’t even notice since it isn’t a customer facing application. The impact would simply be more work for our event planning staff as they revert back to the previous way of doing things (assuming we don’t have any data loss). Complexity – The use cases for this project are pretty straightforward. It simply needs to manage several lists of data, and link them together appropriately. Precisely the task that access (and/or Excel) can do with minimal custom development required. Life-Expectancy – For this specific project we’re only planning to create something to be used for the one event (we only hold these events every 2 years). If it works well this may change (see below). Let’s assume we hack something out quickly and it works great when we plan the next event. We may decide that we want to make some tweaks to the tool and adopt it for planning all future events of this nature. In that case we should examine where the current application is on the SEMS, and make a conscious decision whether something needs to be done to move it further to the right based on the new objectives and goals for this application. This may mean scrapping the access database and re-writing it as an actual web or windows application. In this case, the life-expectancy changed, but let’s assume the importance and complexity didn’t change all that much. We can still probably get away with not adopting a lot of the so-called “best practices”. For example, we can probably still use some of the RAD tooling available and might have an Autonomous View style design that connects directly to the database and binds to typed datasets (we might even choose to simply leave it as an access database and continue using it; this is a decision that needs to be made on a case-by-case basis). At Anvil Digital we have aspirations to become a primarily product-based company. So let’s say we use this tool to plan a handful of events internally, and everybody loves it. Maybe a couple years down the road we decide we want to package the tool up and sell it as a product to some of our customers. In this case the project objectives/goals change quite drastically. Now the tool becomes a source of revenue, and the impact of it suddenly stopping working is significantly less acceptable. Also as we hold focus groups, and gather feedback from customers and potential customers there’s a pretty good chance the feature-set and complexity will have to grow considerably from when we were using it only internally for planning a small handful of events for one company. In this fictional scenario I would expect the target on the SEMS to jump to the far right. Depending on how we implemented the previous release we may be able to refactor and evolve the existing codebase to introduce a more layered architecture, a robust set of automated tests, introduce a proper ORM and IoC container, etc. More likely in this example the jump along the SEMS would be so large we’d probably end up scrapping the current code and re-writing. Although, if it was a slow phased roll-out to only a handful of customers, where we collected feedback, made some tweaks, and then rolled out to a couple more customers, we may be able to slowly refactor and evolve the code over time rather than tossing it out and starting from scratch. The key point I’m trying to get across is not that you should be throwing out your code and starting from scratch all the time. But rather that you should be aware of when and how the context and objectives around a project changes and periodically re-assess where the project currently falls on the SEMS and whether that needs to be adjusted based on changing needs. Note: There is also the idea of “spectrum decay”. Since our industry is rapidly evolving, what we currently accept as mature software engineering practices (the right end of the SEMS) probably won’t be the same 3 years from now. If you have a project that you were to assess at somewhere around the 80% mark on the SEMS today, but don’t touch the code for 3 years and come back and re-assess its position, it will almost certainly have changed since the right end of the SEMS will have moved farther out (maybe the project is now only around 60% due to decay). Developer Skills Another important aspect to this whole discussion is around the skill sets of your architects and lead developers. When talking about the progression of a developers skills from junior->intermediate->senior->… they generally start by only being able to write code that belongs on the left side of the SEMS and as they gain more knowledge and skill they become capable of working at a higher and higher level along the SEMS. We all realize that the learning never stops, but eventually you’ll get to the point where you can comfortably develop at the right-end of the SEMS (the exact practices and techniques that translates to is constantly changing, but that’s not the point here). A critical skill that I’d love to see more evidence of in our industry is the most senior guys not only being able to work at the right-end of the SEMS, but more importantly be able to consciously work at any point along the SEMS as project needs dictate. An even more valuable skill would be if you could make the conscious decision to move a projects code further right on the SEMS (based on changing needs) and do so in an incremental manner without having to start from scratch. An exercise that I’m planning to go through with all of our projects here at Anvil in the near future is to map out where I believe each project currently falls within this SEMS, where I believe the project *should* be on the SEMS based on the business needs, and for those that don’t match up (i.e. most of them) come up with a plan to improve the situation.

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• CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 04, 2013

  CodePlex Daily Summary for Friday, October 04, 2013Popular ReleasesMoreTerra (Terraria World Viewer): Version 1.11: Release Notes Release 1.11 =========== =Bug Fixes= =========== Now works with Terraria 1.2 wld files. =============== =Known Issues= =============== Not all tiles and items are accounted for. Missing tiles just show up as pink. This is actively being worked on but wanted to get a build out that works with 1.2VG-Ripper & PG-Ripper: PG-Ripper 1.4.19: NEW: Added Option to login as Guest NEW: Added Support for "ImageTeam.org linksStyleMVVM: 3.1.4: This release has virtually no code change but adds multiple new Item templates for the Windows Phone 8 platformSystem Center Orchestrator Community Project: Orchestrator Visio and Word Generator 1.5: This tool lets you export Orchestrator runbooks as a Visio diagram, and you can also generate an optional Word file as well. Components exported as of v1.5 are : - Title of the runbook - Activities and their names/thumbnails/description (description is displayed as a callout in the Visio diagram, attached to the shape of the activity) - Links and their names/colors - Looping and their interval Thumbnails and activities are grouped in the Visio diagram, for easy manipulation of the diagra...State of Decay Save Manager: Version 1.0.4: Add version at bottom of formDNN® Form and List: DNN Form and List 06.00.07: DotNetNuke Form and List 06.00.06 Changes to 6.0.7•Fixed an error in datatypes.config that caused calculated fields to be missing in 6.0.6 Changes to 6.0.6•Add in Sql to remove 'text on row' setting for UserDefinedTable to make SQL Azure compatible. •Add new azureCompatible element to manifest. •Added a fix for importing templates. Changes to 6.0.2•Fix: MakeThumbnail was broken if the application pool was configured to .Net 4 •Change: Data is now stored in nvarchar(max) instead of ntext C...SimpleExcelReportMaker: Serm 0.03: SourceCode and Sample .Net Framework 3.5 AnyCPU compile.RDFSharp - Start playing with RDF!: RDFSharp-0.6.6: GENERAL (NEW) Introduction of INT64 hashing engine (codenamed "Greta"); QUERY (FIX) Incorrect query evaluation due to faulty detection of optional patterns (v0.6.5 regression); (FIX) Missing update of PatternGroupID information after adding patterns and filters to a pattern group; (FIX) Ensure Context information of a pattern is not null before trying to collect it as variable; (MISC) Changed semantics of Context information of a pattern: if not provided, it will be ignored; (MISC...Application Architecture Guidelines: App Architecture Guidelines 3.0.8: This document is an overview of software qualities, principles, patterns, practices, tools and libraries.C# Intellisense for Notepad++: Release v1.0.7.2: - smart indentation - document formatting To avoid the DLLs getting locked by OS use MSI file for the installation.BlackJumboDog: Ver5.9.6: 2013.09.30 Ver5.9.6 (1)SMTP???????、???????????????? (2)WinAPI??????? (3)Web???????CGI???????????????????????Microsoft Ajax Minifier: Microsoft Ajax Minifier 5.2: Mostly internal code tweaks. added -nosize switch to turn off the size- and gzip-calculations done after minification. removed the comments in the build targets script for the old AjaxMin build task (discussion #458831). Fixed an issue with extended Unicode characters encoded inside a string literal with adjacent \uHHHH\uHHHH sequences. Fixed an IndexOutOfRange exception when encountering a CSS identifier that's a single underscore character (_). In previous builds, the net35 and net20...AJAX Control Toolkit: September 2013 Release: AJAX Control Toolkit Release Notes - September 2013 Release (Updated) Version 7.1002September 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). Important UpdateThis release has been updated to fix two issues: Upda...WDTVHubGen - Adds Metadata, thumbnails and subtitles to WDTV Live Hubs: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha: WDTVHubGen.v2.1.4.apifix-alpha is for testers to figure out if we got the NEW api plugged in ok. thanksVisual Log Parser: VisualLogParser: Portable Visual Log Parser for Dotnet 4.0AudioWordsDownloader: AudioWordsDownloader 1.1 build 88: New features list of words (mp3 files) is available upon typing when a download path is defined list of download paths is added paths history settings added Bug fixed case mismatch in word search field fixed path not exist bug fixed when history has been used path, when filled from dialog, not stored refresh autocomplete list after path change word sought is deleted when path is changed at the end sought word list is deleted word list not refreshed download ends. word lis...Wsus Package Publisher: Release v1.3.1309.28: Fix a bug, where WPP crash when running on a computer where Windows was installed in another language than Fr, En or De, and launching the Update Creation Wizard. Fix a bug, where WPP crash if some Multi-Thread job are launch with more than 64 items. Add a button to abort "Install This Update" wizard. Allow WPP to remember which columns are shown last time. Make URL clickable on the Update Information Tab. Add a new feature, when Double-Clicking on an update, the default action exec...Tweetinvi a friendly Twitter C# API: Alpha 0.8.3.0: Version 0.8.3.0 emphasis on the FIlteredStream and ease how to manage Exceptions that can occur due to the network or any other issue you might encounter. Will be available through nuget the 29/09/2013. FilteredStream Features provided by the Twitter Stream API - Ability to track specific keywords - Ability to track specific users - Ability to track specific locations Additional features - Detect the reasons the tweet has been retrieved from the Filtered API. You have access to both the ma...WPF Extended DataGrid: WPF Extended DataGrid 2.0.0.4 binaries: Improved performance of GroupByAcDown?????: AcDown????? v4.5: ??●AcDown??????????、??、??、???????。????，????，?????????????????????????。???????????Acfun、????(Bilibili)、??、??、YouTube、??、???、??????、SF????、????????????。 ●??????AcPlay?????，??????、????????????????。 ● AcDown???????C#??，????.NET Framework 2.0??。?????"Acfun?????"。 ??v4.5 ???? AcPlay????????v3.5 ????????，???????????30% ?? ???????GoodManga.net???? ?? ?????????? ?? ??Acfun?????????? ??Bilibili??????????? ?????????flvcd???????? ??SfAcg????????????? ???????????? ???????????????? ????32...New ProjectsAnalysis Services Activity Viewer 2012: This project was created from a blog post I wrote back in February 2013 http://redphoenix.me/2013/08/22/upgrade-activity-viewer-2008-to-sql-server-2012/ARYSTA SYSTEM: Notebook System A/R Sales * Sales Order * Delivery * Sales Invoice * Sales Return * A/R Credit Memo * A/R Debit Memo A/P Purchasing * Purchase Order BEWELL SYSTEM: This system is design for Bewell-C Incorporated. Project Manager: Ben Penafiel System Engineer: Jhay Camba Report Designer: William Damasco Caching IOC: Caching IOC Container This will cache any Interface return results making it really easy to introduce caching to your solution.Grupo Anclita: Trabajo Final Laboratorio 4Halcyonic Skin by HTML5-UP - for DNN: This skin was converted for use in DNN by Michael Doxsey. Original HTML template designed and built by HTML5-UP: http://html5up.net/halcyonic/ ProPro: project about other projectsS3Unlock: Unlocks S3 agents that are stuck installing.sdfsdlfsdlkj01: dsfdffsdSerendipity - Responsive Skin for DNN: This is an HTML Template by Elemis, converted for use in DNN. Elemis URL: http://elemisfreebies.com/premium-themes/ Free for personal use and ed. purposes only.SmartSystemMenu: Smart system menu for you.SP 2013 Custom MultiTenant Adminstration: This Project creates a custom SP 2013 Tenant Admin site template covering limitations of existing tenant admin site.Telephasic Skin by HTML5-UP - for DNN: This skin was converted for use in DNN by Michael Doxsey. Original HTML template designed and built by HTML5-UP: http://html5up.net/telephasic/TelerikedIn: Social web app trying to look and feel like the famous LinkedInTerra 2: Generador de personajes para el juego de rol Terra2tsydev01: TextLineUpdateVds2465 Parser: This Project is about implementing a Parser for the Vds2465 protocol. It includes parsing and generating Vds2465 telegram bytes.Your Appliances: Empresa De ElectrodomesticosZeroFour by HTML5-UP - for DNN: This skin was converted for use in DNN by Michael Doxsey. Original HTML template designed and built by HTML5-UP: http://html5up.net/zerofour.

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• Microsoft Channel 9 Interviews Mei Liang to Introduce Sample Browser Extension for Visual Studio 2012 and 2010

  - by Jialiang

  This morning, Microsoft Channel 9 interviewed Mei Liang - Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework - to introduce the newest Sample Browser extension for Visual Studio 2012 &2010.   This extension provides a way for developers to search and download more than 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio, including over 700 Windows 8 samples and more than 1000 All-In-One Code Framework customer-driven code samples. Mei shows us not only the extension, but also the standalone version of the Sample Browser.   http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Visual-Studio-Toolbox/Sample-Browser-Visual-Studio-Extension   Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, working in close partnership with the Visual Studio product team and MSDN Samples Gallery, developed the Sample Browser extension for both Visual Studio 2012 and Visual Studio 2010.  As an effort to evolve the code sample use experience and improve developers' productivity, the Sample Browser allows programmers to search, download and open over 4500 code samples from within Visual Studio with just a few simple clicks.  If no existing code sample can meet the needs, developers can even request a code sample easily from Microsoft thanks to the free “Sample Request Service” offered by Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.  Through innovations, the teams hope to put the power of tens of thousands of code samples at developers’ fingertips. In short 3 months, the Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension has been installed by 100K global users.  It is also selected as one of the six most highly regarded and commonly used tools for Visual Studio that will make your programming experience feel like never before.   Got to love the All-In-One Code Framework team! You guys know this is THE go to source for code samples. Get this extension and you'll never need to leave VS2012 (well except for bathroom trips, but that's TMI anyway... ;) Read More... From: Greg Duncan (Author of CoolThingOfTheDay) 9/6/2011 12:00 AM The one software design pattern that I have used in just about every application I’ve written is “cut-and-paste,” so the new “Sample Browser” – read sample as a noun not an adjective – is a great boon to my productivity. Read More... From: Jim O'Neil (Microsoft Developer Evangelist) 9/28/2011 12:00 AM Install: http://aka.ms/samplebrowservsx Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework also offers the standalone version of Sample Browser.   The standalone version is particularly useful to Visual Studio Express edition or Visual Studio 2008 users, who cannot install the Sample Browser Visual Studio extension.   From Grassroots’ Passion for Developers to the Innovation of Sample Browser This Sample Browser has come a very long way improving the code sample use experience.  The history can be traced back to a grass-root innovation three years ago.   In early 2009, a few MSDN forum support engineers observed that lots of developers were struggling to work in Visual Studio without adequate code samples. Programming tasks seem harder than they should be when you only read through the documentation.  Just a couple of lines of sample code could answer a lot of questions.   They had a brilliant idea: What if we produce code samples based on developers’ frequently asked programming tasks in forums, social networks and support incidents, and then aggregate all our sample code in a one-stop library to benefit developers?  And what if developers can request code samples directly from Microsoft, free of charge?  This small group of grassroots at Microsoft devoted their nights and weekends to prototyping such a customer-driven code sample library.  This simple idea eventually turned into “Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework”, aka. OneCode.  With the support from more and more passionate developers at Microsoft and the leaders in the Community and Online Support team and Microsoft Commercial Technical Services (CTS), the idea has become a continually growing library with over 1000 customer-driven code samples covering almost all Microsoft development technologies.  These code samples originated from developers’ common pains and needs should be able to help many developers.  However, if developers cannot easily discover the code samples, the effort would still be in vain.  So in early 2010, the team started the idea of Sample Browser to ease the discovery and access of these samples.  In just two months, the first version of Sample Browser was finished and released by a passionate developer.  It was a very simple application, only supporting the basic sample offline search.  Users had to download the whole 100MB sample package containing all samples first, and run the Sample Browser to search locally.   Though developers could not search and download samples on-demand, this simple application laid a solid foundation for the team’s continuous innovations of Sample Browsing experience. In 2011, MSDN Samples Gallery had a big refresh.  The online sample experience was brought to a new level thanks to its PM Steven Wilssens and the gallery team’s effort.  Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework Team saw the opportunity to realize the “on-demand” sample search and download feature with the new gallery.  The two teams formed a strong partnership to upload all the customer-driven code samples to MSDN Samples Gallery, and released the new version of Sample Browser to support “on-demand” sample downloading in April, 2011.  Mei Liang, the Group Manager of Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, was interviewed by Channel 9 to demo the Sample Browser.  Customers love the effort and the innovation!!  This can be clearly seen from the user comments in the publishing page.   It was very encouraging to the team of All-In-One Code Framework. The team continues innovating and evolving the Sample Browser.  They found the Visual Studio product team this time, and integrated the Sample Browsing experience into the latest Visual Studio 2012.  The newly released Sample Browser Visual Studio extension makes good use of Visual Studio 2012 IDE such as the new Quick Launch bar, the code editor, the toolbar and menus to offer easy access to thousands of code samples from within the development environment.   The Visual Studio Senior Program Manager Lead - Anthony Cangialosi, the Program Manager - Murali Krishna Hosabettu Kamalesha, the MSDN Samples Gallery PM – Steven Wilssens, and the Visual Studio Senior Escalation Engineer - Ed Dore shared lots of insightful suggestions with the team.  Thanks to the brilliant cross-group collaboration inside Microsoft, tens of new features including “Local Language Support” and “Favorite Samples”, as well as a face-lifted user interface, were added to further enhance the user experience. Since the new Sample Browser Visual Studio extension was released, it has received over 100 thousand downloads and five-star ratings.  A customer told the team that he officially falls in LOVE with Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework.   The Sample Browser Innovation for Developers Never Stops! The teams would never stop improving the Sample Browser for developers’ easier lives.   The Microsoft All-In-One Code Framework, Visual Studio and MSDN Samples Gallery teams are working closely to develop the next version of Sample Browser.  Here are the key functions in development or in discussion.  We hope to learn your feedback of the effort.  You can submit your suggestions to the official Visual Studio UserVoice site.  We look forward to hearing from you! 1) Offline Sample Search This is one of the top feature requests that we have received for Sample Browser.   The Sample Browser will support the offline search mode so that developers can search downloaded code samples when they do not have internet access.  This is particularly useful to developers in Enterprises with strict proxy settings. 2) Code Snippet Support and Visual Studio Editor Integration Today, the Sample Browser supports downloading and opening sample project.   However, when developers are searching for code samples, a better user experience would be to see the code snippets in the search result first.  Developers can quickly decide if the code snippet is relevant.   They can also drag and drop the code snippet into the Visual Studio Editor to solve some simple programming tasks.  If developers want to learn more about the sample, they can then choose to download the sample project and open it in Visual Studio. 3) Enterprise Sample Sharing and Searching Large enterprises have many code samples for their own internal tools and APIs that are not appropriate to be shared publicly in MSDN Samples Gallery.   In that case, today’s Sample Browser and MSDN Samples Gallery cannot help these Enterprise developers.  The idea is to create a Code Sample Repository in TFS, and provide an additional Visual Studio extension for Enterprise developers to quickly share code samples to TFS.  The Sample Browser can be configured to connect to the TFS Code Sample Repository to search for and download code samples.  This would potentially enable the Enterprise developers to be more productive. 4) Windows Store Sample Browser With the upcoming release of Windows RT and Microsoft Surface, developers are facing a completely new world of application platform.   Not like laptop, people would often use Microsoft Surface in commute and in travel.  Internet may not be available.  Today’s Visual Studio cannot be installed and run on Windows RT, however, our enthusiastic developers would hope to spend every minute on code.  They love code!   The idea is to create a Windows Store version of Sample Browser. Search and download samples from the online Samples Gallery when the user has internet access. Browse the sample code files and learn the sample documentation of downloaded samples with or without internet access.   In addition to the "browse” function, the Sample Browser could further support “bookmark”, “learning notes”, “code review”, and “quick social sharing". Make full use of the new touch and Windows Store App UI to give developers a new “relaxing” code browsing and learning experience, anytime, anywhere. With Windows Store Sample Browser, developers can enjoy A new relaxing and enjoyable experience for developers to learn code samples You do not have to sit in front of desk and formally open Visual Studio to read code samples.  Many developers get sub-health due to staying in front of desk for a very long time.  With Windows RT, Microsoft Surface and this Windows Store Sample Browser combining with the online MSDN Samples Gallery, developers can sit in a sofa, relaxingly hold the tablet and enjoy to learn their beloved sample code with detailed documentation. Anytime, anywhere Whether you have internet access or not, whether you are at home, in office, or in commute/airplane, developers can always easily access and browse the sample code. Lightweight and fast Particularly for learning a small sample project, the Windows Store Sample Browser would be more lightweight and faster to open and browse the sample code. Please submit your feedback and suggestion to Visual Studio UserVoice.  We look forward to hearing from you and deliver a better and better sample use experience.  Happy Coding!   Special Thanks to People working behind the latest release of Sample Browser Visual Studio Extension and the great partnerships!

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